Under the Radar

Front matter

R. Eugene Parta

“THE RADAR

Ea k Western Radio Listeners in the Soviet Union ere

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ' 1x

INTRODUCTION Why a History of Audience Research at Radio Liberty? + 1

PRELUDE (1953-1965) My Road to Radio Liberty (amabile) + 9

Introduction

Why a History of Audience Research at Radio Liberty?

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” John F. Kennedy

“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy”

Ludwig van Beethoven

Western democracy is currently under attack by a resurgent Russia, which has exploited new technologies and social media to weaponize false information with the goal ofundermining national elections and policy decisions in the Western world. The threat is not a new one. The Soviet Union used the means available to it at the time to much the same purpose. During the Cold War the West successfully resisted Soviet propaganda, and used truthful information denied to the Soviet audience to help bring about the eventual demise of the USSR.

How can the West respond most effectively today? How can we seize the initiative? This has been made a high priority since the second Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

The lessons of the past provide valuable help in countering the renewed threat from our once and current adversary. This book details an unusual Cold War operation whose purpose was to assess the role and impact of Western information beamed to the USSR in the form of shortwave radio broadcasts. It shows how outside information helped to transform a closed society, and draws inferences relevant to the current situation.

Western radio broadcasts to the communist world are widely acknowledged to have played a key role in ending the Cold War and eroding the communist empire. Political figures and ordinary citizens in the countries concerned, as well as Western scholars and government officials, agree that the broadcasts were crucial. In my previous book, Discovering the Hidden Listener: An Assessment of Radio Liberty and Western Broadcasting to the USSR during the Cold War," I presented empirical evidence attesting to the impact of the broadcasts.

1 Published by the Hoover Institution Press at Stanford University in 2007.

INTRODUCTION

A second work that I co-edited with A. Ross Johnson, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” included once-secret documents and official testimonials from the target countries that documented the broadcasts’ influence.

It is estimated that about one-third of the urban adult Soviet population and about one-half of the Eastern European adult population listened to Western radio broadcasts after the 1950s, and that the information they contained was passed on to a much broader audience by word-of-mouth.

How do we know this? Thanks to survey research carried out among Soviet citizens traveling in the West. During the Cold War, these findings were an invaluable resource for the major Western broadcasters to the USSR. But how was this data gathered? How was it analyzed? By whom? In what conditions?

When we delve a little further, more questions arise. Why did Soviet people believe some media and not others? What led so many of them to distrust Soviet domestic media? What convinced them to trust Western media in the Cold War context? What lessons learned from the Cold War experience remain relevant for today?

These are some of the questions this book attempts to answer.

Under the Radar explores the methods used and the challenges faced by RFE/ RLs Soviet Area Audience and Opinion Research department (SAAOR) which I directed for many years. RFE/RL was a US-funded radio station, based in Munich, which broadcast to the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union, and to five countries of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania), in their own languages, aiming to serve each one as a surrogate home service, broadcasting uncensored news and information to societies where all media were controlled by their communist governments. The specific task of SAAOR was to study the influence of broadcasts by Radio Liberty and other Western stations on the mindset of Soviet citizens. Our operations covered the almost forty-year period between 1956 and 1994.

At its inception in 1956, SAAOR* was facing what Stanford University scholar Wilbur Schramm considered a near impossible challenge: “By the rules of

2 Published by the Central European University Press, Budapest, in 2010.

3 See Johnson and Parta, eds., Cold War Broadcasting, 345.

4 SAAOR underwent a number of name changes during its existence. From 1956 to 1979 it was the Audience Research Division of Radio Liberty (ARD). From 1980 to 1991 it was SAAOR (Soviet Area Audience and Opinion Research), and then finally MOR (Media and Opinion Research of the RFE/ RL Research Institute) from 1991 to 1994.

Why a History of Audience Research at Radio Liberty the game, 95 per cent of all the sophisticated methods available to researchers in Western countries are foreclosed from use.”®

Nevertheless, over time, SAAOR developed audacious and innovative methods of survey interviewing and collected an impressive amount of data. Over 51,000 structured interviews were conducted with Soviet travelers to the West, and over 15,000 detailed interviews were completed with emigrants from the USSR. These two separate databases are now archived at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. They serve as an empirical basis upon which to evaluate the role played by Western broadcasters such as Radio Liberty, Voice of America, BBC, and Deutsche Welle, and offer a unique window on the attitudes of the Soviet public during the Cold War.

SAAOR’s research became the benchmark for knowledge of Soviet attitudes, media use, behavior, and public opinion during much of the second half of the twentieth century. Our research methods allowed us to shed light on sensitive areas that were off-limits to Western researchers during most of the period. Our reporting became the accepted standard of audience measurement for all the major Western broadcasters to the USSR. On several occasions Radio Liberty survived attacks from US government officials and members of Congress because SAAOR could demonstrate that the station had a sizeable and serious audience in the USSR. When other international broadcasters had to contend with bureaucratic budgetary battles, they too used SAAOR data to defend their mission to skeptical oversight bodies.

