Based on an agreement with the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors announced in October 2000, the Hoover Institution will house the broadcast archives and corporate records of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). The collection, consisting of some 80,000 tapes and 10.5 million pages of documents, covers the period from the creation of the radios in the early 1950s to their move from Munich to Prague in June 1995. Hoover will make the collection available to scholars in stages, after it has been processed by Institution staff. Hoover, with support from the Bernard Osher Foundation, is also preparing an online exhibit that will feature significant documents from the collection and serve as an educational resource on the Cold War and the transition period.

RFE and RL, created independently from one another in the 1950s and merged in the 1970s, played the role of a surrogate free press for the nations behind the iron curtain. Heavily jammed from the day they went on the air until the late 1980s, RFE and RL nonetheless served as an important source of information for the peoples of the Soviet bloc. Although funded by the U.S. government, initially covertly and later openly, RFE/RL differed from other Western international broadcast services in its focus on providing audience members with objective information not only on the West, but also on occurrences within the bloc. As a result, the materials in this collection present a unique historical record of every major event, movement, and personality in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe throughout the Cold War and during the first years of the transition to democracy.

The broadcast archives consist of tapes, transcripts, and thousands of pages of additional documents generated by the various broadcast services of RFE and RL. The corporate records include the administrative files of the offices of the president, executive vice president, RFE director, RL director, New York Program Center, Public Affairs Office, and other operating units.

PROCESSING THE COLLECTION

Because of the sheer size of the RFE/RL collection, the Hoover Archives has opted to conduct preliminary processing of materials at an off site location, where, materials, arriving in shrink-wrapped pallets from Prague, are transferred to acid-free archival storage boxes and organized for their upcoming transfer to the Hoover Archives. The scale of this undertaking is demonstrated several photos on this page.

Pictured here amid a fresh shipment of pallets from Prague are (left to right) Lechoslaw Gawlikowski, a former broadcaster with the RFE/RL Polish service who now serves as an adviser to RFE/RL's archival department, Blanka Pasternak, Polina Ilieva, and Anatol Shmelev of the Hoover Archives, and Ross Johnson, former director of the RFE/RL Research Institute and current Hoover fellow.

Blanka Pasternak, Anatol Shmelev, and Polina Ilieva dwarfed by pallets of archival boxes. The thousands of boxes pictured here contain perhaps 10 to 15 percent of the total RFE/RL collection.