Polish Radio - Polskie Radio

 

Special thanks to Ray Robinson, Dr. Adrian Peterson, and Jeff  White for this week's Wavescan story - the very last one for 2025. Enjoy !

Polskie Radio, available at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PolskieradioPL

Jeff: (whatever you want to say!)

You may remember that interval signal, which was used by Polskie Radio as early as the 1920s.  The very first broadcast transmissions in Poland were carried out by the Polish Radio Technical Society beginning on February 1, 1925.  Then, on August 18 of that year, the state-owned national public-service Polish Radio was founded.  And thus, 2025 represents their 100th anniversary.  Regular broadcasts from Warsaw commenced on April 18, 1926.

Before the Second World War, Polish Radio operated one national channel, which from 1931 was broadcast on one of Europe's most powerful longwave transmitters, situated at Raszyn just outside Warsaw.  They also had eight regional medium wave stations:

• Kraków from February 15, 1927

• Pozna? from April 24, 1927

• Katowice from December 4, 1927

• Wilno from 15 January 1928

• Lwów (then part of Poland, now in Ukraine) from January 15, 1930

• ?ód? from February 2, 1930

• Toru? from January 15, 1935

• Baranowicze from July 1, 1938

In 1936, Polish Radio launched the first shortwave broadcasts of brief programs in English and Polish.  Then on March 1, 1937, a second domestic station was opened in Warsaw – known as Warszawa II (Varshava being the Polish pronunciation of Warsaw), and the national channel became Warszawa I from that date.  A ninth regional station was planned for ?uck, but the outbreak of war meant that it never opened.

The invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany led to the complete destruction of the network in September 1939.  However, before Polish Radio went silent for six years, it broadcast significant messages warning Poles about anticipated German attacks.  Here are recordings of some of those messages which were broadcast as the Nazis were on the outskirts of Warsaw.  Listen out for mention of Radio Varshava – Radio Warsaw.

The final broadcast on September 23, 1939 closed with that performance of Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor by W?adys?aw Szpilman.  Years later in 1945, Szpilman played the same piece for the reopening of the station.

But actually, there was a brief rebirth of Polish Radio in occupied Poland during the Warsaw Uprising, which started on August 1, 1944 – as the Nazis were retreating, but before the Red Army had arrived.  There were two insurgent broadcasting stations during this period:

• the first was launched on August 8, 1944 by the Polish Resistance Home Army "B?yskawica",

• and the second, Polish Radio, was launched the following day on August 9 1944.

Both stations used the same transmitter and were supported mostly by pre-war Polish Radio employees.  From a week later in mid-August 1944, these transmissions from the uprising radio stations began to be rebroadcast back to Poland on higher power transmitters by the BBC in London.  But, those broadcasts were short lived.  The Uprising only survived for 63 days, and the last programs were heard on October 4, 1944.  The Red Army had paused their advance, which allowed the Nazis to regain control of Warsaw.

But when the Red Army continued their march towards Berlin through the previously Nazi-occupied territory of Poland, they found there were neither radio stations nor radio receivers, because the Nazis had destroyed or confiscated them all.  The first radio station of any kind to come back on the air in Poland was from a railway car near the town of Lublin in eastern Poland, using Soviet Army equipment.  But this was a Russian army station, not a station of Polskie Radio.

But slowly, Polskie Radio was reconstructed with aid from the Soviet Union, which valued radio as a propaganda medium.  The first regional station of Polish Radio to reopen was in Krakow in southern Poland near the Slovakian border, on February 10, 1945.  But, the number of people owning radio receivers after the war was initially very low due both to the Nazi confiscations and also to the fact that in the immediate post-war years, very few radio receivers were even available on the Polish market, and the ones that were, were very expensive.  They were mostly reserved as a luxury for top Party officials and as a reward for those who had advanced the cause of communism in Poland.

Because of the lack of receivers, on March 2, 1945 from a primitive studio in Poznan, a second station started to broadcast via street speakers.  It was officially opened as a radio station on June 3, 1945, but other street speaker stations were also set up.  In Katowice, on March 5, 1945, a 1kW radio station was inaugurated.  And gradually, the network was rebuilt.  But it took until 1949 for the number of listeners in Poland to climb back up to what it had been ten years earlier in 1939, before the war.

A major step for Polish Radio in 1945 was when it was decided to rebuild the longwave mast and radio station in Raszyn, which was critical to regaining national coverage.  The station was relaunched with a 50 kW transmitter donated by the USSR – one they had previously plundered, mind you, in 1939 from Baranowicze, Poland – the last of the pre-War regional stations to be built.  On August 19, 1945, the longwave station in Raszyn was officially re-opened.  Then in 1949, its transmitter was replaced with a new 200 kW unit, and the tallest antenna mast in Europe was installed – 335 metres or 1,100 feet high.  The previous 50 kW transmitter was then kept as a reserve.  A new broadcast center was also erected in Warsaw, equipped with 12 purpose-built studios.

