Radio Free Europe’s Production and Transatlantic Circulation of ‘Cold War Knowledge’ (1950–1971)

My dissertation project explores how Radio Free Europe (RFE), well-known as Cold War propaganda radio, did become in the 1960s a highly authoritative source in the ‘West’ for information and research on East and Central Europe.
Focusing its broadcasting on five Soviet satellite states behind the Iron Curtain, RFE penetrated the Iron Curtain with its airwaves to fight the “Communist monopoly of information”. This, however,
without merely reproducing western Cold War rhetoric, but rather providing more balanced accounts that sought to establish trans-systemic ‘imagined communities’ with the people “suppressed”
by socialism behind the Iron Curtain: their listeners. In support for the broadcasters who needed to produce an attractive and well-informed “surrogate radio” programme, RFE institutionalized
in the late 1950s its own research department. Rigorous, “academic” research should provide corroboration for news stories and political commentaries.
Besides its internal use for script writing, this accumulated ‘Cold War Knowledge’ was soon highly esteemed – and regularly accessed – by external professionals working on East and Central Europe:
academics, journalists, or officers from governmental agencies. By that, RFE and its “epistemic community” (Peter Haas) of researchers became an authoritative resource and a respected actor in Eastern European area studies. They were closely integrated into western public and private, academic and intelligence services discourses on the ‘East’. In a transatlantic communication space, images of ‘Eastern Europe’ were constructed, negotiated, circulated, repudiated, or multiplied. In that, RFE actively co-produced the mental maps and cultural geographies of Cold War Europe and translated
them for the both sides of the Iron Curtain: via radio for their listeners, and via paper for the western recipients of their research. Focusing on this hitherto neglected epistemic dimension of RFE will introduce a new major player into current debates on the history of knowledge and the social sciences during the Cold War.