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review March 2025

Radio politics in Czechoslovakia

Review by David M. Durant
Street scene. In the middle a soldier is seen walking among the crows. He is wearing a helmet with a Soviet star on it, and he is holding a machine gun under his arm. In the bottom left corner of the picture a hat is visible. People on the picture seem concerned about what is happening around them.
In Red Tape (Stanford University Press, 2024), Rosamund Johnston shows how Czechoslovak Radio became a site of negotiation between the regime, the listeners and the people who worked there. David M. Durant writes that in this valuable contribution Johnston challenges assumptions that the communist-controlled media was simply there to broadcast official party lines.
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