• In the years following World War II, many within the U.S. government, including George Kennan, former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, began to discuss using a radio station as a tool in the ongoing ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. Such a station, it was hoped, could help weaken the Soviet government's hold on society by providing free discussion of current news and events, and promote Western values. By drawing on the population of Soviet emigres in Western Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the station would be able to address Soviet citizens in a familiar tone, not as outsiders.
• It was decided that the aims of the United States would be best served by a private company, though supervised and funded by the federal government. To this end, Amcomlib was formed, modeled after the National Committee for Free Europe, established in 1949 and focused on Eastern Europe.
• Formally incorporated on January 18, 1951, in the state of Delaware as the American Committee for Freedom for the Peoples of the USSR, this organization was the forerunner of the Radio Liberty Committee. One purpose of the committee was to sponsor short-wave broadcasts to the Soviet Union by former Soviet citizens. Basic policy of the committee called for the "liberation" of Soviet Russia from the "tyranny of Bolshevism," which reflected the theme of "liberation" in American foreign policy during the early years of the Eisenhower administration. Eugene Lyons, a former editor of Reader's Digest, was named the organization's first president.
• In May 1951, the committee's name was changed to the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia.
• In March 1953, it was again renamed the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, reflecting an increased sensitivity to the multinational complexion of the USSR.
• In 1956, "from Bolshevism" was dropped; the abbreviation Amcomlib was used throughout this period until 1964, when the American Committee for Liberation became the Radio Liberty Committee.
• In the earliest days of its existence, Amcomlib attempted to serve as a coordinating center for the major Soviet �migr� groups active in the United States and Europe. Problems soon arose, however, due to the wildly different political orientations of the various groups. Moreover, �migr� groups from places such as Ukraine, Armenia, and Central Asia often advocated independence from the Soviet Union, a stance vehemently opposed by most Russian groups.

• The first Radio Liberation studios and offices were located in the former administration building of the Oberwiesenfeld Airport, in northern Munich. They would move to Bogenhausen in 1964.

• Five days after Radio Liberation's first broadcast, Stalin died. Boris Shub, then director of the Radio's New York Program Section, broadcast a program that consisted of reciting the names of the Bolshevik leaders who had been pallbearers at Lenin's funeral in January 1924 (Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, etc.), and who had then been vilified in the Soviet press for years and finally tried and executed as traitors during Stalin's purges of 1936-1938. The implicit message of the program was to remind the audience that the despot's victims were loyal comrades-in-arms of Lenin.

• The first non-Russian broadcasts were made in Adygei, Armenian, Avar, Azerbaijani, Chechen, Georgian, Ingush, Karachai-Balkar, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Ossetian, Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbek.
• Broadcasts in Tatar-Bashkir would begin in December; Belarusian and Ukrainian would follow in August 1954.
• The criteria adopted for determining whether to broadcast in a given language were (1) the population or population density (2) the existence of a developed, or developing, national self-awareness (3) the strategic location of the language group and (4) RL's transmitting capabilities.

• In September 1954, the body of Leonid Karas, a Belarusian writer, was found in the Isar River near Munich. Two months later, Abo Fatalibey, chief of the Azerbaijani desk, was garroted in his apartment. Although never conclusively proved, KGB involvement was suspected in both cases.

• A former U.S. undersecretary of state, Sargeant would remain the organization's president for more than twenty years.

In July 1954, RL had launched a discussion program entitled Writers in Uniform, to address the forthcoming Soviet Writers' Congress (to be held in December). The program reviewed the regime's crushing of artistic expression since the first Writers' Congress in 1934. On the eve of the Writers' Congress, the Radio told the audience that the writers gathering in Moscow were merely "rubber-stamp speakers" who created "literary indoctrination courses." These sharp criticisms were supplemented by a series of messages from well-known �migr� and American writers.

This may have provoked the Soviet government's first overt reaction to an RL broadcast. In his closing speech at the Writers' Congress, Aleksei Surkov, first secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, attacked the Russian �migr� writer Boris Zaitsev for "babbling poisonous words of impotent malice over a White Guard microphone." Surkov did not directly name the Radio. The first mention of RL's name in Moscow's central press appeared on April 17, 1955, when Izvestiia wrote, "Radio Liberation is an organ for the dissemination of filthy falsifications and black slander, invented by American intelligence and directed against the creative achievements of democratic peoples."

