Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television 9780300208962

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BETWEEN TRUTH AND TIME

E U R A S I A PA S T A N D P R E S E N T GENERAL EDITORS

catriona kelly University of Oxford douglas rogers Yale University mark d. steinberg University of Illinois

Between Truth and Time A H IST OR Y OF S OV IET CEN TR A L TE L E V I S I O N

Christine E. Evans

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2016 by Christine E. Evans. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in MT Baskerville type by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN 978-0-300-20843-6 (cloth : alk. paper) Library of Congress Control Number: 2016930748 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my teachers

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C ONTEN TS

Preface, ix Acknowledgments, xiii Introduction: Stagnation and Experimentation in the Russian Era of Television, 1

CHAPTER ONE

Not a Mirror but a Magnifying Glass: Soviet Television Enthusiasm, 21

CHAPTER TWO

Programmnaia Politika: Audience Research and the Creation of the Channel 1 Schedule, 47

CHAPTER THREE

From Café to Contest: New Year’s Variety Shows and the Soviet Festive System, 82

CONTENTS

CHAPTER FOUR

Time and the Problem of Boredom, 115

CHAPTER FIVE

“Spiritual Coauthorship”: Seventeen Moments of Spring and the Soviet TV Miniseries, 150

CHAPTER SIX

“KVN Is an Honest Game”: Game Shows and the Problem of Authority, 183

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Dress Rehearsal for Life: Artloto and What? Where? When?, 216 Epilogue: The Origins of Central Television’s Perestroika, 235 Notes, 255 Bibliography, 303 Index, 319

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P R EFAC E

The research for this book began and ended with game shows. When I first traveled to Moscow to begin my research on Soviet Central Television, I found myself in one of the Lenin Library’s innumerable back rooms asking an elderly librarian, “What is KVN?” I had run into that three-letter abbreviation in the titles of many books in the television and radio section of the card catalog, but these titles offered no clue to the acronym’s meaning. What was I to make of a book called KVN?, KVN . . . KVN! or What Is KVN? My question caught her off guard. “What?!” she asked. “I cannot even say! I do not even know where to begin!” Finally, she answered that it was a television club, a television game, and explained that the initials stood for “Club of the Merry and Resourceful [Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh].” Her response baffled me, for two reasons. First, what was a Soviet TV game show? And second, what could make a game show so significant, so momentous, that it could not be quickly or easily described to a stranger? In the course of my research, it quickly became clear that Soviet game shows were indeed a serious phenomenon. Borrowed as part of the

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transnational exchange of successful television formats that arose along with television itself, they also epitomized something important and specific about television in the Soviet Union: its emphasis not solely on propaganda or even just on entertainment, but on play, risk, and experimentation with new rules of the game. Because game shows were entertaining and trivial, and because their participatory and improvisational formats could be linked to the revolutionary mass festivals after 1917, game shows in fact offered a way to think about the future, including a democratic future. I joked to friends that the most interesting thing I had learned about Soviet television in my months of research was that there was so much voting on Soviet game shows and musical contests in the 1970s. This project became my dissertation before Vladimir Putin’s third term, before the mass protests against electoral fraud in 2011–12. Back then, it was easy to see all this voting, these many public conversations about authority to judge, in a quite optimistic light—“practicing democracy,” to borrow Margaret Anderson’s term. But, as Anderson notes, elections always have a dual character—asserting the voting public’s role as source of political authority, but also affirming the legitimacy of the state that holds them. As Putin’s third term wore on, and my dissertation became this book, it has become much easier to see the political experimentation on Soviet Central Television as a precursor to Vladislav Surkov’s “managed democracy,” in which the forms of democratic proceduralism shore up an authoritarian state. Luckily, however, the game show format in post-Soviet Russia resists this kind of tyrannical presentism. Now that Putin looks likely to remain in power for nearly as long as Leonid Brezhnev before him, at least two aspects of “stagnation” culture appear resurgent in the Putin era: melancholy, and alongside that response, the rise of experimentation and longterm thinking about other possible futures. As I finished the revisions of this manuscript, both of these sentiments were evident in a small set of Russian TV game shows. In March 2015, I visited the Moscow set of What? Where? When? [Chto? Gde? Kogda?], a Channel 1 game show known since 1977 for its atmosphere of uncensored freedom. The producers’ choice of musical guest that night reflected growing concerns that What? Where? When? might not be able to retain its critical edge in the new political environment since the annexation of Crimea. The performer x

