Under the Radar: Tracking Western Radio Listeners in the Soviet Union

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction. Why a History of Audience Research at Radio Liberty? Prelude. My Road to Radio Liberty (amabile) First Movement (1965-1970). Early Years of Audience Research (andante) Second Movement (1970-1980). First Steps in Audience Interviewing (accelerato) Third Movement (1981-1985). Audience Research Breaks New Ground (sforzando) Fourth Movement (1986-1990). Perestroika Changes the Game (fuocoso) Fifth Movement (1991-1994). The End of the USSR and the Post-Soviet Transition (vittorioso, capriccioso, lamentoso) Postlude. Past Successes, Future Challenges (coda) Afterword. Ukraine 2022: The Information War (agitato) Appendix 1: Charts Referenced in Narrative Appendix 2. Some of Those Who Crossed My Path: Max Ralis, Ross Johnson, James Crichlow, Morrill "Bill" Cody, Ralph Walter, James Buckley, Eugene Pell, William W. Marsh, Viktor Nekrasov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Victor Grayevsky, Irina Alberti, Helmut Aigner, Christopher Geleklidis, Steen Sauerberg, Copenhagen interviewer Appendix 3. The MIT Connection and Computer Simulation Appendix 4. Some Examples of SAAOR Reporting and Surve Questions Asked Appendix 5. Profiles of the SAAOR Team Bibliography Index

About the Author :
R. Eugene Parta is former director of Soviet Area Audience and Opinion Research at RFE/RL and of Media and Opinion Research at the RFE/RL Research Institute.

Review :
"Most of Radio Free Europe’s research efforts were geared toward learning how to build listener trust and how to counter propaganda. Today, there is no centralized research organization that combines quantitative media surveys with analytical research into the target country’s economic, political, and sociocultural life. Parta’s final peroration is a call for the creation of such an institution: one that could provide insights into digital audiences and offer counternarratives, especially in light of contemporary Russian propaganda and its role in fueling the war in Ukraine." https://muse.jhu.edu/article/911038 "Stylishly written and fun to read, Parta’s book is ultimately more about people than policies or data. He describes his fellow employees and associates at the various contracting firms who conducted the actual interviews that provided raw data for statistical analyses. He elucidates how they worked and sometimes how they played, which gives the reader a sense of the personalities behind Cold War radio. These were not policy-formulating or policyimplementing automatons but real people with real virtues and failings." https://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-abstract/25/4/261/118956/Cold-War-Radio-The-Russian-Broadcasts-of-the-Voice?redirectedFrom=fulltext "It provides readers and researchers with unique information about Radio Liberty’s audience research department and its international connections, including a priceless who’s who, the profiles of the department’s employees, depictions of its network and working techniques, and the role of its survey partner institutions. Researchers working in the archives of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty’s audience research should start with this book." https://ceureviewofbooks.com/review/an-insiders-view-of-radio-free-europe-radio-liberty/ "R. Eugene Parta has written a very timely book. While the general reader will certainly enjoy numerous insider tales offered in the book, several groups will find it useful in a very practical way. Media practitioners who seek to learn from earlier efforts of reaching audiences in heavily censored environments will find plenty of material to contemplate. Sociologists and political psychologists will appreciate generous insights into ways to deduce the attitudinal make-up of deeply fragmented audiences. Media and communication scholars will be compelled to probe their ontological assumptions that a free circulation of information is congruent with democracy and that attitudinally, the latter can be advanced via media consumption." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09668136.2024.2405387