The Foreign Service Journal, September 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2022 87 and here at home in Bethany, Ohio, and Greenville, North Carolina (the latter sta- tion is still operating to this day). More recently, there have been suc- cessful efforts to restart radio broadcast- ing to parts of the former Soviet Union, both via shortwave and medium-wave transmission, as well as free rebroadcast- ing on commercial stations. Pomar assesses the role of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty as CIA projects aimed at weakening popular support for communist rule among the subject peoples of the Soviet empire. He dissects the demographic and cultural aspects of the radio services’ staff, discussing the role of the heavily White Russian makeup of the employees in influencing their attitudes toward the contemporary Soviet Union, collabo- ration with Nazi Germany and anti- Semitism. Pomar does a superb job of tracking the tension between efforts to promote Western values of human rights and democracy in the Soviet space with hard-core adherence to traditional Rus- sian values of autocracy, monarchy and orthodoxy among some of the staff. Mark Pomar’s stellar career in the Soviet and post-Soviet world makes him an ideal teller of this compelling story. From 1982 to 1993, he worked as assistant director of the Russian Service at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Munich), as director of the USSR Division at the Voice of America and as executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting. From 1993 to 2008, Pomar was a senior executive at IREX, a large U.S. international organization operating in 33 countries that administers programs in education, public policy and media. And from 2008 to 2017, he was the founding CEO and president of the U.S.- Russia Foundation (USRF), a private U.S. foundation based in Moscow that ran pro- grams in entrepreneurship and the rule of law. The USRF has sadly been forced to stop operations inside Russia as a result of the growing repression under Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial regime. n Eric Rubin is the president of AFSA.