P R E FA C E

was a relative unknown, Paulina Andreeva, singing her first hit—the title track for a 2013 television serial called The Thaw, set during the era of reform following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. Despite its allusion to a long reformist tradition, I was struck by the song’s overwhelming mood of disillusionment and loss. “I thought it was spring,” Andreeva sang, “but it was only a thaw.” This refrain evoked the ephemeral nature of various “thaws” and the loss of broader hopes. Less than a month before this broadcast, the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov had been murdered, just days ahead of a mass protest he had helped organize—a protest called “The Spring.” Just weeks later, however, the embattled opposition television channel, TV Rain, announced the launch of a new game show. Entitled President-2042, the show offered young people born after 1991 the opportunity to compete for “election,” by Rain’s audience, as the future Russian president in 2042—the year made famous by the writer Vladimir Voinovich’s alarmingly prescient dystopian novel, Moscow 2042, published in 1986. The show’s promotional campaign stressed the ephemeral nature of the Putin era. “In 2042,” the show’s trailer noted, “Vladimir Putin will be 90 years old, and Dmitry Medvedev 77. For that reason,” the ad’s narrator continued, “it’s high time for them to settle down in front of the TV, turn on TV Rain, and find out who will become president in 2042.” President-2042 thus does not question television’s centrality to the Russian political process, but it does offer another account of how it might be used. The show’s website featured audition videos by hundreds of Russian young people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, in which they present their biographies and political views in myriad, contrasting ways. By fostering lengthy on-air discussions about political life and the qualifications of a good leader, President-2042 has joined the handful of Soviet and now post-Soviet Russian game shows that put intellectual young people on air before the viewing public to demonstrate their superior wit, teamwork, and leadership skills, in implicit contrast to aging, inadequate leaders. These TV games cannot (should not!) determine the fate of a country, but they retain their ambiguity, and their ambitions, in the present.

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AC K N OWL ED G ME NTS

This book is the product of the generous intellectual, emotional, and financial support of many marvelous people. My advisor Yuri Slezkine, together with the late Reggie Zelnik, Victoria Frede, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, and Olga Matich, provided insight, kindness, and encouragement many times beyond what I deserved. Graduate school is often presented as a time of suffering and exploitation—for me it was an idyll spent with the most brilliant, generous, and ethical people imaginable. I am extraordinarily grateful to Robert Edelman, whom I met serendipitously and who turned into a mentor of extraordinary generosity and wit. Stephen Lovell has offered generous support and insightful feedback on drafts at key moments over nearly a decade. When I moved from Berkeley to be with my family and finish my dissertation in Detroit, Michigan, Joshua First, Val Kivelson, Douglas Northrop, Aaron Retish, Lewis Siegelbaum, and Ron Suny welcomed me, providing intellectual, material, and moral support when I needed it most. I thank them and the participants of the Midwest Russian History Workshop for making me feel at home. Most recently, I thank the anonymous reviewers of

