Over the past decade, a “sonic turn” in the humanities has fueled a renewed interest in the social and political history of radio broadcasting. Rosamund Johnston’s Red Tape explores the politics of broadcasting in socialist Czechoslovakia from the end of World War II through the Prague Spring, drawing on insights from the interdisciplinary field of sound studies to reconsider the evolving relationship between Czech state officials, radio reporters, and ordinary listeners. Where the first Anglophone histories of broadcasting in Central and Eastern Europe tended to be written from a bipolar Cold War perspective, focusing principally on the efforts of Western broadcasters to reach listeners behind the “Iron Curtain,” Johnston draws on underexploited Czech archives and an impressive number of oral histories to analyze journalists’ and listeners’ attitudes toward radio. The result is an engaging and nuanced history that invites readers to reconsider the nature of propaganda and Stalinism itself.

Johnston adopts an expansive definition of radio as an “assembly of technology, content, and listening practices which came to be associated with a particular set of voices in postwar Czechoslovakia” (11). Contemporary Western observers often imagined socialist radio as the tool of a repressive state used to “frighten and demoralize listeners,” but Johnston views radio instead as a “site of negotiation between Communist officials, a cadre of experts empowered to work with sound (chief among them broadcast journalists) and audiences” (11). While state authorities sometimes tasked journalists with promoting certain policies, this did not prevent radio reporters and listeners alike from developing a nuanced sense of what constituted “professional” journalism versus “propaganda.” Both radio journalists and their audiences enjoyed more autonomy than might be expected, revealing that the “repertoire for political action in a socialist state was so much richer than a Communist/anti-Communist binary,” even amid political repression (9). The thematic and loosely chronological chapters of Red Tape explore these nuances through specific episodes in postwar Czechoslovak broadcasting, the careers of individual radio reporters, and the emergence of distinctive broadcast genres.

In the war’s aftermath, Communist radio reporters exploited the narrative of a “radio revolution”—that Czechs had fought to recapture the airwaves from Nazi control during the liberation of Prague—to claim Nazi radio infrastructure as Czechoslovakia’s own and embed their “institution into the foundational myth of the postwar Czechoslovak state” (23). The Communist politicians who dominated the government ministries overseeing radio broadcasting selected radio staff with leftist sympathies. These staffers in turn set out to “make the case for Communism on their own terms and tailored to local conditions” as a precondition to establishing legitimacy among radio listeners. State radio’s support for communism thus predated the arrival of Soviet advisors, who took their place at Czechoslovak state radio after the Communist takeover of 1952.

Even then, radio journalists exercised considerable freedom in crafting broadcasts, as evidenced in Johnston’s discussion of the classic Stalinist radio genre—the 1952 and 1954 show trials of Milada Horáková and Rudolf Slánsky. Reading the trial transcripts against existing radio recordings and interviews with radio staff, Johnston offers a reinterpretation of these well-studied events. Where previous scholars have interpreted the “increasingly audible curation of these trials” (56) as evidence of growing state media censorship, Johnston suggests the trial broadcasts were both censored and “subject to editing processes that had little to do with protecting state secrecy” (64). The introduction of magnetic tape recording into broadcasting contributed to the rehearsed sound of the show trials by allowing announcers to punctuate recordings with commentary, a strategy intended to enhance audiences’ listening experiences. Far from creating a “single, orthodox interpretation of proceedings,” Johnston argues, the trial broadcasts instead revealed the diversity of “listening attitudes, techniques, and approaches which continued to exist … during Czechoslovak Stalinism” (86).

In the second half of the book, Johnston highlights the limits of state control over the airwaves by examining Czech and Slovak audiences’ engagement with foreign stations and the surprising freedom enjoyed by some journalists to craft their own stories and forge relationships with audiences. During de-Stalinization, émigré press conferences became a central feature of both Radio Free Europe and Czechoslovak broadcasting. While Radio Free Europe used interviews with defectors to highlight communism’s abuses, Czech and Slovak radio reporters interviewed returning émigrés to showcase the “abysmal conditions and moral bankruptcy of the West” (129). The decision made by Czechoslovak broadcasting to use press conferences—a model first developed in the West—proved disillusioning for some listeners, who questioned which stations were telling them the truth. “Contradictory attitudes attached themselves to broadcasts emanating from both sides of the Iron Curtain,” Johnston argues, “suggesting that listeners’ own party-political convictions were not always the primary lens through which they evaluated (and rejected) content” (143). Indeed, while Soviet officials attempted to jam Radio Free Europe, Czech and Slovak listeners, particularly in the border regions, regularly tuned into Austrian and West German radio stations, which they valued for their light music and human-interest programs. Further complicating the East–West binary through which Cold War era broadcasting has so frequently been understood, Red Tape includes two fascinating chapters that explore Czech radio reporters’ broadcasts from the African continent. In the case of Vera Šťovíčkova, a foreign correspondent working in Guinea, one of Czechoslovakia’s leading trading partners, discussions about distant peoples and places offered her a subtle way to critique domestic politics while escaping censors.

Red Tape is an elegantly written account of the transformation of radio broadcasting in socialist Czechoslovakia. While building upon recent studies of Cold War radio that have highlighted listeners’ agency, Johnston’s nuanced account demonstrates how shifts in radio technology (from magnetic tape to the transistor), professional journalistic standards, and listening practices shaped the meanings Czechoslovak listeners assigned to broadcasting. Historians of broadcasting and socialist media will find much to interest them in this book, particularly Johnston’s interviews with radio staffers and her careful reinterpretations of socialist broadcast genres. At the same time, Red Tape shows the importance of considering the ways pre-World War II social and cultural norms persisted during state socialism, shaping the reactions of listeners to the sounds emerging from their radio loudspeakers.