RADIO LIBERTY (RL)

RADIO LIBERTY (RL) – a radio station created at the initiative of the U.S. government to broadcast to the USSR in its most widely spoken languages, including Ukrainian, with the aim of providing listeners with objective information and commentary on political events to promote the development of independent public opinion in the USSR. RL champions democratic freedoms in accordance with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the right of peoples to self-determination. The daily Ukrainian program (since August 16, 1954) provides political news, a chronicle of Ukrainian life, a press review, commentary on current events in Ukraine, discussions on Ukrainian history, materials from Ukrainian samizdat, literary reviews, religious programs, and more.

The American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, Inc. was founded in 1951, involving émigré groups from the USSR. From March 1, 1953, until the late 1950s, it broadcast under the name “Radio Liberation.” Since 1953, RL’s headquarters was located in Munich; in June 1995, it was moved to Prague. Until 1971, it was unofficially funded by the United States from the CIA budget; thereafter, funding and oversight of the radio station’s activities have been carried out by the U.S. government’s bipartisan Board for International Broadcasting. In 1975, RL merged with Radio Free Europe (RFE, which broadcast to Warsaw Pact countries) to form the company Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Despite intensive jamming, RL, by its own estimates, had 7–9 million listeners in the USSR.

The heads of the Ukrainian Service of RL at various times were Mykola Kovalsky (1955), Mykhailo Dobriansky (1956–71), A. Romashko, Mykola Herus, Anatoliy Kaminsky, Bohdan Nahaylo, Roman Kupchinsky (1991–2001), Alexander Narodezky (2001–2005), and Olga Buryak (from 2005).

In the 1950s and 1960s, the staff and authors of the Ukrainian Service’s programs were émigrés of the first and second waves from Soviet Ukraine. From the mid-1970s, Ukrainian dissidents—third-wave émigrés—such as Leonid PLYUSHCH, Nadiya SVITLYCHNA, Viktor Borovsky, and Moysey Fishbein began working there. Well-known Ukrainians such as Emma Andijewska (as Halyna Hordiyenko), Ihor Kachurovsky, and Ihor Hordiyevsky worked at RL, often under pseudonyms, while Bohdan Osadchuk, Ivan Maystrenko, and Borys Lewytzkyj worked as freelance contributors.

Lyudmila ALEKSEEVA, Viktor NEKRASOV, Volodymyr MALYNKOVYCH, Gabriel Superfin, Vladimir Tolz, Sergei Soldatov, Kronid Lyubarsky, Galina Salova, and others worked in the Russian service and covered Ukrainian topics.

From 1961 to 1980, RL aired more than 80 programs covering various issues of history, and the political, economic, and cultural life of the USSR that were suppressed by Soviet media. Each national service effectively functioned as a national radio. The radio station focused on manifestations of dissent in the USSR, with samizdat becoming the main source of information about them from the second half of the 1960s. The station established a Research Center and a Samizdat Archive (AS), whose collection of uncensored texts from the USSR from the 1950s to the 1980s is the largest in the world. It also published the “Samizdat Bulletin.”

Soviet citizens who recorded the radio station’s broadcasts (see, for example, H. MAKOVIYCHUK), as well as the authors of samizdat texts broadcast by RL, were subjected to persecution. In political trials in the USSR, the very fact that an uncensored text was broadcast by Radio Liberty served as “proof” of its criminal nature, while listening to the broadcasts was considered evidence of a citizen's disloyalty to the Soviet regime.

The jamming of RFE/RL broadcasts, which began from the first days of broadcasting to the USSR, was only stopped in October 1988, during the period of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. From that time on, Soviet citizens were no longer forbidden to cooperate with RL.

The first “Liberty” correspondents in Ukraine were Serhiy NABOKA, Leonid Milyavsky, Svitlana Ryaboshapka, Ivan Rybalko, and Andriy Derepa. The first Moscow correspondents for “Liberty” were Anatoly Dotsenko, Vitaly Portnikov, and Matvey Ganapolsky.

In February 1992, an RL bureau opened in Kyiv, which continues to operate to this day. Currently, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasts in 24 languages.