Radio waves, memories, and the politics of everyday life in socialist Romania: The case of Radio Free Europe

Abstract

During the communist era, Radio Free Europe (RFE) was Romania's favorite radio station. This paper analyzes the role of RFE in everyday life in the strictly controlled Romanian communist state by looking at the broadcasts of RFE's Romanian Department, their audience, and their impact. Drawing largely on the RFE archives at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) and the former secret police files at the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS), it investigates how radio waves mediated and channeled information while preparing people to embrace political and cultural change. The paper focuses on the circulation of knowledge, media confluences, and human agency. The rituals that developed around the secrecy which governed the listening process, the personal requests, attitudes, and opinions expressed in letters to RFE, and oral and written testimonies, coupled with the disproportionate and, at times, extreme reactions of the communist state, together reveal the carving out of individual spaces that allowed for the preservation of the "self" during Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship. At such critical historical moments, the connection became visible. Through an analysis of recent media representations in which RFE figures, such as Cold Waves, this study also looks at how RFE shaped personal memories of communist times. K E Y

Failure or Reasonable Move?: Portrayal of American Pullout from Afghanistan in Russian and American International Media

“…Around 200 local radio stations in the Western Balkans broadcast RFE/RL programs (C ̌abaravdic , 2009). The medium's influence had mainly been assessed through its successful role in countering communist messages and the eventual fall of communism in Eastern Europe (e.g., Petrinca, 2019), while its current role, as RFE/RL claims, resides in the spread of democratic messages and countering disinformation (RFE/RL, 2021). Its influence has also been important during conflict situations when messages from the "other side" have been hard to access, such as during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 (C ̌abaravdic , 2009).…”

“…Some studies accused RFE/RL of manipulating public opinion and manufacturing consent (e.g., Cone, 1999). Their authors considered that during the Cold War, RFE was a propagandistic instrument of the American government that delivered anti-communist campaigns (e.g., Cone, 1999; Petrinca, 2019), but that the pure propagandistic role was abandoned after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (Petrinca, 2019).…”