Out Now: The BBC And The Challenge of Reporting from Cold War Moscow
I have written a chapter for this new book, Conflict Resolution and the Cold War: Media Encounters Across the Iron Curtain published on 22nd January. My contribution is called, The next most important British personage in Moscow? The BBC and Soviet Union during the early decades of the Cold War. There is a short extract below.
The Coming of the Cold War
The challenge was especially daunting for the BBC. Having bolstered its international reputation during the war, as radio became the dominant news medium— ‘every correspondent in a foreign country now, of course, relies on the radio both for news and official propaganda’,[i] wrote Charlotte Haldane, a pioneering woman among those reporters permitted to enter the Soviet Union to cover the war. The BBC’s experience between the end of the Second World War in 1945, and their opening a bureau in Moscow in 1963, is a story that sheds light on the political, diplomatic, and editorial pressures the corporation faced in a Europe, and a world, divided by ideological differences. It is also a story of a news organization that strove to understand and explain despite the ideological obstacles placed in its path. Radio broadcasts became one of the few links between that could cross a divided Europe.
Of course, ideological differences had never disappeared as the Soviet Union and its western allies tried to balance the competing demands of building an alliance robust enough to defeat Hitler, while taking care not to cede ground—ideological or physical—in the new world that would follow victory. Churchill was especially vigilant against any sign of communist influence at the BBC. This was not his first confrontation with the corporation. In 1926, during a general strike in Britain, he had tried to take over the BBC’s airwaves for the purposes of spreading only the government’s version of events. Now that he was leading the country in a World War, the Internationale – at that time, the Soviet national anthem – was not to be played on the BBC along with the national anthems of other allies.[ii] Later in the war, Churchill shared with this cabinet his true opinion of the BBC, which he described as ‘a nest of Communists’.[iii] Not having a correspondent in the Soviet Union at the outbreak of war, the BBC eventually settled on Alexander Werth, then a correspondent for The Sunday Times, who had been born in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg and whose family had fled the coming of Soviet power. The BBC archives reveal that this was not a straightforward process.
[i] Charlotte Haldane, Russian Newsreel (London: Penguin, 1943), 46.
[ii] Siân Nicholas, The Echo of War, Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC (Manchester: University Press, 1996), p. 166.
[iii] Nicholas, The Echo of War, p. 171.