Books and articles have been, and will continue to be, written about the "major" radios in the Cold War: Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Voice of America, BBC and RIAS in Berlin.
There was another level of radios, the "medium" level of Radio Vatican, Radio Madrid, Radio France Internationale, Deutsche Welle, and the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) International Service, which stopped shortwave broadcasting on Sunday, June 24, 2012. Below, we will take a brief look at "the voice of Canada's" Cold War short-wave broadcasts to Europe.
The CBC International Service began short-wave broadcasting in February 1945 in French, English and German from its studios in the Radio-Canada building in downtown Montréal and from transmitters at Sackville, New Brunswick.
Czech and Dutch language programs began in 1946. Russian-language broadcasting, directed at the Soviet Union, began in early 1951. Dana Wilgress, Canada's ambassador in Moscow during World War II, addressed the Russian people when he said, in Russian,
It is no fault of ours that all our attempts to break down the artificial wall between you and us have met with an uncompromising rebuff from the Soviet government. We are, therefore, attempting to reach you by radio to tell you something about our land, our history, our people, our free way of life.
Ukrainian language broadcasts begian in September 1952, Polish in 1953 and Hungarian in 1956.
In 1954, International Service director Charles Delafield, listed the objectives of the International Service, including,
To provide a reliable source of Canadian and international news for peoples of Eastern Europe; to counteract communist propaganda about the western world, through news, factual information, a vigorous statement of our views on current topics to encourage the Soviet people to question their government policies and to oppose its aggression tactics.
By 1958 the International Service was broadcasting in 16 languages. A television documentary on the CBC Internation Service that year gave the rationale behind the short-wave broadcasts: "Though it broadcasts in 16 languages, there's just one priority for the CBC's International Service in 1958: bringing news from Canada to listeners in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The Cold War is on, and Communist rule in those countries leaves their people with few sources of reliable news about the world."
The USSR at one time jammed the CBC International Service, BBC, and Voice of America broadcasts, but the three services agreed to coordinate their broadcasts times and frequencies to overcome the jamming.
In July, 1970, the service was renamed Radio Canada International (RCI). On March 25, 1991, six of RCI's 13 broadcast languages - Czech, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, and Portuguese were discontinued.
Radio Canada International's last daily and weekly programs were in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Arabic and Portuguese. The new internet service does not include Russian.
For more information in English about the new internet service: http://www.rcinet.ca/english/
See also K.R.M Short, Ed. Western Broadcasting Over the Iron Curtain, (Croom Helm, London & Sidney, 1986), Chapter 2