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this manuscript for their insightful and generous comments, as well as the editorial staff at Yale University Press and my series editors, Catriona Kelly, Doug Rogers, and Mark Steinberg, for their advocacy on my behalf. This book was supported by generous grants and fellowships from a number of institutions. They include the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. Department of Education Fulbright Hays Program, the Department of History and the Institute for Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies (under the indefatigable leadership of Ned Walker) at the University of California Berkeley, the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund, the Wayne State University Humanities Center, the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan, and the Center for 21st Century Studies and the Graduate School Research Committee of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. In Moscow, I was helped enormously by archivists at GARF, OKhDOPIM, and RGANI, and the staff of Gosteleradiofond in Moscow and Reutovo. Particular thanks are due to Nina Ivanovna Abdulaeva and Lidiia Sergeevna Naumova for taking me under their formidable professional wings. I am especially grateful to my dear friend Olga Kuz’mina and her family and friends in Ivanovo and to the Balashov family in Moscow for making my time in Russia so full of wonderful adventures. I thank Aleksandr Drouz, Yulii Kleban, and the Chicago club of znatoki for showing me the contemporary meaning of old Soviet game shows. I would like to especially thank the friends and colleagues who made research and writing more exciting and fun. Kirsten Bönker, Paulina Bren, Dina Fainberg, Simon Huxtable, Anikó Imre, Sabina Mihelj, Julia Obertreis, and Kristin Roth-Ey organized exciting conferences and journal issues, offered important feedback, and made socialist television studies into an exciting new field. Eleonor Gilburd, Faith Hillis, Elizabeth McGuire, Miriam Neirick, Serguei Oushakine, Knox Peden, Alexis Peri, Shawn Salmon, and Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock all read parts of this manuscript—often long parts on short notice—and offered invaluable suggestions along with much wisdom and encouragement. Stephen Brain, Molly Brunson, Lara Cohen, Anne O’Donnell, Nicole Eaton, Bill Goldman, Sarah Horowitz, John Pat Leary, Kristin Romberg, Erik Scott, Regine Spector, Jarrod Tanny, and Susanne Wengle offered important xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

feedback, but also made my time in Berkeley, Moscow, and Detroit a lot more fun. My colleagues at UWM, especially Jasmine Alinder, Winson Chu, David DiValerio, Richard Grusin, Maggie Levantovskaya, Elana Levine, Annie McClanahan, Ted Martin, and Rick Popp improved this project and made Milwaukee home. Finally, I would like to thank my family, especially Lydia and Abe, for being themselves, and Nick, who always gets it. This book includes material that first appeared in the following publications: “A ‘Panorama of Time’: The Chronotopics of Programma ‘Vremia,’ ” Ab Imperio 11, no. 2 (2010): 121-46; “Song of the Year and Soviet Culture in the 1970s,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 3 (2011): 617–45; and “The Soviet Way of Life as a Way of Feeling,” Cahiers du monde russe 56, no. 2–3 (2015): 543–69. I thank the editors for granting permission to republish it here.

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BETWEEN TRUTH AND TIME

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INTRODUCTION Stagnation and Experimentation in the Russian Era of Television

In February 2014, viewers around the world watched the Olympic opening ceremonies from Sochi, Russia. They saw a strange, grandiose, and occasionally stunning television mass festival reenacting a thousand years of Russian history, as imagined by an international creative team led by the powerful director of Russia’s state-run television Channel 1, Konstantin Ernst. Just months later, a triumphant Vladimir Putin celebrated the annexation of Crimea in the latest installment of his annual Direct Line with Vladimir Putin [Priamaia liniia s Vladimirom Putinym] broadcast, a multihour live television extravaganza in which he answers questions about domestic and foreign affairs submitted by Russian citizens via telephone, Internet, SMS, and in person using live cable and satellite linkups with crowds assembled in public squares across Russia’s vast territory. These two high-profile media events revealed a great deal about contemporary Russian politics, illustrating the continued importance of popular support to Putin’s political calculus and the powerful appeal to Russia’s imperial past (and present) in the Putin-era mass media. At the same time, they also revealed the continued centrality of television, not only as a medium of control and censorship, but also as culture and as 1

