Zvuky Prahy / Sounds of Prague

The Office of War Information took over Voice of America's operations when it was formed in mid 1942. The VOA reached an agreement with the British Broadcasting Corporation to share medium-wave transmitters in Britain, and expanded into Tunis in North Africa and Palermo and Bari, Italy as the Allies captured these territories. The OWI also set up the American Broadcasting Station in Europe. By the end of the war, VOA had 39 transmitters and provided service in 40 languages.Programming was broadcast from production centers in New York and San Francisco, with more than 1,000 programs originating from New York. Programming consisted of music, news, commentary, and relays of U.S. domestic programming, in addition to specialized VOA programming.Radio Moscow began broadcasting in 1922 with a transmitter station RV-1 in the Moscow region. In 1925 a second broadcasting centre came on air at Leningrad. Radio Moscow was broadcasting (on mediumwave and shortwave) in English, French, German, Italian and Arabic by 1939. Radio Moscow did express concern over the rise of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s, and its Italian mediumwave service specifically was jammed by an order of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini during the late 1930s. In the late 1970s its English language service was renamed Radio Moscow World Service. The project was launched and supervised by a long-time Radio Moscow journalist and manager Alexander Evstafiev. Later a North American service, African service and even a “UK & Ireland” service (all in English) operated for a few hours per day alongside the regular (24 Hour) English World Service as well as services in other languages, the “Radio Peace and Progress” service and a small number of programmes from some of the USSR republics.Broadcasting Soviet information was Radio Moscow's primary function. All programmes (except for short newsbreaks) had to be cleared by a “Programming Directorate”, a form of censorship that was only removed in 1991.