Discussing the future of USIA in 1987: Edward B Williams, Rupert Murdoch and USIA director Charles Week. (c) Ron Edmonds / AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.As part of our series “25 years of change”, we publish part two of Vasily Gatov’s long essay on the history of “mediation” between Russia and the US. You can read the first part here.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian and American media intermediaries that had smoothed the way for superpower dialogue fell on hard times — from effective liquidation, as in the case of the international departments of the Communist Party Central Committee and the KGB in 1991, to total reorganisation and fragmentation, as was the fate of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1999.
But although the USA didn’t start formally dismantling its “cold war forces” immediately, the USIA’s decline began much earlier. The agency’s budget was cut, for the first time in its history, as early as 1989, and in 1993 the cuts went deeper after Bill Clinton, who supported Boris Yeltsin and regarded USIA as a Cold War hangover, was elected US president. Politically, the heads of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and the Clinton-era Voice of America were “doves”. Even Radio Liberty was no longer an instrument of the CIA, leaving its fortified headquarters in Munich for Prague.
