To control the world’s information flows – Soviet Cold War broadcasting

Abstract

The radio journalist James Wood has described the high power shortwave transmitter as the weapon of the Cold War.1 There is a reason for this: both superpowers sought constantly throughout the Cold War to expand their transmitting power to reach even the most distant places and provide ever more language services to nations they wished to influence. Radio broadcasting became the way to contact foreign populations and convey the message of the foreign government. Yet, while messages never went through in such a mechanistic way, radio broadcasting emerged as an extremely important part of Cold War strategy for both warring parties. However, while there have been numerous studies about western Cold War broadcasting to the Soviet Union, there are practically no studies that would tackle the issue of Soviet international broadcasting. [Continues, please see the article]