RFE/RL'S RUSSIAN SERVICE

In Brief

* Language: Russian

* Coverage: 24 hours a day, including news, interviews, analysis, and live interactive talk shows

* Frequency: FM, MW, UKV, SW, CBL, Satellite

* Internet: svobodanews.ru

History

* RFE/RL’s Russian Service in 1953 began broadcasting to the Soviet Union from Munich under the name Radio Liberty.

* For four decades, it was a key source of information from both outside and inside the Soviet Union, providing a platform for dissidents and emigres to voice their views. The Russian Service gave a voice to many prominent Soviet dissidents, including the nuclear physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, whose statements the service aired to Soviet audiences.

* In 1991, then Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree allowing the Russian Service to open a bureau in Moscow.

* Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the broadcaster organized a network of stringers across the Russian Federation, from Kaliningrad in the West to Kamchatka in the far East.

* In recent years, the website of the Russian Service has expanded beyond duplication of the broadcaster's radio programming to become a unique and independent information source. 

Highlights

* The broadcaster read excerpts from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," published in the West in 1973, to a public that knew little of the Soviet forced-labor system.

* During the Soviet coup attempt in August 1991 and its aftermath, the Russian Service's broadcasts were widely regarded as the Soviet public's only reliable source of information on the historic events.

* Two years after allowing the Russian Service to open its Moscow bureau, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: “It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of your contribution to the Russian people."

* As Russia witnesses the continuing suppression of free speech and the control of electronic media by state authorities, Radio Svoboda has become a key forum for political and public figures who lack access to other means of free expression. Radio Svoboda is one of the very few outlets that listeners and readers turn to for reliable information and objective analysis of domestic and international events.

* Radio Svoboda's new website was launched in February 2009. The site had 1.2 million unique visitors in August 2009 -- a 70 percent increase from August 2008. The average number of page views per visit has increased by more than 300 percent during the same time period.

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