Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

For those who remember listening to the radio in the 1930s this book will prove interesting and informational. Although the author does not deal with the technological development of the radio, he does present the media's impact on American society by describing the work of such colorful early radio news commentators as Boake Carter, H. V. Kaltenborn, Raymond Gram Swing, Elmer Davis, Edward R. Murrow, and Fulton Lewis, Jr. A biographical sketch is given of each commentator with a description of his style of speech as well as his opinions during the years of the Great Depression and the United States entry into World War II. Most readers will be struck by the candor of these commentators in a day when they were not afraid to express their personal views on all events of the day. For example, Boake Carter once criticized Franklin D. Roosevelt by saying his voice was the voice of Jacob but his hands were the hands of Esau. The Roosevelt crowd had debauched the

News for Everyman: Radio and Foreign Affairs in Thirties America

and choices of his father, a Soviet state security double agent who was exposed by Aldrich Ames and later executed. Satter accepts at face value the statements of the spy’s Central Intelligence Agency handlers, who unsurprisingly—and not disinterestedly— portray him as a heroic opponent of the Soviet regime. Leaving aside the absence of any evidence about Poleshchuk’s motives, this story does not really reveal any unique Soviet depravity if we bear in mind that all governments in the world deal harshly with those who spy against them. Curiously, Satter overlooks several important developments of recent years. On 30 October 2009, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev released a video blog bluntly denouncing the killing of millions of innocent people at Stalin’s behest and rebuking those who would justify this horror in the name of goals of the state. In July 2010 Sergei Karaganov, an inouential political commentator with ties to the Kremlin, published an article calling for a fuller recognition of the scope of Stalin’s murderous acts and describing Russia as “strewn with Katyns.” His allusion to Katyn followed several ceremonies commemorating the massacre with joint participation by Russian and Polish ofacials, both before and after the shocking death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his entourage in a plane crash on 10 April 2010. Perhaps Satter chose not to discuss these events because they suggest the Russian government’s position toward acknowledging Soviet-era crimes is more complicated than he maintains. Satter also ignores important scholarship relevant to the Russian case. Recent studies of Stalin’s crimes, the Gulag, and Russians’ recollections of the Soviet period by Norman Naimark, Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum, Adam Hochschild, Alexei Miller, and Thomas Sherlock receive no mention. Nor does the growing interdisciplinary literature on “historical memory,” which demonstrates that Russia is hardly the only country struggling with how to confront shameful elements of its recent past and that connections between views of history and political developments in the present are complex, controversial, and difacult to untangle. Bold, hyperbolic claims that “the failure to acknowledge and atone for the mass crimes of Communism has contributed to a situation in which the average Russian is as powerless before the apparatus of the state as was a citizen of the Soviet Union” (p. 300) may make for good sound bites, but they do not provide insight.

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_cold_war_studies/v015/15.1.haas.pdf

Radio Free Europe's "Crusade for Freedom": Rallying Americans behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950-1960 by Richard H. Cummings (review)

Besides other public intellectuals, no less a person than Bertolt Brecht was very enthusiastic about wireless broadcasting. In his 1932 speech ‘Radio as an Apparatus of Communication’, he considere...

Hedwig Wagner

Papers

Radio Beyond Boundaries: An Introduction