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Chapter One
RADIO LIBERTY'S CONCEPTION AND BIRTH
Stalin was swimming alone at his dacha outside Moscow when he started to drown. A peasant who happened to be passing by jumped in and pulled him out of the river. In gratitude, Stalin offered to grant the rescuer anything he wished.
"Comrade Stalin," the peasant pleaded, "please don't tell anyone I saved you!"
Visionary American statesmen under President Harry Truman in the State and Defense Departments in the late 1940s realized the potential value of an American-sponsored radio station in the ideological struggle against communism. By harnessing the talents of refugees from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, they could reach their compatriots beyond the "Iron Curtain," a curtain that the Cold War had frozen into an impenetrable sheet of ice.
George F. Kennan, America's outstanding expert on Russia who had served in the 1930s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow (and became ambassador in 1952), was the policy-planning adviser to the secretary of state after the war. The containment of the Stalinist regime was first proposed by Kennan in his seminal article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X." Thanks to his initiative, and with the cooperation of other influential citizens in the government and private life, two radio stations were soon created: Radio Free Europe (RFE), which began in 1950 to communicate with listeners in the Soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe, and Radio Liberation (RL; laterrenamed Radio Liberty, also RL), which began broadcasting to the Soviet Union in 1953. Both Radios received their funds via the CIA from congressional appropriations, and both were located in Munich, but they were distinct from each other and operated separately until their merger in the mid-1970s.
The funds for Radio Liberation were disbursed to Amcomlib, which was formally incorporated on January 18, 1951, in the state of Delaware as the "American Committee for Freedom for the Peoples of the USSR, Inc." In May 1951, it was changed to the "American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia," to placate Russian exile leaders who opposed the recognition of the Soviet Union implicit in the title. In March 1953, it was again renamed the "American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism," reflecting the common cause for which the multinational émigré groups were fighting. In 1956, "from Bolshevism" was dropped; the abbreviation "Amcomlib" was used throughout this period until 1964, when the American Committee for Liberation became the "Radio Liberty Committee." The station had been renamed Radio Liberty in 1959.
The facade of a private company was supposed to establish greater credibility for the Radio as an independent voice rather than as an official arm of the U.S. communications network that included Voice of America. Thus, when Soviet diplomats confronted their American counterparts at international conferences with the accusation that the émigré radio was "interfering in the internal affairs of the Soviet people," they were simply informed that it was a private station not subject to government control. To preserve the fiction, a board of trustees had been appointed that included several distinguished Americans, three of them famous journalists who had reported from Soviet Russia: William Henry Chamberlin, Isaac Don Levine, and Eugene Lyons.
Eugene Lyons, for many years a senior editor of Reader's Digest, was the first president of Amcomlib. He had returned from the Soviet Union in the 1930s completely disillusioned with the socialist experiment he had once greeted with enthusiasm. After a brief tenure, he resigned, but joined the board of trustees. Admiral Alan G. Kirk, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, became president in February 1952. Because of ill health Kirk soon left, but not before he had supervised the hiring of émigrés in Munich and New York to form the nucleus of the Radio's staff. He was followed later in 1952 by Vice-Admiral Leslie C. Stevens, who had served in Moscow as naval attaché. Stevens was president at the birth of the Radio and remained for another eighteen months, when he was succeeded by Howland Sargeant in October 1954.
Our New York office, located above a bank at 6 East Forty-fifth Street in Manhattan, hardly resembled a radio station. It was more like a city desk at a small newspaper, since we had no studios in those days. Only when I visited RL headquarters in Munich in 1954 did I begin to feel part of an active radio network. My new boss, Boris Shub, manager of the New York Program Section (NYPS), was the American-born son of a well-known writer and publicist, David Natanovich Shub. The elder Shub had known Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Plekhanov, Zasulich, Axelrod, and other pre-revolutionary Marxist leaders of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which split in 1903 into two factions: the radical Bolshevik majority and the moderate Menshevik minority. He considered himself a "European social democrat" rather than a Menshevik, although he was close to leaders like Plekhanov. Boris used to boast to his friends that he made his first political decision in 1916 at the age of four: when his father introduced him to Trotsky, Boris refused to shake his hand, saying, "He looks like the devil." However, he enjoyed the piggyback ride Bukharin gave him. Both Bukharin and Trotsky were living in New York before the 1917 revolution, and the elder Shub's house served as a meeting place for assorted rebels and foes of czarist tyranny.
