The effort to catalog and research the RFE/RL collection is supported in part by a generous grant from the Bernard Osher Foundation of San Francisco. The Osher Foundation has provided funding to bring journalist-scholars from the Radios' various language services to Hoover to assist in the organization of the archival materials and to research the Radios' activity in the histories of the countries they serviced. The Osher program also provides for a student internship program; the student interns assist in the processing of archival materials and contribute to the web site devoted to the collection. Over the course of four years, this grant will bring twenty fellows and interns to the archives.

Osher Fellows

Year 2004

Abbas William Samii is RFE/RL's Regional Analysis Coordinator for Southwest Asia and the Middle East. He has been with the company since 1998. His primary task is writing an analytical weekly called the "RFE/RL Iran Report" and contributing to the daily RFE/RL Newsline. Samii's research articles have also appeared in The Middle East Journal, The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Middle East Policy, and elsewhere, and his opinion pieces have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal Europe, The Weekly Standard, and elsewhere.

He has contributed to several books, including the forthcoming Distant Relations: Iran and Lebanon in the Last 500 Years, Houchang Chehabi and Hassan Mniemnieh, eds.(London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), as well as the 6th edition of Political Parties of the World (John Harper Publishing, 2004). While at Hoover Samii will be working on a book examining the impact of domestic politics on Iranian foreign policy. Samii earned his Ph.D. and M.Phil. at the University of Cambridge and his B.A. at the American University. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Tbilisi, Georgia. Samii formerly served as an infantryman/parachutist in the U.S. Army.

Venera Djumataeva joined RFE/RL in 1996 as a journalist for RFE/RL in Kyrgyzstan. For the past three years she has been a broadcast journalist of the Kyrgyz service based in Prague. She received her education at Kyrgyz State University, where she studied Kyrgyz history and published several articles on Islam in Central Asia. Her journalistic focus is on regional problems of post-Soviet Central Asia, such as border issues and political and economic relations. Her project at the Hoover Institution is to prepare a book tentatively entitled Radio "Azattyk" in the Informational struggle for Democratic Kyrgyzstan (1953-1990).

Nestor Ratesh, former director of the Romanian Broadcast Department, joined RFE/RL almost immediately upon his emigration from Romania in 1973. He covered Washington for 20 years as correspondent and senior correspondent. He served as Director of the Romanian Department from 1984 until 2002, in both Munich and Prague. In June 2002, he was appointed Editorial Policy Advisor to the Director of Broadcasting, a post he held until retirement at the end of 2003. He currently serves as a consultant to RFE/RL with the title of Senior Advisor. Among his many written works, Ratesh authored the book "Romania: The Entangled Revolution" (Praeger, 1991), described by the New York Review of Books as "probably the best brief account of recent Romanian history".

In the past two years, he has been researching the files of the Romanian Communist secret police, the infamous Securitate, where he unearthed documents that provide evidence of the crimes of the Romanian Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu against RFE/RL in the 1980s, including the bomb that exploded at its Munich headquarters on February 21, 1981, the death of at least two directors and one lead broadcaster of RFE/RL's Romanian Broadcasting Department between 1981 and 1988,. Ratesh's present projects include writing a book on the "forgotten terrorism" and a paper on Radio Free Europe's unprecedented influence in Romania, at the conference on the impact of international broadcasting during the Cold War to be held in October 2004 at Stanford University.

Year 2003

Charles Recknagel, Osher fellow in fall 2003, is an RFE/RL senior correspondent specializing in Iran, Iraq and related issues. He joined the News and Current Affairs Department in 1995 and prepares news analysis for the radio's multiple language services. At Hoover for six weeks, he is researching for publication and a series of documentary broadcasts Iran's progress in developing a nuclear weapons capability. Mr. Recknagel has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and holds an M.A. in Journalism from the University of Maryland and a B.A. from Beloit College, Wisconsin.

