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The RFE/RL Broadcast and Corporate Records are a rich and extraordinary resource for the study of the Cold War through one of the leading organizations that fought it. As a conflict of ideas and ideologies, the Cold War was unique not for its muddy battlefields and the stench of dead bodies so much as for the culture wars it inaugurated by broadcasting decadent Western music to Eastern Europe and by creating Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty as a surrogate national outlet for news and cultural programming for the Soviet Bloc.
Announcing the launch of Radio Free Europe's broadcasts to Poland
Hoover marks the sixtieth anniversary of the famed 1956 revolution in Hungary by digitizing and making available rare scripts documenting the event
Radio Free Europe scholar A. Ross Johnson discusses Cold War radio in Hoover Digest
Stanford's "Rhetoric of Radio" class meets with Radio Free Europe archivists and sound recording specialists at Hoover
Anatol Shmelev is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Robert Conquest Curator of the Russia and Eurasia Collection at Hoover’s Library & Archives, and the project archivist for its Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Collection. Shmelev’s expertise is in twentie...
Comprising 10.5 million pages and more than 100,000 sound recordings from the 1950s to 2006, the records are separated in two collections representing broadcast and corporate arms. Many of the broadcast records are housed off-site, requiring advance notice for use. Contact RFE/RL project archivist Anatol Shmelev before visiting to determine availability.
The sound recordings are fragile and often unique. As a result, digital use copies must be produced before recordings can be made available. Thousands already exist and are available now on Hoover’s Digital Collections site, including more than 5,500 RFE/RL broadcast recordings and 160 RFE/RL corporate recordings.
Copies of sound recordings not yet digitized may be ordered. For further information, email hoover-library-archives@stanford.edu.
Additional recordings available via the following online resources:
International researchers and former officials met at the Hoover Institution to address the impact of Western broadcasting—especially Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)—during the cold war.
Johnson, A. Ross and R. Eugene Parta, eds. Cold War Broadcasting; Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Central European University Press, 2010.
The Hoover Institution Library & Archives seeks volunteer contributors to audition and describe digitized recordings from the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast archives.
This month Hoover Library & Archives marks the sixtieth anniversary of the famed 1956 revolution in Hungary by digitizing and making available rare scripts documenting the event from our Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty collection, collaborating with the Hungarian National Széchényi Library to make rare recordings of the event available online, and opening an exhibition of Hungarian Revolution-related materials in the Hoover Tower Rotunda.
This month Hoover Library & Archives welcomes a group of Columbia University students participating in the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) research fellowship at Columbia’s European Institute. The visiting students will spend a week consulting Hoover’s extensive Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty collection.
Hundreds of broadcast recordings from the Prague Spring of 1968, the pivotal Cold War moment when Czechoslovakia introduced democratic reforms that were snuffed out by a Soviet invasion, are now available to scholars in the Hoover Archives' reading room.
Audiocassette recordings of interviews of former Polish employees of Radio Free Europe (RFE) have been digitized by Hoover's audio lab for preservation and access.
This exhibit, organized on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Radio Free Europe's first full schedule of broadcasting to Czechoslovakia in 1951, covers the history of the radios and some of the broad themes in the Radios' programming over the years.
This exhibit celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Radio Free Europe's first full schedule of broadcasting to Czechoslovakia in 1951. Four additional radio services quickly followed: to Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Radio Liberty began broadcasting to the Soviet Union in 1953. The purpose of the Radios was the same: to provide a free press for the Soviet Union and countries of Eastern Europe where the media were controlled by totalitarian governments.
Hoover’s entire collection of audiotapes created by RFE/RL’s Latvian Language Service has been digitized for preservation and access. Use copies of the recordings are available for listening at the Hoover Archives.
After serving as assistant director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in the New York office from 1985 to 1993, Arch Puddington wrote Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (University Press of Kentucky, 2000). His research material for the book represents the bulk of the Arch Puddington collection at Hoover. Ninety sound recordings in the collection, consisting chiefly of Puddington's interviews of RFE/RL staffers, have been digitized for preservation and access by Hoover's audio lab.
