Archive: History | Czech Radio history Czech Radio history
The Cold War on the streets of Belfast
In the 1970s the Cold War was fought on many fronts. One of them was
Northern Ireland, where the tension and violence that raged throughout the
decade also became part of the propaganda war between East and West. At the
time, Czechoslovak Radio’s correspondent in London was Karel Kvapil, who
had entered the radio after the wave of sackings following the 1968
Soviet-led invasion, and later went on to become its last communist era
general director. In 1977 Kvapil travelled to Belfast, to report on the
Troubles. For part of his programme he spoke with women on a housing estate
in a mainly Catholic area of the city: More
1969: Radio Prague goes back to the bad old days
In the course of 1969 and 1970 Czechoslovak Radio was transformed back into
what it had been in the 1950s, a tool of hard line propaganda. In the
process, over 700 radio staff were forced to leave their jobs. Those who
stayed found their freedom of expression severely curtailed. To give an
idea of the extent to which things had changed by August 1969 - the first
anniversary of the Soviet led invasion – I will start with a short
extract from Radio Prague’s broadcasts back in 1968, as the tanks rolled
into the city. At the time the radio was playing a crucial role in keeping
the world informed of what was really happening – including reports of
violent incidents as the invading troops opened fire on civilians: More
The abnormality of normalization
On the airwaves, 1968 ended very much as it had begun. For New Year’s
Eve, Czechoslovak Radio chose the same format as the year before, with the
light-hearted musical cabaret of the Semafor Theatre. But behind the
scenes, the Soviet-led occupation in August had changed everything. The
Soviets were only too pleased for the radio to give the impression of
normality. A gradual, almost imperceptible drift back to hard-line
communism was beginning. The process came to be known cynically as
“normalization”, a word that was first used by Alexander Dubček
himself on August 27 1968. He had just returned from his forced five-day
stay in Moscow, where he had been bullied into accepting the presence of
foreign troops. More
Playing cat-and-mouse with the Soviets to keep on air
In the days immediately after the Soviet invasion in August 1968, staff at
Czechoslovak Radio played a cat-and-mouse game with the occupying forces.
For the first couple of days, they managed to continue broadcasting
directly from the radio headquarters, despite the presence of tanks
outside. More
August 21 1968 on the airwaves
In the course of 1968 the Soviet Union made it increasingly clear that it
disapproved strongly of the Prague Spring reforms. Yet, despite mounting
tensions with Moscow, the Soviet led invasion on the night from August
20-21 1968, came as a huge shock. Today we are going to hear some of the
broadcasts from that fateful day. We start with Radio Moscow, with an
official Soviet version of events. More
A Proustian moment in 1960s Czechoslovak Radio
By the mid 1960s political control over many aspects of cultural and social
life in Czechoslovakia had relaxed considerably. This was the height of the
“New Wave” in Czechoslovak cinema, in theatre socialist realism had
long gone out of fashion and in music the swinging sixties were well under
way. But it wasn’t just through the music it was playing that
Czechoslovak Radio tried to keep pace with the changes. One programme that
broke the traditional mould was launched in 1966 and was called “The 33
Questions of Marcel Proust”. These were questions that the French
novelist had compiled in the belief that by answering them you could better
understand your inner self. In the programme, a well known personality
would answer questions based on Proust’s list. More
Yuri Gagarin: to Prague via the stratosphere
Even after the death of Stalin in the Soviet Union and Klement Gottwald in
Czechoslovakia the 1950s remained a period of high political tension
between East and West. The Cold War was at its height; with it came the
arms race and the space race. Here is Czechoslovakia’s president Antonín
Novotný, in a New Year radio address on January 1 1958: More
After 1945: something like normality
In From the Archives this week we carry on where we left off at the end of
August in our chronological journey through the Czech Radio archives. We had
reached the point just after the end of World War Two; after the initial
euphoria, the hard work of rebuilding the country began: not least at the
Czechoslovak Radio building itself, which had been shot to pieces in the
Prague Uprising and received a direct hit from a German aerial torpedo. More
Jiří Dienstbier remembers a fateful day
Because August 21 is the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the radio played such a central role in the
events of those dramatic days, in this edition of From the Archives we
shall be hearing the memories of one of the key journalists involved in
those dramatic events. Jiří Dienstbier was one of Czechoslovak Radio’s
star reporters at the time. Later he was to become one of the best-known
dissidents of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and after the Velvet Revolution he was
the country’s first post-communist foreign minister. On the morning of
August 21 1968, he was one of several radio journalists, playing a
cat-and-mouse game with the Soviet occupiers, as the Soviets tried to
silence the radio station. In some of the recordings that survive, you can
hear quite distinctly tanks and machine-gun fire in the background. More
Olga Szántová: the voice of Radio Prague
It was five years ago this week that our much-loved colleague, Olga
Szántová, died at the age of 71. As a child she had spent most of World
War II in New York, which was where she picked up her perfect East-Side
English. Olga became one of the most familiar voices of Radio Prague’s
English broadcasts during the political thaw of the 1960s, and she was also
among the radio journalists who managed to carry on broadcasting secretly
during the Soviet invasion of 1968, as several recordings from the time
still bear witness. More
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