Keith Bush
Radio Liberty executive who kept a close watch on the USSR
KEITH BUSH, who has died aged 87, was a Russia-watcher and research manager who, from the 1970s to the early 1990s, ran the research department of Radio Liberty, the Us-funded radio station broadcasting from Munich to the Soviet Union and, latterly, Russia and the other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Radio Liberty was as much a research hub as a radio station and in the West was known above all for its Daily Report/research Bulletin, a publication which was Bush’s creation. He steered and edited the work of more than 30 analysts, work which was avidly read and routinely cited (or plagiarised) in Western universities, think tanks and government departments. It was also studied, though not publicly cited, by the Soviet state.
Courteous in manner and distinguished in appearance, Bush looked every inch the British Army officer that, in an earlier incarnation, he had been. With American senior management and émigré Russian broadcasters, Radio Liberty was a boobytrapped labyrinth for any manager to negotiate. Bush coped simply by politely saying exactly what he thought.
Most of his time at Radio Liberty was in the preinternet era, but even then the station had a remarkably swift and comprehensive information system covering a wide range of newspapers and periodicals, both communist and western, as well as radio monitoring.
It was an ideal place to work on current developments in the USSR, but the quantity of incoming material was daunting. Bush somehow maintained a grip on it all, showing impressive judgment in nudging his team members away from dead-ends. This took time away from his own writing, yet he managed to publish many reports and articles and, in 1991, a collection of interviews with reformers and commentators, From the Command Economy to the Market.
Keith Edward Bush was born in London on December 7 1929 and educated at Dulwich College. He went on to the RMA Sandhurst and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He became an Army flier, serving as gun position officer in Cyprus and Egypt, and was a flight commander during the Malayan emergency. He left the Army in 1961 in the rank of captain.
Having trained at London University as a Serbo-croat interpreter (he had served as an intelligence officer in Trieste), he went on to take a Master’s degree at Harvard’s Russian Research Center, specialising in economics and politics as well as Russian language before joining Radio Liberty in Munich as a senior economist.
Leaving Radio Liberty not long after the collapse of the USSR, Bush became Program Director of the Russia and Eurasia Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. Here he continued to analyse developments in the former Soviet Union. He also organised a speakers programme, bringing in such figures as Grigory Yavlinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
After seven years he moved to become Research Director at the Us-russia Business Council. Latterly he had worked as a volunteer, translating scholarly articles from Russian and German at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and digitising information on the contents of boxes of documents at the National Archives.
A passionate opera-lover, Bush was appointed OBE in 2002 for work in assisting the transition to democracy in the former Soviet Union and promoting the principles of liberty.
In 1964 he married Heidemarie Rudloff, with whom he had two daughters. He and Heidemarie separated in 1988 and she died in 2013. In 2014 he married Rosilyn Alter, who survives him with his daughters.
Keith Bush, born December 7 1929, died September 29 2017