In July 1955, the Radio marked the second anniversary of the uprising of slave laborers in Vorkuta, a complex of concentration camps situated in the frozen wastes above the Arctic Circle. It was part of the vast network administered by the MVD (later KGB) known officially as the Chief Administration of Camps, or Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, abbreviated GULag. In July 1953, touched off by reports of the June 17 uprisings in East Germany, the long-smoldering unrest among the inmates flared into an open revolt, spreading quickly from one mine to another as slave laborers refused to enter the pits. They presented camp authorities with eleven demands for improved camp conditions. The uprising was not subdued until weeks later, after several hundred inmates had been killed or wounded.

To keep alive the will to resist on the part of the Gulag prisoners, and to communicate the West's concern for the plight of Soviet workers, the Radio observed the Vorkuta Uprising anniversary with special broadcasts of hope, encouragement, and solidarity by prominent Americans, Europeans, and a former camp inmate. The participants included Eleanor Roosevelt; George Meany, president of the American Federation of Labor; Walter Reuther, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations; and Norman Thomas, who had been the American Socialist Party candidate for U.S. president six times.

February 1956 marked the 75th anniversary of the death of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. After many years of silence, the new Soviet leaders had decided to observe this anniversary in order to benefit from the international fame of their native writer. In December 1955, in the influential literary magazine Novy Mir, a sixty-four-page article by V. Ermilov compared Dostoyevsky to Shakespeare in the force of his artistic expression.

Challenged by the Soviet assessment of Dostoyevsky, Radio Liberation decided to offer something different. Several weeks before the anniversary date, Boris Shub, manager of the New York Program Section, initiated a campaign consisting of statements from major American and Russian �migr� writers on the topic "What Dostoyevsky Means to Me," the goal of which was to illustrate the variety of opinions in the Western world about the genius of Dostoyevsky.

Excerpts from Issac Bashevis Singer's statement: "It is characteristic that all great writers in one way or another connect all the problems discussed in their works with the eternal questions: What is the aim of creation? What is the essence of suffering? Is there a Divine Justice? Wherein lies the supreme duty of man? The works of Dostoyevsky always discuss the fundamentals, the basic conceptions that preoccupy all religious and all philosophies. Dostoyevsky believes that human life is one crisis. The state of suspense in the works of Dostoyevsky is not coincidental, is not artificial, is not a literary whim. It is a direct consequence of Dostoyevsky's mood. In human life there is no tranquility since everything is always on the scales. Man is always compelled to choose between good and evil, between life and death. In this respect, Dostoyevsky is closer to Judaism than all the other writers. "There is much that literature in general, and Yiddish literature in particular, can learn from Dostoyevsky. An amoral literature cannot exist. The serious reader has no more patience for the sweet chatter and tricks of the aesthetes. Literature can exist only in the high temperatures under a high spiritual pressure, when all values are at stake, or suspended on a scale. Dostoyevsky was a gambler, not only in his personal life. He also gambled in his works, risking everything. He is always on the borderline between art and hack writing, between good and evil, between life and death. Dostoyevsky is the very opposite of a fatalist. The soul of his writing is freedom of choice."

On February 24, at the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev exploded the image of Stalin as a benevolent and omniscient leader by revealing his many crimes. "We exposed Stalin for his excesses, for his arbitrary punishment of millions of honest people, and for his one-man rule, which violated the principle of collective leadership." This devastating condemnation of Stalin was circulated only within the Soviet leadership, but word of the sensational development soon became known in the outside world, followed a few weeks later by the actual text of the speech, which was leaked to the West through Polish Communists.

Radio Liberation broadcast Khrushchev's speech and devoted a major portion of programming for many months thereafter to analyses by pundits in the West, including the stunned reactions of Communists and fellow travelers in Western Europe and the United States as they confronted the destruction of the Stalin myth.

In the beginning, RL had only one transmitter station, which was located at Lampertheim, Germany. Its low power output (10,000 watts) meant that the broadcasting could reach only a limited audience. In July 1957, RL reached an agreement with Spain to build new transmitter bases at Playa de Pals, on the Mediterranean coast north of Barcelona. During the years 1959-1964 five extremely efficient 250,000-watt transmitters and one 100,000-watt transmitter were installed. Four groups of high-gain antenna curtains were designed, engineered, and constructed during the same period in order to carry the total transmitter power of 1,350,000 watts to the Soviet audience. Four of the large transmitters were combined to provide two signals of 500,000 watts each or one signal 1,000,000 watts strong. In addition, the Pals transmitter was located directly on the Mediterranean Sea, which provided the almost perfectly flat surface so crucial to countering certain types of jamming. In its day, RL's megawatt transmitter was the most powerful shortwave radio transmitter in international broadcasting; it could deliver a signal, despite jamming, to most areas of the European USSR from its Western borders to the Urals and from the Baltic to the Black Seas.

