Stanford University

News Service


NEWS RELEASE

10/6/99

James Robinson, News Service (650) 723-5675; e-mail: jamesrob@stanford.edu

Hoover to house Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty archives

The Hoover Institution will house the broadcast archives and corporate records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty under an agreement worked out between the two and approved by the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, Hoover Director John Raisian announced Sept. 29.

"My colleagues and I are honored that the Hoover Institution has been selected as the repository for the extraordinarily important archives of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty," Raisian said. "These archives provide an historical record of every major event, movement and personality in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe throughout the Cold War and during the first years of transition from communism to democracy. Together with the Radios, we look forward to making this collection widely accessible for scholarly research."

The RFE/RL records and archives to be housed at Hoover cover the period from the creation of both Radios in the early 1950s until June 1995, when the corporation moved its broadcast headquarters from Munich, Germany, to Prague, Czech Republic. RFE/RL's agreement with Hoover does not cover the archives of the RFE/RL Research Institute, which are housed at the Open Society Archives of Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

The broadcast archives consist of some 61,000 reels of broadcast tapes, 7.5 million pages of broadcast transcripts and thousands of additional documents generated by the various broadcast services of RFE and RL.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a private, international radio service to Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East funded by the U.S. Congress.

In a statement, Thomas A. Dine, RFE/RL Inc. president, said: "We are very excited by the possibilities this archive transfer offers to researchers and others interested in the Radios and their work in support of U.S. foreign policy goals. We feel that the Hoover Institution, with its longstanding interest in the peoples and countries of our broadcast region, is uniquely well suited as a home for our broadcast and corporate archives."

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