Under the Radar is not intended to be an analytical study but rather a personalized narrative account of SAAOR’s work. Discovering the Hidden Listener outlined the findings of SAAOR’s survey research, and Under the Radar picks up the story by recounting how this work was accomplished. Like the survey work itself, this book is very much a team effort, but in the interests of coherence, I have been persuaded (albeit reluctantly) to cast it as a first-person narrative.

As a manager I considered my personal style more as the conductor of an orchestra than as a boss in the traditional sense of the term. I saw my role as leading an ensemble of highly talented virtuosos, giving each one freedom to perform but also bringing them together to turn out a polished research product. If all went well, that polished product could resemble a well-constructed symphony.

Classical music has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. To my mind, composing this book has resembled the process of composing a symphony.

5 Letter from Wilbur Schramm to Howland Sargeant, 19 October 1962, HIA.

INTRODUCTION

It was written with classical music streaming in the background (thank you WETA and Radio Suisse Classique!). I would venture to say that SAAOR’s research process, moving through various stages of development over time, can also be compared to the progression of a symphony. One classical reference that comes to mind is Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony, the Reformation, which moves through historical time to a conclusion. Another is Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the Pastorale, which has five movements rather than the usual four, as does the SAAOR “symphony.” Prolonging the musical conceit throughout the text, I have taken the liberty of beginning with a Prelude, concluding with a Coda, and labelling the sections in between as Movements. Appropriate musical notation has been added in. I hope the reader will forgive this piece of authorial self-indulgence!

The Prelude (amabile) traces my personal road to Radio Liberty and explains how I first became involved in this unique broadcasting operation in New York in 1965.

The First Movement — 1956-1970 (andante) switches the focus to audience research. It describes early attempts by RL’s Audience Research Division (ARD) to come to grips with listeners in the USSR in the 1950s, and recounts how I joined ARD in Munich in 1969 with the brief of systematizing listener interviews. In 1970, an ARD office was set up in Paris, a more effective headquarters from which to conduct a European-wide survey of Soviet travelers, and I moved there in 1971.

The Second Movement — 1970-1980 (accelerato) covers the Brezhnev “period of stagnation” from 1970 to 1980. The Soviet government was concerned above all with upholding the status quo, but one innovation was the authorization of limited Jewish emigration from the USSR. This allowed ARD to extend interviewing efforts to Soviet emigrants in Rome and Israel. In parallel, we expanded interviewing of Soviet travelers to the West and ultimately accumulated sufficient data to produce our first reliable estimates of audience size, using advanced computer simulation methods pioneered by specialists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the early 1970s, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were threatened with closure in light of revelations that they had been created and funded by the CIA. After due investigation by a Congressional commission, they were given a new independent status and allowed to continue broadcasting, but ordered to merge as RFE/RL in 1976.

ARD had maintained offices in London and Munich as well as Paris throughout the 1970s, but in 1980 the three offices were consolidated in Paris, and the department was renamed Soviet Area Audience and Opinion Research (SAAOR).

Why a History of Audience Research at Radio Liberty

Dr. Max Ralis, who had run audience research operations since 1956, retired in 1981, and I took over as the head of SAAOR. Our activities expanded rapidly throughout the 1980s as new, talented staff members were brought in.

The Third Movement — 1980-1985 (sforzando) describes how we invested in new interviewing areas in Europe and Asia, provided more frequent and more reliable audience estimates, computerized the office, and branched out into attitudinal research. By now we were in the forefront of media and opinion research into the Soviet Union. No other Western organization could provide comparable data. We were able to gauge Soviet views on such topics as the downing of a Korean Airlines airliner by a Soviet fighter, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, while our audience estimates had become the “industry standard” for the major Western broadcasters to the USSR.

The Third Movement gives a detailed account of the procedural methods used to carry out research into the “denied” area that was the USSR: How the interviewers made contact with Soviet travelers in Western capitals, how they won their confidence, how they steered the conversation round to a discussion of Western radio listening. From the start of the project in 1970 it had been understood that interview questionnaires could never be shown to the Soviet respondents both for fear of alarming them and calling the attention of others, especially group leaders, to the fact that a formal interview was taking place. Information on radio listening was acquired in the course of an informal but highly structured conversation. Methodological safeguards were installed at every step of the way to avoid data corruption.

