At one of the first jazz concerts in Moscow after the Soviet Union collapsed, a buzz swept through the packed hall. “Willis Conover is here!” people said. I had never heard of him, but jazz lovers in the Soviet Union grew up on the “Jazz Hour” program on VOA, which Mr. Conover hosted from 1955 until his death in 1996. At its peak, the program was listened to by up to 30 million people. That’s soft power plus.
Most important was news, which was the central mission of all the Western stations. While at college, I was an intern one summer on the Radio Liberty news desk, and the strict guiding rule was objectivity. The people behind the Iron Curtain who risked tuning in to a foreign broadcast, I was told, were allergic to propaganda, and would not take a big risk to get more of it.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, the radios were allowed to open bureaus inside Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere, and although their mission was now different, listeners continued to tune in for news they had learned to trust. Finally forced out of Russia as President Vladimir Putin tightened his authoritarian controls, the stations once again reverted to serving as an outside source of information, especially about Ukraine.
Not surprisingly, Russia and China rejoiced at the news from Washington. “This is an awesome decision by Trump,” declared Margarita Simonyan, editor of Russia’s huge state-controlled international propaganda network, RT. “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself.” China’s Global Times, which has long chafed over reporting on VOA, gloated that the station had now been “discarded like a dirty rag.”
Russians who had relied on Radio Liberty, meanwhile, mourned. Editors of Novaya Gazeta Europe, successors to a newspaper banned in Russia, wrote on their site that their work “will become more difficult without Radio Liberty, and many Russians will lose access to important information about what is happening in their country.”
