Fighting Communism with words: Petr Brod about his days at RFE/RL

Legendary journalist Petr Brod remembers working fo Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich and Prague at times, when it often seemed that Communism is here to stay. 

The US federal government has announced it will end its funding of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Why is that important? Well, for anyone interested in Czech history, the answer is clear. RFE/RL, then headquartered in Munich in Germany, played a major role during the Cold War in providing independent information to countries behind the Iron Curtain—including Czechoslovakia. In the 1990s the station moved to Prague.

Petr Brod (second from right) worked in RFE during Velvet revolution in 1989|Photo: Josef Rakušan, Post Bellum

Petr Brod left Czechoslovakia as still a teenager in 1969, studied in Germany, Britain and the United States. He wento on to work for the BBC World Service and later for RFE/RL in Munich and in Prague. In this episode of Czechast, among other things, he described the internal dynamics at RFE/RL:

“In every department you had a tribe of, let's say, old emigres and a tribe of new emigres. You had tribes organized according to ethnic lines, according to religious lines, according to whether you were Jewish or not, according to which emigre wave you belonged to.”

We also talked about the fundamental difference between RFE/RL and the BBC World Service:

Petr Brod|Photo: Andrej Halada, Post Bellum

“The BBC was truly a world radio station, interested in anything that went on anywhere, if it was of significance transgressing the local borders.”

And why, despite his deep respect for the BBC, Petr felt drawn to RFE/RL:

“One of the reasons I wanted to go to Munich to serve in Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty was that I simply wanted to devote a larger part of my working time to events directly concerning the target areas, events in the communist area that would eventually, we hoped, lead to the demise of the communist regime.”

In this episode of Czechast, we reflect on the legacy of Radio Free Europe, its role in Czechoslovakia's path to freedom, and what it means when a radio station with such a powerful history faces an uncertain future.