INTRODUCTION

mass festivity: a way of both making new forms of politics visible and bringing them into being.1 This book shows that the highly televisual Putin era represents the culmination of a long Soviet—now Russian—“era of television.” This era began in the late 1950s, when television arrived as a mass medium, found its enduring forms in the second half of the 1960s, and realized its multiple, contradictory visions in the decades that followed. The chief feature of this era was a persistent search for new ways of unifying a diverse public, legitimizing authority, and performing the state’s responsiveness to its citizens—all without recourse either to shared belief in a single ideology or to genuinely competitive elections. Although this search took place across various media in the late Soviet Union, it was the most visible on television, making Soviet television’s highest-profile and most popular programming surprisingly experimental. In the post-Stalin period, television, like other Soviet arts, was a place for the exploration of moral and political ambiguity, for the elaboration of new ways of life, and for cultural and political play and negotiation.2 But more than the other arts, television was also ideally positioned to address the political and ideological challenges of the late Soviet state. Television was intimate, compellingly visual, and located in the home.3 It was thus able to bring key state rituals and messages into the emotionally vibrant spaces of the new private apartment, combating the urgent problem of ossifying ideological language and ritual.4 Television was tightly linked to state power, always censored. At the same time, however, its producers developed, from the mid-1950s, a set of artistic and political ambitions drawn from the theatrical and cinematic avant-garde.5 Imagining themselves as artists and journalists—both groups that took on prominent roles in revitalizing the state and reimagining its relationship to the public under Nikita Khrushchev—Central Television’s most prominent writers, editors, and directors saw themselves as engaged in a creative and politically vital experiment. This search for new sources of authority and social unification began during the Thaw that followed the death of Stalin in 1953, shaped by postwar social and cultural shifts and, especially, Khrushchev’s decision to launch an intense public reckoning with Stalin’s legacy at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. The confrontation with the Stalinist past took place 2

INTRODUCTION

across the arts and media, especially intensely in literature and the press.6 The media were also, correspondingly, the chief venue for efforts to revitalize the socialist project.7 At the same time, the shift, after Stalin’s death, from coercion to persuasion as the primary means of mobilizing the population had raised the status of mass media, and popular entertainments in particular, as a means of influencing the Soviet people and demonstrating the superiority of Soviet society.8 While eating ice cream, living “merrily,” vacationing in state-provided rest homes, having fun in amusement parks, and enjoying musical comedies were central features of Stalin-era culture as well, the rejection of mass coercion and the widespread sense of entitlement among Soviet citizens whose enormous sacrifices had won the Second World War altered popular attitudes toward the state, as Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev increasingly emphasized the right of all Soviet citizens to leisure and pleasure.9 Soviet cultural producers had always been obliged to engage audiences before they could influence them. As Robert Edelman has written, “mass culture was supposed to teach, but it could not do so if no one listened.”10 In the postwar, post-Stalin Soviet Union, popular demands that state media not only engage but actively please and satisfy their audiences grew louder. These new concessions and demands did not simply result in the provision of more popular content; rather, they altered the negotiations between state and public far more profoundly, raising questions of authority that quickly expanded beyond the bounds of popular culture. As much recent work has suggested, the cultural and political conflicts of the Thaw in the Khrushchev years did not end with the 1960s.11 Instead, Soviet television’s search for new ways of engaging the public and justifying authority intensified dramatically in the second half of the 1960s, when the optimism and enthusiasm of the Khrushchev era began to wane. The loss of faith, especially among intellectual elites, in the near-term fulfillment of the Communist Party’s promises required the identification of new sources of social solidarity, and new ways of mediating the conflicts of generation and class exposed by the crushing of socialist reform movements in the late 1960s.12 Television’s arrival as a truly mass medium coincided precisely with the beginning of this new, more exploratory period. From 1965, the year in 3