In his youth, Boris met anti-Soviet political leaders such as Alexander Kerensky, prime minister of the Russian provisional government of 1917, and grew up determined to help the Russian people get rid of the dictatorship, which he believed was a threat to peace in the world as well as an oppressive burden on its subjects. By the time he was forty years old, in 1952, he had gained a reputation in Western political circles as a skillful propagandist. He was the political adviser in Berlin to RIAS (the acronym for "Radio in the American Sector"), the U.S. government's German-language station broadcasting to East Germany. In addition, he had collaborated on a book with Walter Krivitsky, a high-level defector from Stalin's secret police. Most important, he had written a provocative book called The Choice, published in 1950, in which he argued that if Americans "restore our wartime alliance with the Russian people" by communicating our ideas and ideals, together we might achieve the goal of liberating them from the Kremlin's yoke.
Initially, in 1952, my title was Research Coordinator of the New York Program Section, but I soon became Shub's de facto deputy. I was responsible for helping the Russian writers by establishing a reference library of appropriate books and periodicals. In those days, the Soviet press refused our request for subscriptions, so I would go to the nearby office of Frederick Praeger, a publisher who approved of our fledgling organization, to pick up the Moscow newspapers he obtained for us. Our mission in the NYPS was to prepare scripts in Russian for transmission to Munich, where Radio Liberation was building studios and hiring personnel in anticipation of launching broadcasts to the Soviet Union. His close ties with émigré intellectuals enabled Shub to recruit a talented corps of Russian staff members and freelancers in 1952. A few of them had taken an active part in the prerevolutionary struggle against czarism, including his father, who was best known for his unauthorized biography of Lenin (whom he disliked), published in several languages but banned in the Soviet Union. Later, in the 1970s, another of David Shub's books (in Russian), Russian Political Leaders, found its way to Soviet dissidents in Moscow and other cities, smuggled into the USSR along with other forbidden works published in the West. Among former Mensheviks the most prominent was Yuri P. Denicke, who had been active in early postrevolutionary politics in the ancient city of Kazan on the Volga and had more recently worked in a research section of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in Washington. He was deeply respected by his fellow writers.
Roman B. Goul, the chief editor, was a non-Marxist who was also an editor of Novy Zhurnal (The New Review), a respected émigré tolsty zhurnal (thick magazine), as Russians call such periodicals on political and cultural themes. Two of the writers were former Red Army officers who had defected at the end of World War II: Mikhail M. Koriakov, a captain and former journalist from Siberia, who defected in Paris; and Vladimir I. (Volodya) Yurasov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel who escaped from occupied Berlin to West Germany and who had been one of our interviewees at the Harvard Project in Munich.
Among regular freelancers was Father Alexander Schmemann, a Russian priest and dean of the St. Vladimir Orthodox Academy in Westchester County, New York. Together with Boris Shub, Schmemann conceived a weekly "Sunday Talk" aimed not only at secret believers but also at people who were dissatisfied with the Marxist-Leninist atheistic Weltanschauung and were seeking spiritual inspiration to fill the void in their lives. He avoided strident sermonizing or a formal liturgical service; instead, he calmly discussed ethical and religious issues for Soviet believers and receptive nonbelievers. Father Schmemann's weekly fifteen-minute talks continued for more than thirty years and attracted a wide audience of admirers, especially members of the Russian intelligentsia that included Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn before the writer's forced exile in 1974. Solzhenitsyn told Western reporters in an interview in Moscow in the early 1970s that the talks were for him "the temple in which I worship." Schmemann spoke in a quiet, reassuring baritone, as though talking to an individual friend. Occasionally he would come to the studio with his young son, Serge, who went on to Harvard and a career in journalism as a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent of the New York Times and its Moscow bureau chief. It came to pass that this son of the Russian people's favorite radio priest, who long challenged Soviet official atheism with eternal Christian values, reported the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In my relations with my émigré colleagues, I tried to speak Russian most of the workday, absorbing their insights about Soviet reality and empathizing with their implacable hostility to the regime. My eagerness to think and feel like a Russian went to such an extreme that once, on the Monday after the Russian Orthodox Easter, when Koriakov came to work and greeted everyone with three kisses on their cheeks and a solemn "Khristos voskres!" (Christ is risen!), I joined in, despite my Jewish heritage.