In 1957, Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago, which exposed the author's hostile attitude toward the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet rule through the eyes of the novel's hero, was first published in Russian and in Italian translation by the publisher Feltrinelli (English translation in 1958). The book was banned in the Soviet Union for three decades and did not appear until 1988 when it was serialized by Novyi Mir. The publication of the book abroad soon brought Boris Pasternak international fame: he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the first Soviet writer ever to be so nominated . However, Pasternak had to deny the honor because of pressures from the Soviet political establishment. Not until 1989 did Pasternak's son accept his father's Nobel Prize medal at a ceremony in Stockholm.

Shortly after Doctor Zhivago appeared in print, RL obtained the Russian original from the Italian publisher and proceeded to broadcast it in its entirety in daily installments. In the fall of 1960, RL produced a roundtable discussion on Pasternak's life and work in observance of the second anniversary of his Nobel Prize award and his recent death (May 1960). Marc Slonim, who was noted for his literary criticism and books on Russian literature, acted as moderator with a group of authors in an exploration of "the writer's need for courage."

By 1958, the pace of de-Stalinization and other changes in Soviet society had made it necessary to revise RL's basic Policy Manual. The new document, issued on November 15, 1958, made it clear that evolution, not revolution, was the locomotive of political change within the Soviet Union. The new Policy Manual placed special emphasis on the need for adjusting to changing Soviet realities, asserting the principle of freely elected government as a means for political transformation in the Soviet Union. Such change was to be achieved "through the will and endeavors of the peoples of the Soviet Union themselves." According to the manual, RL would neither directly nor indirectly attempt to urge any particular political platform or promote any line of action. RL would make it clear that the West did not seek to impose any particular form of government on the Soviet peoples. Moderation and restraint were restated as the main principles to be followed in broadcasting. Together with the new Policy Manual's emphasis on the peaceful liberalization of Soviet society, the name of the radio, Liberation, seemed obsolete; in May 1959, the radio was renamed Radio Liberty.

At the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev resumed his assault on Stalin. He disclosed to a greater extent the number of Stalin's crimes, with stunning details about Stalin's personal involvement in signing hundreds of execution orders. After this speech and subsequent open discussions of Stalin's cruel abuses of power, Stalin's name and place in history were irreversibly compromised.

The embalmed body of Stalin, which had lain next to Lenin's, was removed from the mausoleum. The new de-Stalinization campaign removed portraits and monuments of the dictator and renaming geographic locales, most notably Stalingrad, which became Volgograd.

Radio Liberty treated these events with cautious optimism. It broadcast discussions on the significance of the congress and its impact on the Soviet citizens and the rest of the world.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was one of the turning points in the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Radio Liberty played a significant role in providing its Soviet audience with a complete account of the event. At 4 a.m., October 23, 1962, two hours after President Kennedy gave his speech exposing the presence of offensive Soviet missiles in Cuba and announcing a U.S. arms quarantine, the Radio broadcast a summary and, later on in the same day, a full text, of the speech, which was repeated every hour for the next twenty-four hours in seventeen languages; the Soviet media did not mention the speech until fourteen hours after it was delivered and never reported the text in full. When the U.N. Security Council began its debate on October 24, RL's New York office broadcast the stirring speeches of Ambassador Adlai Stevenson accusing the Soviet Union of converting Cuba into a Soviet bridgehead in the Western hemisphere, and the denials of the Soviet delegate. On October 27, when the world learned about Khrushchev's letter to Kennedy concerning the withdrawal of Soviet missile bases from Cuba, RL pointed out that this was tantamount to the Soviets actually admitting the existence of offensive bases in Cuba. In the days after the crisis passed, the Radio followed up with comments concerning the cost of the Soviet regime's recklessness for its citizens. It also prepared to broadcast Russian-language newscasts to Cuba in the hope of reaching Soviet civilians and military personnel stationed there.

In 1965, a new Policy Manual was published, again encouraging moderation and exhorting broadcasters to behave "as a guest in the home" of Soviet listeners.

October 1964: Nikita Khrushchev is ousted as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, soon to be replaced by Leonid Brezhnev.

In September 1965, two writers, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, were arrested for publishing anti-Soviet literature in the West. Sinyavsky had become known abroad for works such as The Trial Begins and The Makepeace Experiment, published under the pseudonym Abram Tertz; Daniel had published short stories and poems such as The Man From Minap and Atonement. Their trial was highly controversial, both in the West and within the Soviet Union, for it marked the first time that a writer had been put on trial by Soviet authorities for his work. The transcripts of the trial, compiled by Alexander Ginzburg, were circulated as works of samizdat. In February 1966, Daniel and Sinyavsky were sentenced to five and seven years, respectively, in hard labor camps.