INTRODUCTION

which the writers Yulii Daniel and Andrei Siniavsky were arrested for publishing their work abroad, to 1970, the number of televisions per Soviet family doubled, from roughly one set for every four families to one per two families.13 This still modest number conceals much greater saturation in urban areas where television signals could be received consistently.14 On November 4, 1967, the powerful new Ostankino Television Center began to broadcast the signal of Moscow’s Central Television to a rapidly growing network of stations connected by cable lines and radio relay towers; two days earlier, the Soviet Union had commenced television broadcasting by satellite, bringing Central Television’s Channel 1 to the Far North, Siberia, the Far East, and Central Asia.15 The new medium’s enthusiasts planned elaborate live all-Union spectaculars for the fiftieth anniversary of 1917. Just over nine months later the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, ending the Prague Spring and crushing, at least for the moment, the last wave of optimism among Soviet cultural elites. By 1970, the Soviet state found itself already losing its exclusive claim to ideological “truth” and confronted with the challenges of governing in nonteleological historical time. Without the scientific triumphs and millenarian hopes of the Khrushchev era, what were the bases of Soviet superiority relative to the West and to other countries in the communist bloc, or of the Party’s authority, and how could they be made comprehensible and convincing to audiences? The first part of this book’s title, “Between Truth and Time,” is meant both to describe this moment of transition and to link it to the changing Soviet media landscape. On January 1, 1968, the Soviet Communist Party’s chief voice, the newspaper Pravda [Truth] gained its first real rival—a new television evening news program, Vremia [Time]. The loss of faith in “truth”—the imminent arrival of communism— among ideological and cultural elites, and the repression of socialist reform movements by the Party leadership in the late 1960s resulted not only in malaise and the rise of irony, but also in experimentation, uncertainty, and the exploration of new ways of representing state and society that might prove flexible enough to endure through unending and everchanging time. This state of affairs still characterizes the present. Within the Soviet and post-Soviet media landscape, Time has proved much more durable than Truth. Time remains the premier Russian television news 4

INTRODUCTION

program, while the newspaper Truth has undergone multiple closures, reorganizations, and legal disputes since 1991.

The Stagnant, Innovative 1970s To see the Soviet “long 1970s”—the decade and a half stretching from 1968 to the early 1980s—as more experimental than the preceding decade requires some explanation.16 An old narrative, promoted most famously by Mikhail Gorbachev after his ascent to the top of the Communist Party leadership in 1985, saw the years after 1968 and before 1985 as a more-or-less uninterrupted period of cultural repression and reStalinization as well as stagnant or zero economic growth.17 The word “stagnation [zastoi],” popularized by Gorbachev himself, has come to serve as shorthand for these years, combining several intertwined facts and claims: the rejection of economic reform, greater censorship in the arts and media, and failure to respond to important social and technological changes in the world outside. Scholars have lately questioned the accuracy of “stagnation” as a characterization of this period on a number of grounds: for being too intertwined with Gorbachev’s agenda and Cold War politics to be of use to scholars in the present; for being constructed on the basis of a series of false dichotomies between, for example, official and unofficial culture; and for papering over much of the real political, economic, and social change that inevitably takes place in the life of any country over the course of almost twenty years, and therefore simply not reflecting the lived experience of most Soviet citizens, for whom the 1970s were as eventful as any other decade, sometimes more so.18 As others have noted, the term “stagnation” also has an unfortunate tendency to imply that nothing was happening at all in Soviet public life during this period, when in fact there were significant events in the Cold War, real shifts in the worlds of high politics and cultural policy, and broad social and economic change.19 This latter, less useful sense of stagnation as eventlessness works least well as a descriptor for Soviet culture in these years. The claim that the Brezhnev years were a time of cultural, as well as economic, “stagnation” depends on the assumption that all of the vibrant cultural life taking place in private apartments and other un- or semisanctioned settings in the 1970s was exclusively “private” and “unofficial,” 5

INTRODUCTION

completely cut off from public culture and state-controlled theaters and media.20 It also requires the dismissal of a remarkably vibrant world of Soviet mass media, film, popular literature, and music as mere entertainments, lacking political or other historical significance. I would like to suggest, however, that the term “stagnation” should be reinterpreted, rather than jettisoned entirely. When understood as one key, constitutive mood—an interpretive lens through which people make sense of their lives—“stagnation” offers several real strengths.21 First, it captures the very real sense of malaise, irony, and political disengagement that is a widely remembered feature of the Brezhnev era. As Jonathan Flatley and Mark Steinberg have shown, however, melancholic feelings like these do not preclude (indeed, may facilitate) openness to new connections and ways of being in the world. By focusing attention on this affective dimension, “stagnation” allows us to explore the entangled ideological, social, economic, and political problems that gave rise to the Soviet state’s fears about popular disaffection, and its search for television programs that could address these problems. As Juliane Fürst has convincingly argued, many of the affects and attitudes associated with stagnation were already apparent in the late Stalin era.22 As a mood and a set of interrelated problems, stagnation could arise at multiple moments before and after 1991. Most important, retaining “stagnation” also helps link the Soviet 1970s to the global political, economic, and ideological trends of the 1970s, which were likewise marked by political repression and disaffection, economic crisis and malaise, and, correspondingly, the flourishing of (ostensibly) private identities and forms of expression. The greater stability and political control of the Soviet 1970s were part of a much broader phenomenon of domestic repression in response to the social unrest of the 1960s. Détente—the pursuit of a balance of power and greater stability in foreign affairs—was also, as Jeremi Suri has argued, a “convergent response to disorder among the great powers.”23 Abandonment of political goals, pursuit of consumer identities and private self-realization, and the privatization of politics characterized life in many countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain after 1968, and were vividly reflected in television shows, films, and popular music that explicitly encouraged these developments.24 6