Under Shub's inspired direction, our NYPS produced a backlog of "timeless" feature scripts that would accompany the daily newscasts, giving the audience information about subjects forbidden by Soviet-censored sources. Several series were created that remained on the air for years: "Missing Pages" restored the writings of Russian authors repressed by Stalin—for example, Babel, Olesha, and Zamyatin; "How They Were Cured of Communism" quoted from the confessions of disenchanted former Communists in the West, such as Arthur Koestler; "For Your Freedom and Ours" cited passages from Alexander Herzen and other prerevolutionary Russian democrats, whose opposition to the czarist autocracy was relevant as a critique of the Soviet stifling of freedom; "Speaking Precisely" exposed the Orwellian clichés of Soviet Newspeak; "Our People Abroad" refuted propaganda about the miserable fate of Russian émigrés by offering them our microphone to describe their successful adjustment to life in America and to express their nostalgia and love for their motherland.
Shub and Volodya Yurasov also created a series called "Colonel Panin." It consisted of short messages ostensibly from a former lieutenant colonel in the Soviet army, addressed both to civilians and to Soviet troops in Eastern Europe, in which Yurasov/Panin excoriated the dictatorship and invariably concluded by declaring that the only solution for Russia's ills was a "government of freely elected representatives of the people." The messages effectively combined Shub's sharp political analyses with Yurasov's own life experience; as a Soviet citizen he had been an inmate of the gulag before he managed to escape, conceal his identity, and serve as an officer during World War II. Boris would pace the floor, exploding with ideas and phrases that Yurasov put into colloquial Russian. The two of them made an odd couple: Shub was short and frenetic, and Volodya was tall and solidly built, resembling somewhat the German boxer Max Schmeling. Although they respected each other, their collaboration was often stormy; I once witnessed them punctuating their writing session by wrestling on the office floor like schoolboys. I thought they were fighting—until they got up, burst out laughing, and resumed their script-writing.
Within a short time Boris shared with me his approach to editing the scripts, based largely on political rather than stylistic criteria, which he usually left to Editor Goul. Shub's goal was to shape the future broadcasts into effective weapons of psychological warfare. When I was put in charge of the NYPS a couple of years later, I tried to apply his subtleties and nuances. Ultimately, by 1960, the section expanded into a division with its own state-of-the-art studios, taping programs that we airmailed by pouch through special arrangement with Lufthansa in those days before telexes and faxes. Once communication satellites were launched into fixed orbit in space, urgent programs were transmitted immediately and could be broadcast instantaneously to the Soviet Union. And, of course, the computer age introduced the e-mail link.
From the early days, the New York output was integrated into the total program schedule in Munich, which included newscasts, press reviews, and features prepared by Radio staff there. In the beginning, we had to rent recording time at an independent audio-video studio on nearby Madison Avenue whenever we supplemented the written scripts with special recorded programs. Shub coached Sergei Dubrovsky, an actor from Moscow who later became a leading RL announcer (in Russian, diktor), in the proper recitation of the lyrics to the famous prerevolutionary song of the workers, "You Fell Victim." Played and sung at the funerals of comrades, it easily evoked deep emotions: "You fell victim in the fateful struggle, / With selfless love for the people, / You gave up everything you could for them, / For their life, their honor and freedom." The song describes the suffering of the victims of the czar's cruel regime, wasting away in chains in dank prisons. The dirge concludes on a note of hope:
The despot feasts in his sumptuous palace, drowning his fear with wine— But menacing letters were drawn on the wall, long ago by a fateful hand: "Arbitrary rule will fall, and the people arise, great, powerful, and free." Farewell, brothers, you have honorably trodden a noble and shining path.
Shub revived the song to use as a weapon against Stalin, because its message is that the people will ultimately prevail. Dubrovsky gave an emotional rendition of the lyrics, and Boris, ever the perfectionist, made him work repeatedly on the lines about the despot in his palace, zeroing in on every plosive consonant, like a Hollywood director who demands many "takes."
A new world of political indoctrination opened as I became acquainted with other well-known revolutionaries who had escaped Soviet tyranny: Vladimir Zenzinov, considered by some a "saint," was a leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), who had defeated Lenin in the 1917 elections to the Constituent Assembly; the distinguished Menshevik leader Irakli Tsereteli and his colleagues Boris Nicolaevsky, Solomon Schwarz and his wife Vera Alexandrova, and Rafael Abramovich. The Mensheviks were closely associated with the Sotsialisticheski Vestnik (Socialist Herald) and the New Leader, the American liberal anti-Communist magazine. The New York Program Section became the center for intellectual ferment as the time drew near for Radio Liberation to take to the airwaves.