The Fourth Movement — 1986-1990 (fuocoso) covers the period of glasnost and perestroika, when the Soviet Union began to open up. By the end of the decade SAAOR was able to administer questionnaires openly to Soviet travelers in the West and in Eastern Europe as well. Not long afterwards we began in-country interviewing. After twenty years of informal interviews, we were finally able to use conventional Western survey research interviewing methods! We made great strides in all areas of our research. We began to conduct focus groups on RL programming, first with Soviet emigrants, then with Soviet travelers, and finally with Soviet citizens in their own country. In September 1990 I made my first ever trip to the USSR to observe focus groups in Moscow, and coordinate preliminary survey work in Moscow and Kyiv. The end of 1990 saw a sea change in our operations when RFE/RL inaugurated a Research Institute on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. SAAOR was to be an integral part of this, and it required us to move back to Munich from Paris. From now on I was the head of

INTRODUCTION both the Soviet and the Eastern European audience research departments, which were fused into a new unit called Media and Opinion Research (MOR).

The Fifth Movement — 1991-1994 (vittorioso, capriccioso, lamentoso) is set in the period immediately before and after the dissolution of the USSR. 1991 was a tumultuous year. In March our research operation was attacked on Soviet television, in August hardliners attempted a putsch to oust Gorbachev, in September Yeltsin invited RFE/RL to open a bureau in Moscow, and in December, in a televised address to the nation, Gorbachev declared the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics defunct. More drama erupted in October 1993 when government troops stormed the parliament building (the White House). MOR had lost no time in developing a network of survey research institutes throughout the broadcast area, and we were able to show how RL broadcasts had kept the Russian public informed throughout the upheavals.

With the collapse of the Soviet system, and the former Soviet Union taking its first steps on the rocky road to democracy, it seemed advisable to know how members of the societal elite were approaching the transition. We inaugurated a series of studies on Russian “decision makers.” The results made it plain that Western radio, and RL in particular, was playing an important role in informing and influencing the movers and shakers in the new Russian society. In a further attempt to understand how the Soviet people were dealing with their changed political circumstances, we signed a partnership agreement with the Swiss-based International Research Institute on Social Change (RISC), and took our first step in socio-graphics. Our partnership with RISC allowed us to begin mapping the structure of public opinion and process of change in the country as a whole.

This would have been a major step forward, but sadly it was ended before it could deliver its full potential. RFE/RL fell victim to the “peace dividend” sought by the US government at the end of the Cold War, and its budget was reduced by almost two-thirds. The Radio survived this process by moving to Prague in a greatly scaled-down structure, but there were no longer sufficient funds for the RFE/RL Research Institute. The Institute was closed at the end of 1994, and the Radios moved to Prague in 1995. Some MOR staffers were relocated to Washington and this new unit continued under the name of InterMedia for several years, but was unable to undertake more than basic audience research work for RFE/RL. And thus our effort to understand public opinion in the former Soviet Union came to a premature end.

The final section of this book, the Coda, explains how the lessons learned from SAAOR’s work are still relevant thirty years later, in a world threatened by

Why a History of Audience Research at Radio Liberty authoritarianism and cyberwarfare, and concludes with a proposal as to how the US international media program might be strengthened to protect and promote democracy. With Russia closing down all independent media in an attempt to cut off Russian society from information on the Ukraine war of 2022, this is now of vital importance. An Afterword will examine the “information war” surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Appendices to the text provide the charts and tables referred to in the narrative, as well as vignettes of some of the distinctly unusual personalities with whom SA AOR had the privilege to work, and a technical exposition of the MIT computer simulation model. Certain footnotes are referenced with HIA or REP. HIA stands for Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University where the RFE/RL corporate records are kept. REP stands for my personal papers which will eventually be archived in the RFE/RL corporate records at the Hoover Institution as well.

PRELUDE

My Road to Radio Liberty

1953-1965 amabile

LIVING IN HISTORY

Radio Liberty is an American radio station, founded in 1953, that broadcast to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and is still active on digital media, radio, and TV in the Russian Federation, most of the ex-Soviet republics, and Afghanistan. During the Cold War, its mission was to provide uncensored information to a closed society where freedom of information was non-existent.

I worked for Radio Liberty from 1965 to 2006, a period of over forty years that spanned what the Chinese would call “interesting times,” beginning in the Brezhnev era in early 1965 and ending during Putin’s second presidential term in 2006. All but one of those years were spent in Europe, and nearly all of them were devoted to audience research. A working life spent studying international broadcasting to a closed society may seem like an unusual career arc for a boy from outstate Minnesota with no direct ties to Russia, but my choice was influenced by my early years.

As an adolescent, I dreamt naively of what I thought of as “living in History’—as opposed to living in some provincial backwater somewhere. My improbable dreams were encouraged by my mother June (a big-city girl) and my grandmother Lempi (who in her heart never left her native New England), and shaped by the overseas wartime experiences of my father Russell (US Army in the Pacific) and my uncle Eugene (US Naval Intelligence in Europe). My dreams came true, but in ways I could never have imagined at the time. I certainly didn’t expect to live in history to quite the extent that I did.

