This episode focuses on another source of extreme embarrassment for US foreign policy – the war in Vietnam – and explores the ways in which RL’s coverage of the war tried to address and minimize the damage to the US’s reputation that Soviet media coverage of the war was spreading across the Soviet population.

Yuri Gagarin and the Space Race

The "Speaking to the Soviets" series focuses on Radio Liberty, an extraordinary United States-funded radio station that punched through the Iron Curtain to broadcast to listeners across the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Each episode in this six-part podcast mini-series focuses on a key event in the history of the Soviet Union, as described and discussed by Radio Liberty: from the death of Stalin through to the development of the space race, the emergence of détente and the signing of the Helsinki Accords, and the Chernobyl disaster and eventual collapse of the USSR. Using original broadcast material from the Blinken Open Society Archives’ Radio Liberty Collection, host Stephen Westlake analyses the content and form of these broadcasts to introduce listeners to the surprising and subtle ways in which this major American radio propaganda project was undertaken.This podcast series is part of the "Sound-Resound" research component of the "Sound Relations" project. The project is funded by the Central European University through its Intellectual Themes Initiative. The series was created with the support of the Blinken Open Society Archives.