One of my first purchases for our library at the NYPS was the complete set of the Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya (BSE, the Large Soviet Encyclopedia), published in Moscow in 1950. It was a treasure trove of Soviet disinformation and distortion. The fifth volume, containing the biography of Lavrenty Beria, the notorious chief of the secret police and Politburo member in Stalin's final years, filled several pages of encomium, accompanied by an idealized full-page photograph. In 1953, within a few months after Stalin's death, Beria was arrested and all subscribers to the encyclopedia received substitute pages describing the Bering Sea, together with explicit instructions to take a scissors or razor, cut out pages 21-24 and the portrait (not otherwise identified), and paste in the new pages. Beria went down the Soviet memory hole, but I kept both versions in the library and for years would amuse and shock visitors with this vivid illustration of the post-Stalin regime's revision of its own recent history.
At forty, Boris Shub was still an enfant terrible, contemptuous of authority, brutally frank in his criticism of the staff's efforts, but earning our respect for his innovative methods and brilliant insights along with his profound commitment to the cause of a democratic Russia. At countless lunches together, I listened as an eager apprentice while he shared his thoughts about how the Radio could make a significant contribution to changing Soviet listeners' attitudes and prejudices. He understood that the audience we were preparing to reach would be suspicious of any messages we might send that would simply project a mirror image of their domestic media. He appreciated their pride and sensitivity as members of a superpower that had successfully repelled the Nazi invaders at a staggering cost of twenty million dead. He was also aware that many of them were imbued with the socialist ideals proclaimed by Lenin and were hostile to the capitalist world. He spoke of our need to attract the "loyal Soviet citizen," not merely those who were already enemies of the regime.
Boris realized the tremendous odds against us in our attempt to exdoctrinate people daily exposed to an unending barrage of official propaganda. They faced reprisals if they sought other sources of information, especially from a radio station staffed by émigrés whom many Soviet citizens resented for having chosen a comfortable life abroad. But Boris was convinced that millions of Soviets were dissatisfied with the quality of their lives; that they had expected meaningful improvements in their spiritual and material condition after the victory over Germany but instead were plunged into a dangerous Cold War struggle with their erstwhile allies. He believed that they would be attracted by voices that spoke pure, unaccented, contemporary Russian and other Soviet languages, not Americans or Englishmen, but compatriots who expressed their genuine aspirations for lasting peace, freedom of expression, and a higher standard of living. Unlike Voice of America and the BBC, which focused primarily on life in the United States and Great Britain, Radio Liberation would be an internal radio even though it was situated beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.
In December 1952, Shub went on temporary assignment to Munich, where he worked with the newly hired émigrés and the Radio's American adviser, Manning Williams, preparing for the inauguration of the broadcasts on March 1, 1953. Williams was a former "Moscow hand," a member of the U.S. Embassy staff after World War II. He had been editor of Amerika, a slick Life-like Russian magazine produced by the USIA. (During the war, other Americans served in Moscow, including Isaac Patch, Thomas P. Whitney, Frederick C. Barghoorn, and Robert C. Tucker. They went on to carve careers as Soviet experts in the academic and communications fields, and in various ways made positive contributions to the Radio.)
The Radio's offices and studios were located on Lilienthalstrasse in northern Munich in the former administration building of the Oberwiesenfeld airport. It was there that Great Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and France's Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, landed in September 1938, en route to the conference with Adolf Hitler that doomed the independence of Czechoslovakia and thereafter gave the name "Munich" a pejorative association.
After the Radio went on the air in March 1953, it operated with six studios. If you entered the control room of, say, Studio One and watched through the soundproof window, you would hear an announcer speak Russian into the microphone. First he would give the latest newscast, followed by a review of the Western press and Several feature programs—many of them sent from New York, others prepared by the local Russian section, and all of them recorded by the engineer for delivery to the transmitter in another part of West Germany. In the other studios, you would see a similar setup but hear another of the Radio's many languages. The atmosphere resembled a mini—United Nations, where Slavic faces could be seen along with Georgians and Armenians, as well as Oriental-looking colleagues from Soviet Central Asia. Russian and German were most frequently used for communicating among the various ethnic groups, and American and British executives needed to know at least one of those languages.
At daily meetings each language desk discussed the priorities for the topical segment of the program, based on screening the early-morning Western wire services, plus a pirated duplicate of a machine that punched out the news from TASS (Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union). RL, along with TASS's legitimate subscribers, had swift access to the official Soviet version of the latest events and could sometimes scoop domestic clients, who received the dispatches more slowly.