Radio Liberty had played an important role in making the two writers' works available to Soviet listeners, broadcasting installments from The Trial Begins. This fact was not lost on Soviet prosecutors, who used the Radio Liberty broadcasts as evidence against Sinyavsky and Daniel during the trial. Following his release in 1971 and subsequent emigration to France, Sinyavsky became a frequent contributor to RL.

It would later relocate to the RFE building in the Englischer Garten in central Munich.

A series of news reports reveal the CIA's longstanding funding connection to both RFE and RL. A congressional committee led by Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach urges an immediate end to all covert support to U.S. volunteer and educational programs, including the two Radios.

Her book, Twenty Letters to a Friend, was broadcast over the airwaves by Radio Liberty. Alliluyeva read the first two chapters, with the remaining chapters read by a freelance announcer. Alliluyeva became a frequent guest on Radio Liberty, describing the current situation within the Soviet Union.

In retaliation for Israel's Six-Day War, the Soviet Union launches an anti-Zionist program. Although the campaign was theoretically directed at Zionism, it soon became a means to discriminate against all Soviet Jews. The resulting wave of Jewish emigration would bring large numbers of qualified journalists and broadcasters to Radio Liberty.

A lifelong opponent of the Soviet regime, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also had a long relationship with Radio Liberty.

Radio Liberty played a crucial role in making Solzhenitsyn's work more widely available to Soviet listeners, including those works distributed internally as samizdat as well as those first published in the West, such as The Gulag Archipelago. Works such as The First Circle and August 1914 had been read on the air during RL broadcasts. Solzhenitsyn himself was a committed RL listener and, following his arrival in the West, made numerous public statements supporting the station and its goals.

Congressional hearings headed by Senator J. William Fulbright are convened to determine the future of RFE and RL. As a result, CIA funding of the Radios is halted, with a new agency, the Board for International Broadcasting, eventually replacing the CIA as the funding and oversight body for RFE and RL.

With the passage of Public Law 93-129, the Board for International Broadcasting (BIB) was created. The board was an independent federal agency composed of nine bipartisan members appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The BIB's sole responsibility was to oversee and fund RL and RFE, and after 1976 the combined RFE/RL Inc. David M. Abshire was named the organization's first chairman.

Radio Liberty devoted heavy coverage to Nikita Khrushchev's death, remembering him as the man who exposed Stalin's crimes and comparing him favorably to Brezhnev. Numerous speakers offered speeches both supportive and critical of Khrushchev's policies.

Watergate was an important event for Radio Liberty, for it allowed the station to demonstrate that it could objectively report on the less attractive aspects of life in the United States. It offered major commentary on the crimes Nixon and his aides stood accused of, the process by which the Watergate affair was investigated, as well as the legal proceedings directed against those taking part. This reportage contrasted sharply with the official Soviet line, which ironically attempted to downplay the scandal, seeing it as a distraction from the policy of d�tente.

An active participant and leader in the Soviet dissident movement, Andrei Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for his founding of the Moscow-based Human Rights Committee in 1970 and other dissident activities.

Radio Liberty put considerable effort into making Sakharov's works available to Soviet listeners. Broadcasts of Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom were made in several languages. In 1983, RL broadcast the entire text of a letter from Sakharov to U.S. physicists expressing his thoughts on arms control. The station also gave wide coverage to the "Sakharov hearings," a series of international tribunals held between 1975 and 1983 during which Soviet dissidents in the West testified to Western scholars on the repression still being carried out by the Soviet government. The hearings were named for a 1974 petition, signed by Sakharov and others, calling for an international tribunal to investigate Soviet crimes.

The Brezhnev government hoped that signing the Helsinki Final Act would stabilize the borders of Europe and thus strengthen its rule. Instead, it allowed dissidents to point to violations of human rights affirmed within "Basket Three" of the Act as further evidence of the repression within the Soviet Union. Radio Liberty devoted many hours to describing the points contained within the accords, as well as the changes required of the Soviet regime in order to comply with them. RL also gave heavy coverage to those activist groups, such as Helsinki Watch, formed in the wake of the agreements.

