The Media during the Cold War | 139an especially high level of freedom that even extended to cooperation with
the West: there were numerous joint film productions, for example, and
Yugoslavia was the only Communist country to become a member of the
‘European Broadcasting Union’ (EBU). Beginning in the 1960s, Yugoslavia
consequently took part in the Eurovision Song Contest and presented itself
with Mediterranean flair. Some leeway for development was also in evidence
in Poland, which had a prominent church press (albeit accounting for only 1
per cent of circulation) and a significant underground press with a self-image
that drew on experiences during the German occupation and often formed
the backbone of the opposition movement, especially after 1979. Even after
martial law was imposed in 1981, an estimated eight hundred illegal publica-
tions remained in existence (Paczkowski 1997: 26). This contrasted strongly
with those Communist countries that granted no leeway and had not even
tapped into modern media development. Thus there was no television in
Albania as late as the 1980s, and Romania had only one television station
with very truncated air times, and practically no underground press. In fact,
any critical information about the regime that the Romanians received, like
that leading to the fall of the dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu in 1989, came from
the freer Hungarian radio.
The East European media systems were linked by firm cooperation. As in
Western Europe, the broadcasting field was the province of a transnational
organisation called OIRT (Organisation Internationale de Radiodiffusion et
de Télévision) and Intervision, which fostered the exchange of technical infor-
mation and programming. They were an arena for the circulation of news,
sport and culture. Their common framework was dictated mainly by the
Soviet news agency TASS, which prescribed a general agenda especially for
international news. While the Soviet television imported only 5 per cent of
its programme, the proportion of foreign programmes in the rest of Eastern
Europe ranged from 17 per cent in Poland to 45 per cent in Bulgaria in the
early 1970s – especially from the Soviet Union (Mihelj, in Imre et al. 2013:
15). Nevertheless, the Soviet Union never managed to achieve the same domi-
nance or presence in East European cinema and television as the United States
in the West.
With respect to television, shared programming was not restricted to East
European contributions in any case but included Western programmes in
equal measure. This meant that in 1968 a good 42 per cent of ‘foreign’ pro-
grammes in the GDR came from ‘capitalistic’ countries, with the Socialist
Intervision acquiring over a thousand Eurovision programmes per year during
the 1970s, but only a few hundred programmes per year making the journey
from Eastern to Western Europe (Eugster 1983: 185f., 231; Heimann, in Lin-
denberger 2006: 254). This exchange pointed up some striking differences: in
Poland and Yugoslavia, American series like Sesame Street were already being