Ivan Tolstoi received a degree in Russian Literature from Leningrad State University in 1988. He has taught the history of Russian émigré literature at the St. Petersburg State University, the Arts Academy, St. Petersburg, the Russian Christian Humanitarian Institute, St. Petersburg, the Sorbonne, Paris, and Charles University, Prague. Author of over 500 newspaper and encyclopedia articles, essays and reviews, he also published the plays of Vladimir Nabokov (Moscow, 1990) and a guide to Prague (Moscow, 2001). He currently works as an editor and broadcaster at Radio Free Europe/ Radio Europe in Prague (since 1995).

Lechoslaw Gawlikowski, an RFE/RL consultant, is Senior Advisor for Archives. From 1989 to 1994 he was Deputy Director of RFE/RL's Polish Broadcasting Department. A graduate of the Main School of Planning and Statistics in Warsaw, he was deputy editor of "Young Cinema and Theatre" magazine in Warsaw from 1970-1972. He then left Poland, and joined RFE, where he worked as a news editor and senior economic editor in the Polish service before becoming its assistant and then deputy director. After 1994 he was in charge of the RFE/RL archives. He was responsible for the move to Prague and organization there of the RFE/RL Archives. He then supervised the transfer of the RFE/RL archives from Prague to the Hoover Institution. He is working on a history of the RFE Polish Service.

Russell Eugene (Gene) Parta, Osher Fellow in 2003, is currently serving as Director of Audience Research and Program Evaluation for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague. Previously, Mr. Parta was Director of Media and Opinion Research (MOR) of the RFE/RL Research Institute in Munich, a position he had held from the founding of the Research Institute in 1990. He has worked in the field of international broadcasting audience research since 1969. He is currently serving on the Executive Board of CIBAR (Conference on International Broadcasting Audience Research) and was a member of the CIBAR/EBU working group on standards to harmonize international broadcasting audience measurement.

Mr. Parta was educated at the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University, St. Olaf College, Harvard University and the American University. In 1975-1977, he was a research associate at the Center for International Studies at MIT working on computer simulation models of Soviet media and western broadcasting. He has written extensively on media use, communications and public opinion in Central and Eastern Europe and has been a frequent speaker and participant in international academic and professional conferences.

Year 2003-2004

Lenka Fedorova, Osher Intern for academic year 2003-2004, is pursuing her master's degree at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford. In May 2002, she graduated with a bachelor's degree in International Affairs and German Studies from Lewis & Clark College. In 1999-2000, she studied German language, literature, and history at the University of Munich. Before coming to Stanford, Fedorova interned at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C. She processes the Czech and Slovak archival materials of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Ilja Gruen, an Osher Intern since January 2004, is a Ph.D. student in the Slavic Department at Stanford. In 2003 he graduated from Regensburg University, Germany with a B.A. in English and Russian philology. In 2001- 2002 he studied as an exchange student in the Comparative Literature Department at UC Irvine. His main research interest is Pushkin studies. Presently he is also involved in preparation of archival materials by Russian-Jewish writer S. Ansky for publication. At Hoover, he will be processing the RFE/RL archival materials and preparing them for the collection web site.

German Dziebel, 2003-2004 Osher Intern, is pursuing his Ph.D. in the Stanford University Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology with a dissertation on the topic of East European appropriations of Native American cultures in the post-World War II period. He graduated from St. Petersburg State University in 1993 and received his Ph.D. in history from the Peter the Great Museum of Ethnography and Anthropology in 1997. Prior to coming to Stanford as a New Democracy Fellow, he studied sociology at Central European University in Warsaw, Poland. Dziebel will be processing the archival collection and preparing material for the web site.

Dev Kumari Khalsa, Osher Intern for 2003-2004, is a graduate student in the Department of History, writing a Ph.D. dissertation on abortion in the Soviet Union. She received her B.A. in history from UC Berkeley in 2000 and has served as a teaching assistant and coordinator of the Russian and East European History Reading Group at Stanford.