INTRODUCTION

Recent histories of the 1970s in both Eastern and Western Europe have demonstrated that these transformations in popular culture and political life after 1968 were substantive and significant.25 They reimagined political and cultural life on new terms and laid the foundation of our present era, likewise characterized by cynicism about the value of public political activity and institutions and the repressive pursuit of domestic political stability by both democratic and non-democratic regimes. The Soviet 1970s were thus, as in many other countries, a period of both greater repression and greater experimentation.26 Within the state media, the key site of this politically innovative activity was television, and television entertainment in particular, that arena of personal and local communal pleasures, memories, and emotions in which the Soviet state now sought to root itself as traditional public rituals and language became increasingly emptied of meaning. These experiments on Central Television—with all their limitations and artificiality—foreshadowed and helped make possible Gorbachev’s fateful experiments with the Soviet system after 1985. Central Television staff members of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s increasingly understood their work precisely in these experimental terms. “Experiment [eksperiment],” “play [igra],” “innovative [novatorskii],” and “creative [tvorcheskii]” were keywords in Central Television’s internal meetings and the memoirs of its workers, both in relation to television production and, in the case of “play” especially, as a pervasive metaphor for their own role in the Soviet political and ideological system. This play metaphor became increasingly widespread beginning in the late 1970s, as Brezhnev’s aging made possible the emergence of open conflict in the top Party leadership—and thus greater opportunities for play and improvisation below them. These conflicts broke into the press in the second half of the 1980s, dramatically expanding the scope of Central Television staff ’s play and raising the stakes of the game. This particular self-understanding, as innovators and players in a game, allowed Central Television’s personnel to adapt to the political environment after 1968 while still maintaining the identity they had developed in the 1950s, as inheritors of the revolutionary avant-garde.27 “Experimentation,” “innovation,” and “play” all can take place within strict boundaries, on predetermined fields of play; none require changing political and economic structures. The Soviet state had long understood 7

INTRODUCTION

the usefulness of encouraging citizens to “innovate” inside the bounds of the planned economy, as a way of directing attention away from structural political questions.28 As Joachim Zweynart has argued, the Brezhnev-era state encouraged debate and innovation, within clear limits, as a way of placating and engaging scholars, preventing them from offering more fundamental critiques and proposing reforms.29 Indeed, it is possible to see Central Television’s self-identified “creatives [tvoriugi]” in the Youth, Musical, and Literary-Dramatic Programming Desks as the pompous suits depicted in Kostia Kinchev’s famous 1985 rock song, “Experimentator.” Kinchev’s experimentator was very much part of the system: with vicious irony, the song’s narrator described how the “ideally clean-shaven” experimentator “sees wide open spaces where I see a wall,” contrasting the experimentator’s scientific socialist optimism with his own bitter pessimism.30 Rather than dismissing the ambitions of these Central Television experimentators, however, I would like to stress their connections with the broader ludification of the global media system and, indeed, of political and cultural life, that began in the 1970s in both the socialist and capitalist worlds.31 The search for “innovations” that can solve social problems without requiring fundamental political or economic change has characterized both late socialism and late capitalism. At the same time, these experiments could have real consequences, including dramatic structural change in the socialist bloc. Precisely during the 1970s, as Central Television experimented with audience voting and nationalist nostalgia in its entertainment programming, the Chinese Communist government began to experiment with market economics in similarly limited spheres.32 I thus follow Anikó Imre in taking a position between the extremes of optimism and pessimism regarding the significance of what she has described as the “blending of consumption, pleasure, and play with citizenship and politics” in the past five decades.33 This blending, which began on Soviet Central Television at much the same time as it did in the capitalist West, was neither a whole-hearted embrace of democratic procedural politics nor an entirely cynical simulacrum designed to prevent genuine democratic change. Instead, it served the function of all play, as Imre, Brian Sutton-Smith, and Steven Connor have argued—to maintain ambiguity and ambivalence, thus preserving the possibility of change.34 8