RL vacated its Munich facilities and moved to the expanded RFE building. The merger proved to be an extraordinarily complex undertaking, requiring the coordination of two organizations with entirely different structures and philosophies. RFE and RL had different pay scales, retirement plans, and other policies, all of which had to be brought in line. Moreover, the staff philosophy of each station was different; the lingua franca at RL was Russian, with many staffers speaking only Russian; at RFE it was English, with many staffers from Central European countries objecting strongly to speaking Russian in the office.

Radio Liberty ends broadcasts in the Uighur language, noting the small number of Uighurs living within the Soviet Union (most Uighurs live in China) and the existence of broadcasts in Uzbek and Russian, languages widely spoken among educated Uighurs. Critics of the move argued that its primary motivation was a desire to placate the government of China, where close to five million Uighurs now lived.

A massive explosion, caused by a bomb weighing between 10 and 25 kilograms, rocks RFE/RL headquarters in Munich. Believed to be the work of East European or Soviet governments, the explosion seriously injures several employees and causes several million dollars in damage.

After a great deal of bureaucratic wrangling, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe are denied press passes to the Winter Olympics. Soviet officials had long protested the presence of Radio Liberty at the Olympics, arguing that only stations officially broadcasting to their countries of origin should be given accreditation, a condition that would allow broadcasts by Radio Moscow but not RL, which broadcast to the Soviet Union from headquarters in Germany. Despite ardent protests from Radio Liberty officials, in 1984 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Yugoslav Olympic Committee agreed to bar RL from broadcasting from the Winter Olympics. This was not the first time RL had been prevented from covering the games; in 1976, the IOC revoked the station's credentials to cover the Winter Games at Innsbruck, Austria, and in 1980 RL was refused accreditation at the Summer Games in Moscow.

April 26, 1985: Chernobyl

Following a major explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, the Soviet government remained silent for several days, admitting to the disaster only after it became impossible to deny it. Even then, the extent of the catastrophe and the dangers faced by those who lived in the fallout zone were greatly minimized.

Radio Liberty, by contrast, devoted many hours to providing immediate coverage of Chernobyl. The Ukrainian service began broadcasting as soon as it received reports of a major accident at the Chernobyl complex and remained on the air around the clock, providing information on safety precautions, medical procedures, and the risks involved in the cleanup operation. It was a key example of RL's role as a "home service" to the Soviet Union, providing important news and information that the central government chose to suppress.

After more than 30 years of continuously jamming Radio Liberty's signal, Gorbachev orders all Soviet jamming activities to cease.

November 15, 1990: The RFE/RL Research Institute is established

August 1991: Union Treaty creates the Commonwealth of Independent States

August 27, 1991: President Yeltsin issues a decree allowing RL to build a permanent bureau in Moscow.

In gratitude for its broadcasting during the 1991 coup, Russian president Boris Yeltsin issued an official state decree permitting establishment of an RL bureau in Moscow. The act marked one of the first instances of a news organization receiving accreditation through an official act of state. Local bureaus were subsequently established in most of the USSR successor states.

On March 20, 1993, Radio Liberty celebrated its 40th anniversary in the Central House of Writers in Moscow. During the several weeks of celebration, Radio Liberty rebroadcast (in full or in part) tapes of its programs from the early 1950s. An exhibit of photographs was also displayed in Moscow. Among the invited guests were liberal members of the legislature, representatives of the Russian government, and former Soviet president Gorbachev. Gorbachev referred to the radio station as a "stabilizing influence in an unstable time." he said, "I hope to be present at the 50th anniversary of Radio Liberty in 2003."

January 1994: RFE/RL begins surrogate broadcasting in Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian to the former Yugoslavia.

July 1994:

President Clinton accepts offer of President Vaclav Havel and the Czech government to house RFE/RL broadcast operations in the former federal parliament building in Prague. Congress approves the relocation in August 1994, with the move from Munich to Prague fully completed by the end of 1995.

International Broadcasting Act (Public Law 103-236) consolidates all nonmilitary, U.S. government international broadcast services under a Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and also creates the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB)

Congress directs RFE/RL to begin surrogate broadcasting to Iran and Iraq, providing additional funding for these efforts. RFE/RL establishes Radio Free Iraq and the Persian Broadcasting Service, by mid-1999 broadcasting six hours a day to each country.

RFE/RL begins broadcasting to Kosovo in the Albanian language. The move is prompted by rising tensions between Serbs and Kosovar Albanians.

Prompted by the attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress authorizes the re-establishment of Radio Free Afghanistan, following a nine-year hiatus. The attacks also lead to a dramatic expansion in RFE/RL broadcasting to Iraq, Iran, and the countries of Central Asia.

April 3, 2002: RFE/RL renews broadcasts in Avar, Chechen, and Circassian languages.