You can measure the value of Voice of America by its worldwide audience of 361 million and how totalitarians hate it, or you could simply measure it by the impact it had on a skinny-as-a-wight kid named Martina Navratilova, listening to it on a red plastic radio in a small Czech country village, under the tank treads of a communist regime that would have stamped out her thin existence. The noise from the radio wavered, depending on how intent Soviet authorities were on jamming it, but through the hissing and popping, an inspiration of revolt made its way into the mind of the young Navratilova, woven of forbidden words and tunes.
“It was our lifeline,” she notes.
State radio was a buzzing wall of bland polkas and waltzes punctuated by the drone of the regime, “Ať žije naše dělnická třída a její bojový předvoj Komunistická strana Československa!” (“Long live our working class and its fighting vanguard, the Communist Party!”) Every so often, a popular Western song might be played, but only a strangely warped version of it, such as a Czech group singing “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Then the bland sloganeering would resume, calculated to sap the will: “Jak budeme dnes pracovat, tak budeme zítra žít!” (“How we work today is how we will live tomorrow!”)
It was “all propaganda, a total joke,” Navratilova recalls, but it was nonetheless deadening because it relentlessly drummed into listeners that there could be no individual aspiration; only work for the state machine. The Soviet regime choked off life into a “twilight of an unobservable inner destruction,” as Vaclav Havel described it, an “ever-present death of ‘non-action,’ ‘non-story,’ ‘non-life,’ and ‘non-time.’”
Voice of America broke through this wall. “It couldn’t be censored or blocked, though they tried,” Navratilova remembers.
She was reared in Revnice, about 25 miles outside of Prague, where the further you got from the Soviet jammers, the better the radio reception. She, her sister and her parents lived in a single room of what had been her grandmother’s two-story home with an orchard until it was seized by the state and strangers moved into it. The Navratilovas were pushed into a single upstairs chamber with one cupboard for their clothes, so crammed that they kept their shoes in the hall. They covered the windows with paper to keep warm in the winter. They only had cold water until her father managed to rig a boiler from the 1920s. They went to the local public tennis courts every afternoon, partly because its small wooden clubhouse was one of the few places with hot water, so they showered there.
Every evening at 5:30, her parents, Mirek and Jana, turned on the red plastic radio and found the Voice of America signal.
“It was forbidden, but we did it,” recalled Navratilova’s sister, Jana.
First came an international news hour; VOA broadcasters speaking Czech reviewed the events of the day, filling in the blanks of state media: After the Soviet invasion of 1968, when the tanks came rumbling in, the regime banned the use of the words “okupace” and “okupant.” Navratilova heard the moon landing on Voice of America, and she heard the names of beautiful-sounding places that might as well have been the moon: “Philadelphia,” “California,” “Florida.”
“It was what we listened to, find out what was really going on around the world,” Navratilova recalls.
But Voice of America offered far more than news; it offered ungovernable ideas, the sound of how you might live if your life wasn’t stolen. Dissident expatriate Czech writer Josef Skvorecky hosted a show reviewing books, including works he helped publish by Havel and Milan Kundera.
“It was a way of showing a finger to the regime,” says former VOA broadcaster and associate director Ted Lipien, who was born in Poland behind the Iron Curtain and, like Navratilova, raised on its transmissions. “Just listening to Western radio was a sign of showing your desire for freedom and your contempt for the regime and censorship.”
There were music hours, popular songs from the American hit parade, jazz and rock.
“The music of jazz parallels the freedom that we have in America,” VOA music host Willis Conover intoned, and out floated flights of rhythm and horns, unregulated tripping guitars that communist authorities loathingly called “epileptic loudmouthed compositions” and the “music of a vanishing class.” Skvorecky worshiped jazz for this very reason. Music was “an elan vital, a forceful vitality,” he wrote in his essay “Red Music,” and it could not be controlled by “slavers, czars, fuehrers, first secretaries, marshals, generals, and generalissimos, ideologists of dictatorships at either end of the spectrum.”