Although I had a typical Midwestern boyhood (school athletics, hunting, fishing, dating, summers at the lake cabin), I did not come from a typical Mid-

PRELUDE : amabile western family. My grandfather, Carl A. Parta, had been born on the Finnish- Swedish border (as Karl A. Mustaparta) and emigrated to the US as a child around 1890. He became the publisher of what grew into the most widely circulated Finnish-language newspaper in North America. Originally the Minnesotan Uutiset (Minnesota News), it became the Amerikan Uutiset as its circulation eventually expanded to cover the whole country.

As a young man, Carl had worked for a series of left-wing Finnish-language newspapers in Canada, the West Coast, and the Eastern US, but during the Depression of the 1930s he decided it was time to move on from left-wing Finnish-American politics in New England. A few years before I was born in 1940, the family relocated from Massachusetts to Minnesota. On arriving in Minnesota, Carl co-founded a newspaper which was politically independent. This was unusual at a time when most Finnish-language newspapers in the US were sponsored by either political or religious organizations. Its title used the neutral word “News” (Uutiset) eschewing the militant “Forward” (Eteenpäin) used by his former newspaper in Worcester. Given Carl’s background, we were inevitably a political family, though we were not directly engaged. Small town life didn’t allow for that, especially in the newspaper business in the 1950s. Still, political discussions were common in our household.

Thanks to Carl’s ties with the wider North American Finnish-language community, he was on the State Department’s visiting list for Finnish dignitaries, including government officials and cultural figures, who came to the US after the war. My grandparents lived across the street from us, and I was often present when they hosted these visitors from Finland (my grandmother set a great table’). I remember lying on the floor in the evenings by the crackling fireplace attentively taking in their painful but fascinating stories of the Finnish-Russian winter war of 1939-40, and Finland’s delicate post-war relations with the Soviet Union. I was still a young boy, but these tales aroused in me a keen interest in Russia, the Soviet Union, and the nascent Cold War. I listened eagerly to the news on the radio, and combed the newspapers for anything that had to do with international politics and the USSR. I followed with trepidation the ebb and flow of the American front lines across the Korean peninsula during the Korean War. At the same time, I learned the printing and newspaper business from the ground up by working in the family business after school and on weekends. But my sights were set beyond the limits of my rural neighborhood, and I was mentally preparing myself for the day when I would step on to a larger stage.

Io

My Road to Radio Liberty

My name already reflected that wider political world. I was christened Russell Eugene, a far cry from names such as Heikki and Toivo that were customarily given in Finnish-American families at that time. Russell is my father’s name, and Eugene is my uncle’s. My father was born in August 1918, at a time when the English philosopher Bertrand Russell was leading the international peace campaign during the last year of World War I. My uncle was born in 1912, the year that the socialist Eugene V. Debs stood for US President.

Both these names, of course, had been chosen by Carl and Lempi. Later in life, my grandfather abandoned the idealistic ethnic left-wing politics of his youth and became a full-fledged American patriot who supported Roosevelt’s New Deal, served as Chairman of the County Military Draft Board during World War II, and headed the Minnesota State Committee for Finnish relief after the Winter War of 1940. Despite this, I recall a lot of urgent whispered conversations among the adults in the family during the McCarthy “red scare” period of the early 1950s, when all past left-wing political activity was grounds for suspicion, whatever your current situation and politics might be. Because of McCarthy, ideological zealotry of any stripe has always made me uncomfortable. I suppose my work for Radio Liberty could be branded “anti-communist,” but I always took care to steer clear of political fanaticism. I preferred to see myself as working to advance the cause of democracy and human rights, although I was certainly aware of the political strategies involved.

Carl died in 1955, and my father, Russell O. Parta, who had joined the family publishing and printing business on his return from World War II, carried on publishing the Finnish newspaper, along with several local English-language newspapers. Like Carl, my father was on the State Department’s Finnish visitor destination list. He was even decorated by the Finnish government for his contribution to US-Finland relations. This proved helpful to me in later years.

After graduating from high school in 1958, I began to study Russian at St. Olaf College, a highly regarded liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota. My teacher, Astrid Hartmanis Ivask, was a Latvian refugee whose father had been a general in the Latvian Army in 1940, when the country was forcibly annexed by the USSR. I took every course dealing with Russia that St. Olaf offered, and supplemented it during my junior year with course work on Soviet foreign policy in the American University’s Washington Semester program. This was followed by a summer at Harvard doing course work on the sociology of the USSR and attending lectures on political philosophy from the eminent American critic of Marxism, Sidney Hook. But what influenced me the most that summer was a