Sparks of Liberty: An Insider's Memoir of Radio Liberty

by Gene Sosin

Release Date: April, 1999

Edition: Hardcover

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A Fascinating Account of Winning the Cold War

Anyone who is interested in the history of international media and how the Cold War was won by the West should read this book--it was extremely well-written, informative and engaging. The author, a former Radio Liberty programming executive and PhD in Russian from Columbia, has put together a fascinating account of the mission of Radio Liberty (RL) from its beginning broadcast at the time of Stalin's death in 1953 to its joining force with Radio Free Europe (RFE) in 1976 as RFE/RL. The book ends with RFE/RL's current status at the end of the 1990s. It was very interesting to read this account from a Western viewpoint of how the emigre Russian intelligentsia connected with the intelligentsia and average citizen in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In many ways this account is a heroic but not overly aggrandized portrait of how the idea of freedom of speech rent the Iron Curtain by means of radio broadcasts--it could have been very pro-Western and propagandistic in outlook but wasn't, thank goodness. The book seems fairly balanced in that it also discusses internal problems the Radio staff had over a period of time--these conflicts were in effect microcosms of the ethnic tensions that existed within the Soviet Union. I found it also to be a case study on international broadcasting and how the U.S. government has decided to fund it in the past and the present. After finishing this, I wanted to read more books about the history of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union and the history of Western broadcasting.