Canada Calling in the Cold War
Books and articles have been, and will continue to be, written about the "major" radios in the Cold War: Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Voice of America, BBC and RIAS in Berlin.
There was another level of radios, the "medium" level of Radio Vatican, Radio Madrid, Radio France Internationale, Deutsche Welle, and the Canada Broadcast Corporation (CBC) International Service. Below we will take a brief look at "the voice of Canada's" Cold War short-wave broadcasts to Europe.
The CBC International Service began short-wave broadcasting in February 1945 in French, English and German from its studios in the Radio-Canada building in downtown Montréal and from transmitters at Sackville, New Brunswick.
Czech and Dutch language programs began in 1946. Russian-language broadcasting, directed at the Soviet Union, began in early 1951. Dana Wilgress, Canada's ambassador in Moscow during World War II, addressed the Russian people when he said, in Russian: “It is no fault of ours that all our attempts to break down the artificial wall between you and us have met with an uncompromising rebuff from the Soviet government. We are, therefore, attempting to reach you by radio to tell you something about our land, our history, our people, our free way of life.“
Ukrainian language broadcasts begian in September 1952, Polish in 1953 and Hungarian in 1956.
In 1954, International Service director Charles Delafield, listed the objectives of the International Service, including: “To provide a reliable source of Canadian and international news for peoples of Eastern Europe; to counteract communist propaganda about the western world, through news, factual information, a vigorous statement of our views on current topics to encourage the Soviet people to question their government policies and to oppose its aggression tactics.“
By 1958, the International Service was broadcasting in 16 languages. A 1958 television documentary on the CBC Internation Service gave the rationale behind the short-wave broadcasts: “There's just one priority: bringing news from Canada to audiences in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Communist rule in those countries leaves their people with few sources of reliable news about the world.“
The USSR jammed CBC International Service, BBC, and Voice of America broadcasts, but the three services agreed to coordinate their broadcasts to overcome the jamming.
In July, 1970, the service was renamed Radio Canada International (RCI). On March 25, 1991. Six of RCI's 13 broadcast languages - Czech, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, and Portuguese were discontinued.
For more information in English: http://www.rcinet.ca/english/about-us/
K.R.M Short, Ed. Western Broadcasting Over the Iron Curtain, (Croom Helm, London & Sidney, 1986)
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