The first Radio Free Europe broadcast targeted to Polish listeners took place on August 4, 1950; however, it was not until May 3, 1952 that RFE officially inaugurated a full-time Polish broadcast service. For nearly fifty years after that first broadcast, RFE served as a valued source of information for the people of Poland. In the early 1950s, it was through RFE that Poles learned of the corruption of the highest levels of the Polish leadership and the extent of the subservience of that leadership to Moscow.

In 1956, it was through RFE that many Poles learned of Nikita Khruschev's secret speech denouncing Stalin's crimes and the popular uprising in Poznan that the speech may have in part touched off. In 1959, RFE reported the route of Vice-President Richard Nixon's motorcade during a state visit, after communist authorities changed it at the last minute; informed of the change, thousands of Warsaw residents turned out and gave Nixon a welcome far warmer than that received by Khruschev just a few weeks earlier.

In somewhat of a departure from standard station practice, the Polish service throughout the 1960s carried out a successful campaign against the efforts of Mieczylaw Moczar and his "Partisans" to seize control of the Polish party-state; though some RFE staff preferred not to become involved in internal party politics, long-time Polish service director Jan Nowak (born Zdizislaw Jezioranski) and others successfully argued that the Partisans' anti-Semitism, access to security files, and ties to the secret police and elements of the Soviet communist party rendered them a threat to the Polish people. The success of RFE in reaching Polish listeners in the 1960s and the inability of the party to counter the Western message was reflected in the Polish leadership's attempts to convince the West German government to expel the Radios from its territory.

It was through RFE that the 1970 protests in Poland's Baltic cities became known to Poles outside those cities. Defying the regime's attempt to impose a news blackout, RFE spread the word that those rising up were workers disenchanted with the regime's broken economic promises, not the "hooligans and adventurers" that Radio Warsaw blamed for the disturbances. Later in the 1970s, the Polish language service became entangled in the debate over Senator William Fulbright's effort to disband the Radios when letters denouncing the Arkansas Senator -- printed on RFE stationery and bearing the signature of Jan Nowak -- were made public. Nowak asserts and the evidence suggests that he and RFE were the victims of a Polish secret police forgery aimed at discrediting Nowak personally and RFE by extension.

Jan Nowak

Lech Walesa

With the installation of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II and the rise of the dissident movement in Poland, RFE's Polish language service grew in importance and relevance to the Polish people. It was through RFE that Poles were able to hear the details of John Paul II's 1979 visit to Poland; the station devoted 13 of its 19 daily broadcast hours to the story while Polish state television produced only highly edited two-minute segments for the evening news. RFE's Polish language service -- mindful of the examples of Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968 -- adopted a cautious approach toward the growing strength of the Solidarity movement as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s. After the adoption of martial law, RFE continued its policy of demonstrating the shortfall between communist rhetoric and Polish reality. It was over RFE that Lech Walesa was able to listen to the ceremony announcing the awarding of his Nobel Peace Prize after Polish authorities prevented him from traveling to Oslo to accept the award in person.

RFE played a critical role in the first free elections in Poland, conducted in 1989 on a nonparty basis at the insistence of the Communists. RFE's Polish service broadcast the names of noncommunist candidates for each election district, ensuring that Polish voters knew for whom they were casting their ballots. After pro-Solidarity forces achieved an overwhelming victory, Poland opened its doors to RFE -- allowing the establishment of RFE bureaus within the country and the hiring of local stringers to augment the Munich-based Polish language service.

A victim of its own success, the Polish language service of RFE was one of the first to face elimination in the wake of the American Cold War victory. Pleas by longtime listeners and supporters such as President Lech Walesa of Poland, who argued that the Radios still had a role to play given the relatively weak and unfree press in the region, convinced American authorities to grant the Radios a temporary stay of execution.

However, the budgetary logic was inexorable and after conducting a thorough review of the various language services, RFE/RL opted to eliminate service to those nations where the Radios' goals had been met most energetically and completely. As a result, the Polish service was reconstituted into an independent nonprofit corporation prior to RFE/RL's move to Prague in 1995 and, after an unsuccessful bid to secure private funding, discontinued broadcasting at the end of fiscal year 1997.