Authors
Ekaterina Kamenskaya1; 1 University of Manchester, UK Discussion
For Soviet citizens, Western broadcasting was one of the few ways to gain insight into alternative perspectives, including on events within the USSR. During the Khrushchev thaw, attitudes towards listening to foreign ‘voices’ softened. Jamming of the BBC and the Voice of America was stopped, and listening to Western radio stations was no longer legally punishable. As a result, this information channel became more accessible, and international crises provided an additional incentive to switch to foreign waves. The socialist system experienced a series of severe conflicts in the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s, including the Czechoslovak crisis of 1968 and the Sino-Soviet split. The analysis of official information campaigns and their public perception shows that Soviet media covered these events incompletely, thereby increasing audience interest in Western broadcasting. The paper aims to examine the main strategies of Soviet leadership for fighting Western broadcasting audiences. On the one hand, the authorities used traditional restrictive measures such as enhanced jamming, making shortwave receivers difficult to buy, etc. On the other hand, they intensified persuasion mechanisms through ‘counterpropaganda activity’. During this time, the number of propaganda materials, press publications and books criticising the BBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle and RFE/RL grew dramatically. Soviet propaganda paid special attention to constructing a negative image of the Western broadcasting audience. The analysis of Soviet mass newspapers and magazines reveals that the main aim of the propaganda campaign was to create a ‘weak’ image, that would be repulsive and, at best, elicit pity. Newspapers and magazines published satirical notes, feuilletons and caricatures ridiculing the practice of referring to Western broadcasting as an authoritative source. The typical Soviet listener of Western radio stations was presented as weak-willed and poorly educated, often without a normal job or profession, and therefore unable to be a role model. 
