Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the USSR During the Cold War: Soviet Moldavia in the Radio Liberty Broadcast Programs

   Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the USSR During the Cold War: Soviet Moldavia in the Radio Liberty Broadcast Programs
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During the Cold War, the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was in a rather peculiar situation because of its geographic position and special relationship with the USSR and Romania in which conflict, confrontation and cooperation were present. The Communist regime and its institutions developed a real “fighting campaign” against Western broadcasts (Voice of America, RFE/RL, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio France, Radio Vaticana, etc.). However, the citizens of Moldova used the opportunity to listen to these broadcasts as an alternative source of information. In this context, it is important to cross-check the RFE/RL files with the publications of the Soviet newspapers that published hundreds of articles against RFE/RL. The RFE/RL documents serve a bilateral role, providing insight related to the perception of life under, and resistance to, the totalitarian regimes, as well as a platform for the dissemination of critical views on the communist reality. Such analysis can shed light on the impact of Cold War broadcasting on totalitarian societies in general, and on Soviet society in particular.

Sergiu Musteata is a Professor in the Faculty of History and Geography at the Ion Creangă State Pedagogical University of Moldova. He holds his Ph.D. in history from Al.I. Cuza University, Iași, Romania (1999). Musteata is a former Fulbright research fellow at the University of Maryland, an OSI scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, Stanford University, and the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. He was a DAAD and Humboldt Foundation fellow and visiting professor at Frankfurt am Main, Bonn, Freiburg im Breisgau, Braunschweig universities. In 2017 he was hosted by Uppsala University Campus Gotland as a senior scientist of the Swedish Institute’s Visby Programme in 2016. He is the author of 8 monographs, more than 300 scientific publications, editor of over 20 books, and editor of two journals. His major academic interests are history of Eastern Europe, cultural heritage preservation and textbooks analysis.