The voice that was meant to conquer the airwaves: How Radio Prague spread communist propaganda (4)
During the communist era Radio Prague functioned as a highly effective Cold War propaganda tool, tailoring communist messaging to audiences around the world, while operating under strict censorship and centralized control. Yet amid the ideological campaigns and bureaucratic machinery, occasional human moments and the haunting sound of a Slovak fujara closing the day's broadcast offered rare glimpses of authenticity behind the propaganda.
The crackle of radio waves, tuning to the right frequency, and a familiar voice from afar speaking to listeners somewhere across the ocean. At a time when the world was divided by the Iron Curtain, it was not only ordinary news from home that was broadcast from Prague studios over the air. Radio waves became a sophisticated weapon in the ideological war. Although Czech Radio’s international service was ostensibly meant to inform the world about developments in Czechoslovakia, its principal hidden—and often explicit—mission was singular: to systematically spread the ideas of communism and convince the planet of the superiority of socialism. It should be added that, from a professional standpoint, the station carried out this gigantic propaganda task with remarkable flexibility and success.
A double face for America and Africa’s awakening
Prague adopted an exceptionally sophisticated approach toward the United States, where, paradoxically, it directed two different broadcasts. While moderate programs drew on nostalgia and appealed to Czech and Slovak Americans with the greeting “Dear compatriots, your old homeland is calling you,” the broader American audience was targeted with sharp propaganda. The broadcasts did not hesitate to exploit issues such as nuclear testing, describing it as a huge business from which American shareholders reaped enormous dividends. The height of emotional manipulation came in a program marking the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, in which chilling voices warned American mothers that humanity no longer measured the lines of life on the palm of the hand, but rather the deadly Strontium-90 in the bones of future generations.
As colonial empires began to collapse at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, the attention of Prague’s strategists shifted toward Africa. The aim was to draw newly independent states into the socialist camp. Broadcasts in English, French, and Swahili began to fill the airwaves. Although the official rhetoric thundered about supporting the struggle against imperialism and grandly addressed African listeners as “the voice of friendship from Prague,” the day-to-day reality in the newsroom was often a matter of exhausting routine.
Former editor of the French-language service Alena Gebertová recalls the work of the time without illusions: “All of it came from the central authorities. They were mandatory, dry reports saying that one First Secretary had departed and another had arrived.” Reflecting on what listeners on the African savannahs might have found engaging in such sterile content, Gebertová adds that, in the political climate of the era, the mere fact that the unknown Central European country speaking to them was communist undoubtedly played an important role.
Into the heart of dictatorships from secret villas
Yet Czechoslovak radio waves also penetrated far more dangerous territory—directly into the heart of countries gripped by right-wing dictatorships. In General Franco’s fascist Spain, Radio Prague’s reports on miners’ strikes became highly sought-after material subject to the strictest censorship. “If someone was caught listening to Radio Prague in Spanish back then, things got bad very quickly,” recalls Antonio Casado, a member of the Spanish-language editorial team. According to him, the regime immediately branded such listening as incitement to subvert the state.
A similarly significant role was played by the newsroom broadcasting to Pinochet’s Chile. Chilean journalists in exile working in Prague hosted a program called Chile Will Triumph, obtaining exclusive information from their homeland through teleprinters supplied by the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina.
An even more clandestine, almost espionage-like dimension characterized the broadcast known as Rome 2, which from 1950 onward pretended to be transmitting directly from Italy. Researcher Ulrico Bovo reveals the secret of those involved: “They were Italian partisans who had legal troubles back home. Here they received false documents, new identities, and broadcast from concealed apartments in Prague.” The illusion of a free local radio station was so convincing that during violent street demonstrations in Italy, people called the Prague newsroom directly from public phone booths to advise fellow protesters live on air about routes of escape from police cordons.
Czechoslovakia responded with similar speed in 1981, when it rapidly launched broadcasts aimed at Poland, then shaken by the Solidarity trade union movement, with the stated goal of providing “a personal example of the achievements of real socialism.”
Folders, stamps, and the melancholic sound of the fujara
This global propaganda colossus, however, could not have produced a single report without a flawlessly lubricated censorship machine. Editors themselves had virtually no freedom; they merely translated texts issued by the central newsroom. Everything had to pass through an official censorship apparatus. Typed pages were placed into protective folders affectionately nicknamed “shirts,” and the editor would carry them to the respective glass partition. Only when a vigilant censor stamped the folder with an official seal could the words be sent into the airwaves.
Renowned journalist Pavla Jazairiová looks back on her years in the African editorial department with sober hindsight. She acknowledges that it was pure propaganda, yet even there occasional openings for ordinary human warmth could be found. “A Senegalese listener once wrote to us that Christmas is celebrated in palaces and huts alike. And imagine—it got through,” she recalls with a mischievous smile.
The absurdity of the entire approval and censorship apparatus reached a tragicomic climax during the August invasion of 1968. Karel Wichs describes the chilling moment when the besieged radio building came under fire while the management desperately tried to maintain the appearance of normal operations. “The director calmly told us that they were only using blank cartridges. And at that exact moment, the ceiling collapsed on top of us,” Wichs recounts, describing the bizarre final act in the illusion of controlled airwaves.
Yet whether those carefully censored folders were destined for left-wing intellectuals in Chile, miners in Andalusia, or farmers in the American Midwest, Radio Prague’s broadcasts always contained one unique and warm element. As the forceful political slogans faded away and the work shift neared its end, Slovak editor Jožka Rybár would take the microphone. With characteristic grace, he would set aside all prescribed directives and pick up a traditional wooden fujara. Its melancholy yet profoundly human sound would travel out into the world, a fleeting expression of pure beauty marking the end of each day beneath the vast ideological machinery of communist propaganda.
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