Of course, Polish Radio, and later Polish Radio and Television (PRT), was placed under the control of the Polish Communist Party.  Domestically from 1946-1956, Polish Radio became a propaganda tool for the Polish People’s Republic (PPR).  During that period of reconstruction from the war damage, which was considerable, the Communist Party sought to Stalinize Poland on the model of the USSR, and the brutality of the totalitarian regime at that time was reinforced through propaganda on the domestic broadcasts of Polish Radio.

 

External broadcasts on shortwave also resumed in 1945, and were then designated as Warszawa III.  Programming in Esperanto was introduced in 1959, and by 1975 there were daily half hour or one hour programs in English, Polish, Esperanto, Spanish, French, German, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Italian and Arabic, with transmissions for Europe, North America, Africa and the Middle East.

 

But, Polish Radio’s outreach to listeners in the United States was especially difficult due to the long distance, weak shortwave signals, and most of all, the lack of a receptive audience.  External radio programs from communist-ruled Poland to North America had almost no listeners among Americans of Polish descent.  Refugee Poles living in the United States and second and third generation Polish-Americans were overwhelmingly hostile toward Poland’s communist government.

 

In 1980, Poland hit the headlines worldwide because of the Solidarity independent trade union movement founded at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk and led by Lech Wałęsa.  In 1983, Lech Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the union is widely recognized as having played a central role in ending communist rule in Poland.  Poland was the first country in Europe to see the fall of communism, when on June 4, 1989, the first pluralistic elections since 1947 led to the dissolution of the communist government.

 

Soon after the fall of communism in 1989, an agreement was negotiated to establish cooperation between the Voice of America and Polish Radio.  In January 1990, radio listeners in Poland for the first time ever could hear Voice of America bilingual (English-Polish) live newscasts on Polish Radio’s nationwide network, free from any censorship.  This arrangement also marked the first time an Eastern European broadcaster had agreed to use VOA live newscasts.

 

On January 1, 1993, Polskie Radio was officially admitted to full membership of the European Broadcasting Union.

 

But due to budget constraints, shortwave transmissions were steadily reduced between 2007 and 2012, when English language shortwave broadcasts ended.  The following year, broadcasts were heard just twice a day with programming in Polish, Belarusian and Russian, and then on October 27, 2013, all shortwave broadcasting ceased, and Polskie Radio’s External Service became an Internet-only entity.

 

Now, at the end of 2025, external service programming is still being produced in six languages – Belarusian, English, German, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian – and these are broadcast daily via the 75 kW medium wave transmitter of Radio Baltic Waves in neighboring Lithuania on 1386 kHz, as well as on the Internet and via both the Eutelsat and Hotbird satellites at 13°E.  The English programming is also relayed via the World Radio Network, which in turn is sometimes carried by WRMI shortwave in Florida – I’ll let Jeff give you the details of that.

 

Domestically, Polskie Radio, PR, still operates on longwave, now with 1,000 kW on 225 kHz.  There are also four national PR FM networks, 17 regional PR stations, and another six PR channels on DAB+ and Internet only.  And separate from Polskie Radio, there are hundreds of national, regional and local private commercial stations, again on FM and DAB+. 

 Back to you, Jeff.

 Jeff:    Thanks, Ray.  Yes, here at WRMI we do air some transmissions of the Polish Radio external service as part of our relay of the World Radio Network at various times and frequencies that you can find on our website, www.wrmi.net.  While the schedule is subject to change, Polish Radio is currently heard via WRMI daily at 0400 UTC on 7570 and 7780 kHz; at 0800 UTC on 7730 and 15770 kHz; and at 1900 UTC on 9395 kHz.

 My own memories of listening to Polish Radio’s external service on shortwave date back to the early 1970’s when I was living in Indianapolis, where our editor Adrian Peterson lives now.  Polish Radio was quite difficult to hear in Indianapolis back in those days.  The signal was usually quite weak.  But I did listen, and in fact they even answered a few questions from me on their mailbag program.  They were also kind enough to send me a set of Polish language lesson booklets, I remember.

 During that time, Polish Radio’s interval signal was the first few notes of Frederic Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude.  The World Radio TV Handbook even printed the musical score.

 Polish Radio Interval Signal at YouTube: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2FtQ3f2BZY

          

 Little did I think listening to that interval signal back in the 1970’s that some 50 years later I would actually travel to Warsaw and hear the Revolutionary Etude in person.  But as it happened, when my wife and I travelled to the HFCC B25 Conference in Prague this past August, we flew from Miami to Prague on the Polish LOT Airlines, with an overnight stopover in each direction in Warsaw.  While we were there, we took the opportunity to attend a Chopin piano concert at the Museum of the Warsaw Archdiocese in the city’s Old Town, a quaint area with cobblestone streets.  Chopin is the most famous of Polish composers, and the Warsaw airport is even called the Frederic Chopin Airport.   

 Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude played by Ewa Beata Ossowska in Warsaw.  Our short visit to the Polish capital was only long enough to make a quick visit to Warsaw’s Old Town, take in the piano concert, and enjoy a delicious meal of Polish pierogies and other traditional food at a rustic restaurant across the street from the Archdiocese Museum.  A further exploration of Warsaw will have to wait for another trip in the future.  Life is quite interesting for shortwave listeners who often travel to the exotic places they’re listening to, either in person or via their radio receivers.