Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty history

From January 1981 the new Reagan administration took a firmer stand against the Soviet Union.

And when Lech Walesa, leader of Poland's Solidarity movement, was not allowed to accept his Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 in person, he listened as RFE broadcast his wife's acceptance of the award.

In 1988, under Gorbachev, the USSR finally stopped jamming the signals.

As the new governments grappled with the challenges of building new democracies from 1989 onward, RFE/RL established local bureaus throughout its broadcast region, trained local journalists, and served as a model of the journalistic ethics of fairness and factual accuracy for developing local media.

Former Estonian President Lennart Meri nominated RFE/RL for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

The collection covers the broadcasters from their origins until June 1995, when the stations jointly moved from Munich, Germany, to Prague, in the Czech Republic.

Puddington, Arch, "Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty" (2000). Cultural History.

He was formerly a Senior Advisor to the President of RFE/RL, Inc., and Director of Radio Free Europe. [Updated to reflect developments since 2008 by Martins Zvaners.]

For over 13 years, RFE/RL called this former communist headquarters its home, until 2009, when RFE/RL relocated to a custom built, state-of-the-art building just outside the city center.

In January 2010, RFE/RL began broadcasting in the local Pashto dialects to northwestern Pakistan and the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan, in an effort to provide an alternative to Islamic extremist radio stations.

Following Russia's unrecognized annexation of Crimea in 2014, RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service reached out to audiences on the occupied peninsula with special programming in Crimean Tatar, Russian, and Ukrainian, and created targeted content for the war-torn Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.