Poland's War on Radio Free Europe, 1950-1989
Pawel Machcewicz, Translated by Maya Latynski
Copublished with the Woodrow Wilson Center Press
January 2015
456 Pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780804792387
For the Soviet bloc the struggle against foreign radio was a principal front in the Cold War. Poland's War on Radio Free Europe, 1950-1989, tells how Poland conducted this fight, a key part of the wider effort to control the flow of information and ideas.
This is the first book in English to use the unique documents of Communist foreign intelligence operations so widely, and it also employes propaganda materials and personal interviews with RFE people and with party and security functionaries. The English translation reflects further discoveries of documentation since the original publication in Polish in 2007.
"The revised and expanded translation of his 2007 Polish-language monograph contributes to the growing body of literature about Cold War broadcasting and surveillance alike . . . [The Polish sources'] keystone role in Machcewicz's account, and the author's extensive verbatim citations from them, render an entirely new chapter of RFE's history accessible far beyond Poland."—Yuliya Komska, H-Net Reviews
"A fascinating and dramatic account of an important and often quirky instutition, and of the Polish regime's decades-long campaign to neutralize its impact."—Robert L. Hutchings, University of Texas at Austin
"The work excels in its use of forensic research in Polish secret service archives. It illuminates the world-view of the Polish regime and its secret services."—A. Ross Johnson, former director, Radio Free Europe
"In this widely researched, skillful book, Paweł Machcewicz begins to tease apart the different strands of Poland's RFE story...Poland's War on Radio Free Europe will be of great use to experts and graduate students."—Andrea Orzoff, Slavic Review
"A fascinating and dramatic account of an important and often quirky instutition, and of the Polish regime's decades-long campaign to neutralize its impact."—Robert L. Hutchings, University of Texas at Austin
"The work excels in its use of forensic research in Polish secret service archives. It illuminates the world-view of the Polish regime and its secret services."—A. Ross Johnson, former director, Radio Free Europe
"In this widely researched, skillful book, Paweł Machcewicz begins to tease apart the different strands of Poland's RFE story...Poland's War on Radio Free Europe will be of great use to experts and graduate students."—Andrea Orzoff, Slavic Review
Pawel Machcewicz is Professor of Humanities at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and the author of Rebellious Satellite: Poland 1956. He was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1994 and in 2007.
