Rosamund Johnston’s impressive study offers a number of important correctives to received wisdom on communist media systems. Writing of a period that includes the darkest years of postwar Stalinism as well as the reformist era of the 1960s, she insists that reporters on Czechoslovak Radio were “so much more than stooges, and their listeners were so much more than dupes” (228). She reminds us that the production of politically acceptable messages was not something that could be achieved by party diktat. It required the dedicated and largely uncynical efforts of “invested elites” (2) whose credo was “professionalism” more than Marxism. Such professional expertise was at a particular premium in the cutting-edge media of communication—which, in the 1940s and 50s, meant radio above all else. In Czechoslovakia after World War II, radio reporters could be seen as admirable, even glamorous. It is no accident that broadcasting looms large in collective memory of the historical moments that frame Johnston’s book: according to a carefully cultivated myth of the liberation from Nazism, the population of Prague was spurred to rise up in May 1945 by what it heard over the airwaves, while the headquarters of Czechoslovak Radio were the scene of entirely non-apocryphal fighting during the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968. In both cases, radio acquired a “heroic” aura.
Important for understanding the kudos of radio in the postwar era is the fact that the medium was undergoing dynamic development during these years. The most seminal change was the shift from live to largely prerecorded programming thanks to the increased use of magnetic tape. This in turn brought changes in style and genre. Radio producers and reporters could now aim for more polished performance without the mumbles and background noise that had previously been routine. They also had a more pronounced editorial role, as tape could be cut and pasted to create ingenious new segues and juxtapositions. From the examples Johnston presents, it seems that radio professionals under these technologically enhanced new conditions could aspire to greater authorial agency and charisma.
Another dimension of postwar radio reporters’ personas was their imagined relationship to the listener. Naturally, the content of broadcasting under communism was not audience-led in the way of commercial radio stations in western Europe or the United States. But radio reporters cultivated a more intimate rhetoric and conceived their broadcasts as a form of “friendly exchange” (231) with the listener. With evidence from the postbag of Czechoslovak Radio, Johnston argues convincingly that the more successful reporters of the postwar era did manage to gain the trust, admiration, and even affection of many listeners. But she also draws attention to ways in which listeners could be critical, skeptical, or creative receivers of the messages that were broadcast in their direction. Like other recent historians of Cold War media, she takes issue with self-congratulatory western accounts of the impact of Radio Free Europe in fostering “resistance” among east Europeans to their communist regimes.
From its origins in the interwar period, radio was quintessentially an international, border-crossing medium. Johnston rightly dwells on this dimension of the story but casts it in an unexpected light. She points out that Radio Vienna, not Radio Free Europe, was the most popular foreign station in Cold War Czechoslovakia. Despite the anti-German sentiment of the 1940s, many people were willing in the following two decades to remember their German—or to learn the language afresh—in order to tune into the light entertainment offerings just over the border. Further afield, Johnston shows us that the imagination of Czechoslovak listeners extended as far as Africa. Feeding off the state’s economic ambitions, the young reporters Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund became Stalin-era radio celebrities, acting both as intrepid explorers and travelling salesmen for Czechoslovak industry; they were fixtures in the schedule, putting out more than 700 broadcasts from a total of 48 countries between 1947 and 1952. These “boyified men” who embodied a “fame-through-hard-work narrative” (99–100) attracted an avid following, much of it young and female. Although their actual voices were largely absent from the airwaves (their reports were read out by announcers back in Prague), they took great care over “crafting their audio personas” (103). In a later chapter, Johnston analyzes the complementary case of Věra Šťovíčková, who as a correspondent based in Guinea in the early 1960s offered listeners a much more ethnographically embedded account of the region, even if it was still filtered through the prism of communist developmentalism. In the 1960s, Czechoslovak Radio’s foreign correspondents were its highest-status group; not coincidentally, they were also at the forefront of the outspoken broadcasting that briefly became possible in 1968.
Red Tape gets us closer to an insider perspective than perhaps ever before in the historiography of broadcasting in communist eastern Europe; the book bears comparison on this score with even the more sophisticated studies of less restricted western media systems. A lot of the credit for this goes to Johnston’s subtle and dedicated work with a wide range of sources: media archives, letters, memoirs, and interviews. It would also appear that Czechoslovakia offers an unusually rewarding object for investigation. The country was more technologically proficient than any other in the region, less damaged by the war, and more densely “radiofied.” This prominence meant that radio left a larger trace in collective memory, which in turn has led to the creation and curation of a greater number of sources.
There is, then, a great deal to admire in Red Tape. But like any historian, and like the radio reporters whose work she reconstructs, Johnston makes editorial decisions that may beg follow-up questions. In a sense, she offers us the “edited highlights” of postwar Czechoslovak radio. Her chapters are largely structured by genre, and the genres in question are those that made a powerful or innovative impression: show trials, African travelogues, press conferences of returning emigres, German-speaking light entertainment, and the work of foreign correspondents. We learn in passing that “propaganda” was considered low-status “dogsbody” work by radio professionals, but there was presumably not a small amount of it on Czechoslovak Radio. One also presumes that here, as elsewhere, music constituted the lion’s share of the schedule, but Johnston offers no sustained reflections on non-verbal aspects of broadcasting. The reader does not come away from Red Tape with an entirely clear sense of what the schedule looked like at different moments of the postwar era or what constituted “mainstream” Czechoslovak broadcasting.
Another source of potential quibbles is the political dimension of Johnston’s story, along with the associated perennial question of the relationship between form and content. Johnston is surely right to take issue with triumphalist western accounts of Cold War media and to argue that radio professionals were far from being passive implementers of party directives. But it is perhaps a step too far to present the broadcasts of the show trials of 1950–52 as Czechoslovak Radio “banking on a ‘winning’ format it had honed and popularized” in the trials of Nazis in 1945–46 (48) or as a reflection of the emerging 1950s norms of smooth, prescripted speech and “pure” sound (74–75). If background noise was taken out, and if parts of the proceedings were not aired, that was not exactly an aesthetic or formal decision. It was surely far more about creating a monologic voice of authority and denying the accused a platform. If radio producers were not micromanaged by the party authorities or the security services, that is not because they were engaged in a “negotiation” (66), but because it was clear enough what was required of them in the context of judicial murder and verbal lynching. Johnston points out that many radio staff had cordial, even warm relations with their in-house censors, and that much of their work raised no hackles with the authorities. But self-censorship in conditions of state violence is generally much more effective and pernicious than the formal operations of a censorship apparatus. Some of the memoir and interview sources may be more problematic than meets the eye: radio professionals, like anyone else complicit in state violence, needed to find ways to rationalize what had happened.
None of this changes the fact that Red Tape is a substantial achievement and an important addition to the literature. It usefully defamiliarizes the history of communist media and should contribute to debates both within the field of east European media history and beyond it. Readers should take note of Johnston’s perceptive closing observation: the story of Czechoslovak Radio reminds us that all media, however centralized and directed “from above,” depend on their social context and need to cultivate a relationship with the audience to achieve impact. Despite the manifold differences between the two cases, postwar communist media can help us to understand how illiberal voices and “fake” news gain the trust of listeners in our own times.