At the top of many Eastern European charts in 1968 was Louis Armstrong singing a song that only seemed trite to Americans:
I see skies of blue, clouds of white
Bright blessed days, dark sacred nights
And I think to myself, “What a wonderful world”
Sports – winning – was another way to give a middle finger to the regime. When the Czech national hockey team beat the dominant Soviets not once but twice at the 1969 world championships, Navratilova “lived every second of it,” and a half-century later, she can still name the stars of the team, Jaroslav and Jiri Holik, Jaroslav Jirik, Vladimir Dzurilla. The victories set off demonstrations; half a million people poured into the streets, chanting, “Vy nám tanky, my vám branky!” (“You used tanks against us. We scored goals against you!”)
But you learned the true nature of the hockey riots only on Voice of America; on state media, it was reported that “right-wing revisionist and counterrevolutionary elements” were “fanning a nationalistic psychosis.”
When Navratilova defeated a Russian player in a junior tournament, she said at the net, “You need a tank to beat me.”
As she grew from a child into a teenager, she developed the breathtaking serve-and-volley tennis game that seemed like a gate-storming revolution in and of itself. After she was granted permission to travel to the United States to try her game against the best in the world, reports of her victories floated over the air back to Revnice to the family gathered around the red plastic radio.
By 1975, Czech authorities worried she was becoming too “Americanized” and threatened to “clip her wings” and withhold her visa to play internationally. Shortly before she left to play in the U.S. Open, she confided to her father that she was considering defecting to America. He told her: If you do it, no matter what we might say, don’t come back. They could have a gun to our heads.
She did it. After losing to Chris Evert in the U.S. Open semifinals, she put herself under FBI protection. “I couldn’t suffer authority with a smile on my face,” she observes.
Her family learned the news over Voice of America.
It was a brief announcement: “Martina Navratilova has applied for political asylum.” Her mother almost fainted; her sister began wailing. It was as though she had taken a dive into a vast, unknown sea. It would be almost five years before she saw her family again, a decade before she returned to her homeland.
On state media, she became a nonperson. An apparatchik broadcaster would drone, “The four semifinalists of Wimbledon are known. They are Chris Evert, Andrea Jaeger and Evonne Goolagong.” Even when Navratilova returned to Prague in 1986 to play in a Federation Cup match, surrounded by protective American officials, the regime infamously would not say her name. She was announced as “the woman player from the United States.” Nonetheless, throngs of elated Czechs came out to watch her, so many that they hung from the railings of a nearby elevated railway station to get a view of the court as Communist officials stared at their feet.
To the Czech family with the little red radio, Voice of America became more important than ever: It was the sound of their daughter’s existence. Polish Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk described this critical dynamic in her 2019 acceptance speech, titled “The Tender Narrator”: “A thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes. This is a fact well known to not only historians, but also (and perhaps above all) to every stripe of politician and tyrant.”
Voice of America saved Navratilova and her family from existential perishing. It has saved countless other people and events from the same. Now it’s in danger of perishing itself, victim of the Trump administration’s fervor for gutting and silencing federal agencies, including the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA. This is a feat even the communists were never able to accomplish and which China celebrated by calling VOA “a dirty rag.”
It’s a sincere mistake to think that Iron Curtains are relics of history, that hockey riots and “Velvet Revolutions” fueled by soft power like the one that finally toppled the regime in Prague and installed Havel as president in 1989 are no longer needed. The jazz of free discourse is choked off in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Iran, China and Russia. Hundreds of millions who don’t have phones or internet still listened to VOA, broadcast in 49 languages, until the channel went silent this week, replaced by hissing or static, which to so many is the sound of boots on throats. Congress, which funds VOA, can and should insist the dials be turned back on, to restore all the noisy jazz of America.
“It gave us hope that one day we might all have that, too,” Navratilova observes. “It was a lifeline for many and gave hope to even more people.”