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In socialist Eastern Europe, radio simultaneously produced state power and created the conditions for it to be challenged. As the dominant form of media in Czechoslovakia from 1945 until 1969, radio constituted a site of negotiation between Communist officials, broadcast journalists, and audiences. Listeners' feedback, captured in thousands of pieces of fan mail, shows how a non-democratic society established, stabilized, and reproduced itself. In Red Tape, historian Rosamund Johnston explores the dynamic between radio reporters and the listeners who liked and trusted them while recognizing that they produced both propaganda and entertainment.
Red Tape rethinks Stalinism in Czechoslovakia—one of the states in which it was at its staunchest for longest—by showing how, even then, meaningful, multi-directional communication occurred between audiences and state-controlled media. It finds de-Stalinization's first traces not in secret speeches never intended for the ears of "ordinary" listeners, but instead in earlier, changing forms of radio address. And it traces the origins of the Prague Spring's discursive climate to the censored and monitored environment of the newsroom, long before the seismic year of 1968. Bringing together European history, media studies, cultural history, and sound studies, Red Tape shows how Czechs and Slovaks used radio technologies and institutions to negotiate questions of citizenship and rights.
—Tara Zahra, author of Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics between the World Wars
"Sensitively telling stories from both ends of the receiver, this brilliant, absorbing book is not only a panoramic history of postwar Czechoslovakia and its place in the world, but also an extraordinary study of what history, in all its complexity, sounds like. Red Tape is essential reading in radio history, sound studies, and Cold War studies alike."
—Alice Lovejoy, author of Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military
"Life is nuanced, and life under any totalitarian regime is also nuanced. Things are not simplistic, because human beings are complex. In this sense, Johnston's project is rich and fascinating. Her research is impeccable and exhaustive."
—Emina Melonic, The New Criterion
"Her elegant, sure-footed study draws on audio files of programmes by the broadcaster Czech Radio, as well as thousands of fan letters sent in by enthusiastic listeners."
—Anna Parker, Times Literary Supplement
"Well researched and effectively illustrated, this volume shows how radio enabled Czechoslovaks to negotiate issues of citizenship and rights, thus presenting a fresh interpretation of the first decades of the Cold War period. Recommended."—P. W. Knoll, CHOICE
"Johnston's Red Tape is a significant contribution to media history, Eastern European studies, and the study of Communist regimes. By integrating a thorough examination of regulatory processes with an in-depth analysis of listener subjectivity, the impact of Stalinization and de-Stalinization, and the relationships between radio reporters and their audience, Johnston provides a comprehensive and compelling portrait of radio broadcasting in Communist Czechoslovakia. Johnston weaves together biographies, events, structures, and shifts in a compelling and insightful manner. She establishes the history of radio as a mirror of Czechoslovakia's mid-twentieth-century history."—Frank Henschel, H-Socialisms
