Western democracy is currently under attack by a resurgent Russia, weaponizing new technologies and social media. How to respond? During the Cold War, the West fought off similar Soviet propaganda assaults with shortwave radio broadcasts. Founded in 1949, the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast uncensored information to the Soviet republics in their own languages. About one-third of Soviet urban adults listened to Western radio. The broadcasts played a key role in ending the Cold War and eroding the communist empire. R. Eugene Parta was for many years the director of Soviet Area Audience Research at RFE/RL, charged among others with gathering listener feedback. In this book he relates a remarkable Cold War operation to assess the impact of Western radio broadcasts on Soviet listeners by using a novel survey research approach. Given the impossibility of interviewing Soviet citizens in their own country, it pioneered audacious interview methods in order to fly under the radar and talk to Soviets traveling abroad, ultimately creating a database of 51,000 interviews which offered unparalleled insights into the media habits and mindset of the Soviet public. By recounting how the "impossible" mission was carried out, Under the Radar also shows how the lessons of the past can help counter the threat from a once and current adversary.

A pariah during the Cold War, Radio Liberty was ultimately accepted as a legitimate participant on the Russian media scene by the authorities themselves. How did it happen that Radio Liberty-once the most vilified of Western broadcasters in the Soviet Union-had amassed such a vast audience that it was able to experience its finest hour defending the same democratic forces that it had nurtured over almost four decades of broadcasting?Based on more than 50,000 interviews conducted with Soviet citizens traveling outside the USSR during the period 1972-1990, this book attempts to answer the question from the listeners' perspective: How many listeners were there? Who were they? Why did they listen? How did they listen? What did the broadcasts mean to them? Did they make a difference? The author addresses audience size and listening trends over time, the position Western radio occupied in the Soviet media environment, listeners' demographic traits and attitudes, the evolution of the image of different Western broadcasters, and listeners' programming preferences. Through six brief case studies, he also looks at the role of Western radio in various crisis situations. The book concludes with some observations about the ultimate impact of Western radio and Radio Liberty-what they actually meant to their listeners and how their influence may have inspired or reinforced other tendencies at work in the USSR as it moved toward a freer society.

The book examines the role of Western broadcasting to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, with a focus on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It includes chapters by radio veterans and by scholars who have conducted research on the subject in once-secret Soviet bloc archives and in Western records. It also contains a selection of translated documents from formerly secret Soviet and East European archives, most of them published here for the first time.