The staff also received the transcript of the previous night's monitoring of internal Soviet radio stations. On my first visit to Radio Liberation in 1954, I was especially fascinated by the monitoring section, where a solid wall of receivers operated around the clock, recording shortwave broadcasts captured from RL antennas turned eastward to the major cities of Russia and other Soviet republics. The early archives contained tapes of such historic events as Stalin's funeral, which included speeches by Khrushchev, Malenkov, Beria, and other members of the "collective leadership," who professed fealty to one another and to the legacy of their dead leader while they secretly jockeyed for power. Excerpts from such monitored Soviet broadcasts provided us with dramatic "sound bites" for interpretation and commentary at those stages of the regime's evolution when the past was rewritten and abruptly shifted to conform to the new Party line.
Who were the principal members of the Munich staff in those days? Two Russian-speaking Americans who began their careers with Radio Liberation in Munich worked with Manning Williams and played vital roles in shaping its image over the years: Francis S. (Ronny) Ronalds and James Critchlow. Ronalds, formerly with Time magazine, alternated working for the Radio and Voice of America and was Radio Liberty's director in the 1970s. I was always impressed with his love of Russian culture and by his ability to recite from memory the lengthy Verses About the Beautiful Lady by the great Symbolist poet, Aleksandr Blok. Critchlow had great rapport with his émigré colleagues and wrote with verve about many of them in an entertaining and informative memoir about his years with the Radio and his subsequent activities on the staff of the Board for International Broadcasting in Washington. Like me, Ronalds and Critchlow were ardent disciples of Boris Shub and his advocacy of democratic education of the Soviet audience. Paraphrasing Dostoyevsky's famous statement about the debt he and other Russian realists owed to Gogol, "We all came out of Gogol's Overcoat," one of us quipped: "We all came out of Shub's shuba" (shuba being the Russian word for fur coat).
The heterogeneous group of émigrés of the newly formed Russian service, many of whom Boris and Ronny recruited, included Wladimir Weidle, a respected art historian and literary critic from Paris who became the Radio's first Russian program director during the early years. Weidle had just published a perceptive monograph, Russia: Absent and Present, which the well-known Oxford professor and critic Isaiah Berlin lauded in the London Sunday Times as "the most balanced, civilised, and informative account of Russia's position in the world during the last three centuries."
Another of Shub's "finds" was Victor Frank, son of Semyon Frank, the famous Russian religious philosopher, who, like Weidle, was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1923. Victor came from the BBC, where he had been head of the Russian service, and he worked for RL for almost twenty years in Munich and London as our bureau chief. As senior commentator, he infused his broadcasts with his profound knowledge of Russia. He liked to compare the construction of his radio talks to wooing a woman from foreplay to climax. In my opinion, Frank came the closest among all of the Radio broadcasters to Anatoli Maximovich Goldberg, the BBC's veteran Russian commentator who was generally considered to be the voice from the West most respected by the vast audience of Soviet shortwave listeners. Frank's brother Vasily, long a member of the RL news desk, compiled a book of tributes by émigré and American colleagues after Victor's death in 1972.
Gaito Gazdanov came to Munich from Paris, where he had arrived with the first wave of postrevolutionary émigrés after 1917. A gifted writer, with a barbed wit and a French cigarette always dangling from his lips, he had eked out a living by driving a taxi at night, leaving him time to write and to achieve success with his first novel, An Evening with Claire (1930), which made him famous in the Russian community in Paris. From 1953 to his death in 1971, he was an editor with the Radio in Munich and later in Paris. In post-Soviet Russia, Gazdanov has attained long overdue recognition: more than fifty editions of his work have appeared, including a three-volume collection in 1996.
Other members of the emigration recruited for the Radio included Boris Orshansky, a Soviet army captain who defected to the West after the end of the war, and Alexander Bacherach, former secretary to Russia's first Nobel Prize laureate in literature, Ivan Bunin, who lived in exile in France. A colorful reinforcement to this largely intellectual group was Leonid Pylayev, a hard-drinking proletarian who used his sharp satirical mind to record hilarious and coarse political monologues as "Ivan Ivanovich Oktyabrev"—a kind of Russian Joe Six-Pack or Archie Bunker.
The non-Russian staff of the Radio in Munich included many dedicated writers and editors equally concerned about the fate and the future of their respective homelands, such as Carlo Inasaridze, chief of the Georgian desk, and Garip Sultan, head of the Tatar-Bashkir service.
In Shub's absence, I was left in charge of the NYPS, working closely with the writers before their scripts were sent to Munich. It was excellent training for my subsequent job as Shub's successor a couple of years later, when he assumed a position as policy adviser on Amcomlib's executive staff. By then, Radio Liberation was a going concern, and although woefully lacking in transmitter strength, we soon incurred the wrath of the Kremlin, which attempted in various ways, some of them sinister, to discredit and frighten us.