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The television experiments of the Soviet 1970s have therefore had very different fates in the post-Soviet decades. Some became pillars of Putinera television, like the annual “direct line” broadcasts, which closely resemble the lengthy responses to viewer letters and calls by famous 1970s TV hosts and hostesses on Central Television’s New Year’s musical programs.35 Others, like the visually, musically, and politically experimental news shows of the late 1980s—which were themselves based directly on the visual and formal conventions of 1970s game shows—are now anathemized as a direct cause of the Soviet collapse and, therefore, of Russian imperial decline. Still others, like the game show What? Where? When? [Chto? Gde? Kogda?] (1977–present), broadcast live a handful of times a year, in a late-night slot, continue to occupy a liminal position, still facilitating playful confrontations between changing elites and the viewing public.

Transnational Television History and Soviet Distinctiveness Large-scale historical processes linked the Soviet 1970s to the global 1970s, including the great power turn against domestic dissent at the end of the 1960s, and the decline of hopes on the left about the historical role of the working class. But more proximate forces of transnational interaction and mutual exchange were also crucial to the development and production of Soviet television, as for Eastern and Western European television more generally.36 Interaction, exchange, and borrowing took place constantly. Surveys of transnational program exchange conducted in the 1970s and ’80s suggest that Central Television Channel 1 broadcast relatively few foreign programs, especially compared with other Eastern European television systems—only 5 to 8 percent of its schedule was made up of foreign productions. But these exchanges did bring Eastern European and, less often, Western European, North American, and other foreign shows to Soviet screens.37 Moreover, as Kristin Roth-Ey has shown, Central Television adopted television formats from Eastern European television, which, in turn, had borrowed them from Western European services. Interaction and influence took many forms beyond direct program exchange, including private screenings of foreign television for television producers, journalistic and scholarly analysis of foreign 9

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programs, and personal relationships between Soviet and foreign television professionals. Moreover, the Soviet state decided to invest heavily in a national television network because television networks were seen, in the 1950s and early 1960s, as less vulnerable to long-range, transborder enemy broadcasting.38 In other words, even the belief that television could serve as a securely national medium was, from the beginning, a response to broader transnational forces. As Michele Hilmes has argued, states imagined broadcasting as a kind of “national circulatory system,” holding the transnational threats of foreign radio and Hollywood films at bay and “delivering the signs and symbols of the national imaginary across geographic space to individual homes and minds.” Yet these national objectives were always in tension with the desire to reach other nations and to allow foreign influences to enter the nation in a negotiated and controlled way.39 These twin objectives shaped Central Television’s production and programming decisions as powerfully as they did the BBC and other European, state-run broadcasting services. Recognizing the transnational cultural economy that shaped Soviet broadcasting also necessitates a second feature of what Hilmes calls transnational media history: an approach that combines political, economic, and institutional history with the textual and visual analysis of the shows themselves. Soviet television produced texts of great complexity and interest, both aesthetically and politically; this study views Central Television’s production and content through both social scientific and humanistic lenses, focusing equally on political and institutional contexts and on “matters of creative influence, the development of aesthetic practices and forms, and their social and cultural reception.”40 Far from suggesting that only Soviet television, as an aberrant, socialist case, needs to be understood in its political and economic context, this approach is meant to emphasize the inherently political nature of televisual culture everywhere, as well as the common dilemmas faced by Central Television and state and corporate broadcasters elsewhere in Eastern and Western Europe and North America. This transnational approach to broadcasting history is equally able, however, to reveal the real distinctiveness of Soviet television programming in its socialist and non-socialist European contexts. Despite the im10