Vesko Dimitrov, Osher Intern since February 2004, is a Masters student in the Department of Computer Science. He graduated with a B.S. in computer science from Denison University in May 2003 with background in operating systems, networking, databases, and web programming. Vesko's efforts are directed toward improving accessibility to the collection through the web site, including updates to the Polish programming database.

Year 2002

Vlado Azinovic, Osher Fellow in fall 2002, works as a news editor and anchor for the South Slavic Service. Azinovic holds an M.A. in international relations. He joined RFE/RL in 1995 after establishing himself in Bosnian print, radio, and television journalism. During his stay at the Hoover Institution, he continued his research on U.S. policy on Bosnia in 1992-1995, for a series of documentary broadcasts as well as for publication. He has spoken on this subject at forums in Washington, D.C., Stockholm, Zagreb, and Vienna, and has also published many articles in the Bosnian press.

Julie A. Corwin, an Osher fellow for the winter 2002, is a Senior Regional Analyst in the Communications Division. She joined RFE/RL in 1998. Her special focus is Russian domestic politics, a topic on which she has spoken at venues such as the U.S. State Department's Foreign Policy Institution and the Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She received a Master's in international affairs from the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and a Master's in writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. At the Hoover Institution, she will continue her current research on Russian political consultants and their role in Russian elections.

Year 2001

Daniel Butora, Osher fellow in fall 2001, serves as the deputy director of RFE/RL's Slovak service. In addition to contributing analysis and commentary on international politics to daily Slovak broadcasts, Butora regularly writes for both the Slovak and Czech weekly press. A specialist in Central European and transatlantic relations after the Cold War, Butora researched and wrote on NATO expansion while at Hoover.

Year 2000

Alexander Lukashuk, Osher fellow in fall 2000, is based in Prague as director of RFE/RL's Belarus service. Lukashuk was the winner of the 1998 International PEN Award for his book, Sweating it Out at the CheKa, a history of the Stalin era purges in Belarus. During his time at Hoover, Mr. Lukashuk conducted research into armed anticommunist resistance in Belarus in the period 1945-1953.

Osher Interns

Year 2002-2003

Lijuan Li, a Ph.D. student in Slavic literature at Stanford, received her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Russian language and literature and a second bachelor’s degree in economics from Peking University, China. Before coming to Stanford, Li worked as a translator and editor for Democracy & Science Culture Development Co., a major publishing company in Beijing. Li, who became an Osher Intern this September, will be working on the archives of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, selecting items from the collection for inclusion in the web site.

Ekaterina Neklioudova, an Osher Intern since January 2003, is a Ph.D. student in the Slavic Department at Stanford. In 1998 she graduated from the Russian State University for Humanities in Moscow, Russia, with an M.A. in Russian literature and Classics. Before coming to Stanford University, Neklioudova participated in a project on Holocaust history: Lessons of Theresienstadt (Jerusalem, Israel). She will be processing the archival materials and preparing them for the collection web site.

Michael Schaefer, Osher Intern for 2002-3, is pursuing his master’s degree in Russian and Eastern European studies at Stanford. In May 2002 he graduated with a degree in political economy from Michigan State University. Before that, he studied Czech language and culture at the Central European Studies Program at Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. Schaefer generates written content for the collection’s web site and selects items from the collection for the on-line exhibit.

Year 2001-2002

Jamie Earl, Osher intern for academic year 2001-2002, has received his master's degree in Russian and East European Studies at Stanford. Earl, a 1998 graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, worked for the American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative, an international technical legal assistance project, before coming to Stanford. Earl generated written content for the collection's web site and selected items from the collection for inclusion in the online exhibit.

Noppadol Pringvanich, Osher intern for academic years 2001-2003, is in electrical engineering department at Stanford, having received his bachelor's in that subject in June 2001. With a strong background in programming and web design, Pringvanich will focus on capturing audiovisual materials from the collection and developing them for use on the collection web site.