Radio Liberty Ukrainian Service Collection

Biographical / Historical

Radio Liberty (originally Radio Liberation) was formed by the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (Amcomlib) in 1951. Radio Liberty began broadcasting in Russian on March 1, 1953, and by December 1954 it was broadcasting in 17 languages, including Ukrainian. Although ostensibly a non-governmental entity, much of its funding came covertly from the CIA until 1972, when control was transferred to the US State Department, and then to the Board for International Broadcasting. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty continue to serve as a surrogate free press in countries where a free press is banned by the government or is not fully established.

Mykhailo Demkovych-Dobrians'kyi was the director of Radio Liberty's Ukrainian service from 1956 to 1972. He was born in 1905 in the village of Lahodiv near Peremyshliany in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied history and philology at the L'viv University, and law and political science at the universities of Berlin and Vienna. He was active in Ukrainian nationalist politics in Polish-controlled Galicia, and was the editor of a number of Ukrainian Catholic periodicals. He left Ukraine as a displaced person, working as an editor for Ukrainian-language newspapers in Munich and London before becoming an editor at Radio Liberty in 1954.

Patriarch Mstyslav (who was an archbishop at the time of this collections' creation) was one of a group of bishops of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church who left Ukraine ahead of the Red Army during World War II. He was a leading figure in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA from 1950 until his death.

Scope and Contents

The collection consists primarily of spirit-duplicated copies of radio scripts that were sent to (then) Archbishop Mstyslav of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA by Mykhailo Demkovych-Dobrians'kyi. It includes two letters from Demkovych-Dobrians'kyi to Msyslav, and a nearly complete set of daily scripts from October 1961 through January 1962, March 1963, and less-complete sets from other months in the time span covered by the collection. Some scripts appear to have annotations in Mstyslav's and Demkovych-Dobrians'kyi's hands. The content of the scripts consists of daily news reports, political commentary, and features on literature, the lives of Ukrainians west of the Iron Curtain, and other topics. It also includes Ukrainian and English language newsletters from Radio Liberty.

Arrangement

This collection is arranged in two series as follows:

Related Archival Materials

The bulk of the corporate and broadcast records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are currently housed at the Hoover Institution (Stamford University): http://hoorferl.stanford.edu/RFE/index.php.

File Plan

Orginally located in tall cabinet "E", shelf 4-5.