Red Tape traces out the history of Czechoslovak radio from the Communist party’s post-World War II rise to power to the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. Johnston’s deeply researched and consistently revealing book is organized around two original and complementary arguments. First, during the Stalinist era, radio journalists “worked according to a professional creed of communicating and contextualizing the aims of those in power.” Following the death of Josef Stalin and Czechoslovak Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald in 1953, however, radio journalists became “ever-nosier intermediaries in the news that they relayed,” eventually laying the groundwork for and then participating in the Prague Spring (3). Second, Johnston, drawing primarily from letters sent to radio journalists, argues that listeners influenced the content of Czechoslovak radio broadcasts, and thus political discourse. In the process, she breaks free of Cold War binaries to explore how foreign correspondents, mostly based in Africa, as well the surprising popularity of German-language radio stations, informed Czechoslovak’s radio listening experiences.
Drawing upon audio tapes and other materials found in the Czech Radio Archive, as well as archival documents scattered throughout Central Europe and personal interviews, Red Tape moves chronologically, beginning with an opening chapter on the interwar origins of Czechoslovak radio and, in the western Czechoslovakia, the expansion of radio broadcasting and radio technology during the Nazi occupation. Radio continued to dominate the media landscape following the Communist party’s seizure of power in 1948. Magnetic tape allowed producers to cut and splice recordings, which led to more polished content, as exemplified in the radio broadcasts of the Milada Horáková and Rudolf Slánský show trials. Content excised from these broadcasts, she argues, were censored not just for propaganda effect, as has been traditionally argued, but also to meet listeners’ changing aesthetic expectations. In the post-Stalinist era, radio producers mimicked Radio Free Europe (RFE) content when curating press conferences featuring Czechoslovak emigres who had allegedly chosen to return to the country. (One of the first conferences featured Bohumil Laušman, whom secret service agents had kidnapped from Vienna.) In addition to foregrounding the moral bankruptcy of the West, the conferences foreshadowed key themes in post-Stalinist Czechoslovakia, such as clemency rather than vengeance and a “new understanding of history that could incorporate contingency and false paths alongside … the relentless course of Communist progress.” (132)
Listeners, Johnston shows, expressed a fair amount of skepticism about show trials and émigré press conferences. By contrast, great admiration, and teenage adoration, characterized listener mail for the adventurers Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund, who modified interwar conventions to create Stalinist-era travelogues. Their success relied on producing fascinating content within the strictures of censorship while forging personal connections with their listeners. In the 1960s, Věra Šťovíčková’s travelogues in Africa enjoyed a similar success, albeit in a different context. She and other foreign correspondents, Johnston argues, used their relative autonomy to push the limits of acceptable discourse in advance of the Prague Spring. A woman in a male-dominated profession, Šťovíčková’s negotiated traditional gender expectations while amplifying the voices of African women, including African students in Prague, all while influencing Czechoslovak foreign policy. Following the loosening of censorship restrictions in June 1968, the bounds of acceptable discourse rapidly expanded. Former US correspondent Karel Kyncl, for example, produced a two-hour show featuring interviews with Slánský trial victims and relatives of those executed, contributing to a larger discussion about the trial and reform Communism.
Not everyone, of course, chose to listen to the content described above. Czechoslovak radio content was broadcast into factories during the day. At night, some Czechoslovaks tuned into RFE. Even more listeners, as RFE interviews and Communist Party intelligence suggested, preferred Radio Vienna as their foreign broadcaster of choice. Rather than seeking out political content, these listeners, mostly concentrated in the borderlands, opted for game shows and light entertainment. This insight sheds light on Johnston’s choice to focus on practitioners engaged in one of two extreme poles of engagement around political content. Secret police and functionaries from Communist ministries took the lead role in crafting the Horáková and Slánský show trial scripts, as well as the émigré press conferences, leaving radio producers, Johnston argues, room to contour aesthetics. Foreign correspondents, by contrast, enjoyed elite status within Czechoslovak radio and thus the greatest room for maneuver, including the ability to create content of their own. Their reporting on events in Africa could, by association and with irony, subtly comment on domestic affairs. One wonders, then, about work done by Czechoslovak journalists and producers who existed between these two poles, not to mention those who created content that was specifically local or less overtly political. While the book nods to media scholarship on the two Germanies, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere, less is said about networks and influences operating within the Communist bloc. What, for example, did Czechoslovak producers learn from radio broadcasts of the highly publicized 1949 show trial of Hungarian Communist László Rajk and his alleged accomplices?
Such questions should inspire future research into a medium that predominated the Czechoslovak landscape from the 1930s into the 1960s, after the ascendance of newspapers and before television enjoyed its greatest popularity. Sharply written and intellectually inspiring, Red Tape will find a welcome audience among scholars of East European Communism, including those taking part in the field’s “global turn,” as well as media scholars more broadly.
