Suchergebnisse

In the 1940s and 1950s, Western governments turned to radio as the most effective means of countering the Soviet information monopoly. U.S. and West European radio stations attempted to provide listeners with the kind of programs they might expect from their own radio stations if the latter were free of censorship. For most of these listeners in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the broadcasts were their only contact with the outside world. The importance of the foreign radio programs was confirmed not only by audience estimates, but also by the considerable efforts the Communist regimes made to jam the transmissions. Given the importance of foreign broadcasting for the political life of the Soviet bloc, it is remarkable that these broadcasts have received scant scholarly attention in the Western countries that sponsored them. The three books reviewed here help to fill that gap.

This volume concerns the origins, organisation and method of British, American and Soviet propaganda during the 1950s. Drawing upon a range of archival material which has only been accessible to researchers in the last few years, the authors discuss propaganda's international and domestic dimensions, and chart the development of a shared Cold War culture. They demonstrate how the structures of propaganda which were organised at this time endured, giving shape and meaning to the remaining years of the Cold War

Western scholars have long disagreed about the role that ideology played in the Cold War. The release of crucial documentation from the former East-bloc archives has shed new light on this question, but no consensus is likely to emerge. Even if all the archives are eventually opened, the new evidence will not—and cannot—provide full vindication for either realism or an ideology-based approach. A key task for scholars will be to reexamine the broad and often unspoken assumptions on which specific US and Soviet policies were based.