Radio Liberty (originally Radio Liberation) was formed by the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (Amcomlib) in 1951. Radio Liberty began broadcasting in Russian on March 1, 1953, and by December 1954 it was broadcasting in 17 languages, including Ukrainian. Although ostensibly a non-governmental entity, much of its funding came covertly from the CIA until 1972, when control was transferred to the US State Department, and then to the Board for International Broadcasting. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty continue to serve as a surrogate free press in countries where a free press is banned by the government or is not fully established.

Mykhailo Demkovych-Dobrians'kyi was the director of Radio Liberty's Ukrainian service from 1956 to 1972. He was born in 1905 in the village of Lahodiv near Peremyshliany in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied history and philology at the L'viv University, and law and political science at the universities of Berlin and Vienna. He was active in Ukrainian nationalist politics in Polish-controlled Galicia, and was the editor of a number of Ukrainian Catholic periodicals. He left Ukraine as a displaced person, working as an editor for Ukrainian-language newspapers in Munich and London before becoming an editor at Radio Liberty in 1954.

Patriarch Mstyslav (who was an archbishop at the time of this collections' creation) was one of a group of bishops of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church who left Ukraine ahead of the Red Army during World War II. He was a leading figure in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA from 1950 until his death.