INTRODUCTION

portance of common, transnational conditions and interactions, I do not wish to argue that Soviet Central Television merely imitated Western television entertainments, either before or after 1968. As Roth-Ey has shown, Soviet mass culture was defined by its opposition to Western mass culture; its intentions, like those of Western European state broadcasters, were enlightening, but it also explicitly sought to mobilize citizens toward the construction of socialism.41 The adoption of global television formats like the game show and twelve-episode filmed miniseries required a lengthy process of adaptation and redefinition, whereby genres associated with Western mass culture were reimagined as uniquely Soviet, often by linking them to avant-garde traditions in theater and film. The special qualities that distinguished the Soviet, socialist television schedule or TV miniseries were articulated and debated in the press. As ideology workers at the heart of the Soviet media system, Central Television staff members were also closely engaged in finding solutions to domestic political problems, as they saw them and as set forth by the Communist Party Central Committee and, ultimately, by Brezhnev as the television viewer-inchief.42 The question of Soviet Central Television’s distinctiveness, relative both to other socialist television systems in Eastern Europe and to the array of state-owned and commercial television systems in the West, is thus complicated by the fact that Soviet television’s producers themselves had a stake in claiming to be distinctive, even as they borrowed television formats directly from European counterparts. Memoir accounts of the creation of VVV, the first wildly popular Central Television game show, are typical—they recount how the show’s format was directly borrowed from a Czechoslovakian show, in turn based on a Western European one, and then immediately go on to describe the show as their own entirely sui generis creation, the birth of a truly Soviet television genre.43 Post-Soviet Russian memoirs and journalism have likewise actively canonized some Central Television programs and genres as distinctively Russian and Soviet cultural treasures, which they see as superior to the commercial offerings on contemporary Russian television. This process of selective canonization reflects broader cultural and gender hierarchies typical of the post-Soviet cultural intelligentsia; the shows they celebrate as especially distinctive, especially superior to Western masscult, including many 11

INTRODUCTION

discussed in this book, often featured educated male heroes and authority figures and were aimed at educated viewers.44 The post-Soviet conversation about “quality” television in the Soviet past thus reflects many of the same gender and class prejudices as similar conversations in the United States and elsewhere, elevating some kinds of programming—programs aimed at educated, male, wealthier viewers—above others.45 Describing the features of Soviet Central Television thus requires navigating carefully between the accounts of its own producers, with their claims to distinctiveness, and much excellent new scholarly work on socialist television in Eastern Europe that emphasizes the similarities and connections between Eastern European socialist television systems and their counterparts across the Iron Curtain.46 Nonetheless, Soviet Central Television did have some distinctive features, deriving precisely from its producers’ persistent obligation to define Soviet television—the leader, by definition, of socialist states in the Eastern bloc—against its Western and even Eastern European counterparts. Soviet television and its audience were, for example, never completely feminized.47 Although it came to be consumed in the home, Central Television, as Roth-Ey has shown, was profoundly shaped by the Communist Party’s longstanding discomfort with byt, or everyday domestic life.48 When Central Television’s programmers spoke of the audience for daytime programming, moreover, they did not mean housewives (although there were Soviet housewives), but rather schoolchildren and factory workers who attended school or worked in a second, afternoon and evening shift. Programs addressing women as a specific audience were infrequent, despite Central Television’s great concern, beginning in the mid-1960s, with targeting many other specific sub-audiences, including children, students, soldiers, peasants, professional propaganda workers, and people interested in science.49 Soviet women were certainly addressed by television programs that focused on fashion, childrearing, health, and consumer issues, but these infrequent programs neither structured Central Television’s programming nor determined its cultural role. Of course, the gendering of television as a masculine, high-status medium did not preclude successful careers for individual women on and off the air. Central Television’s flagship news program Time [Vremia], was hosted by a male-female pair of anchors, as were its high-profile holiday 12

INTRODUCTION

variety shows. Valentina Leont’eva, the most famous television hostess of the late 1950s and ’60s, remained on air for more than three decades. Her roles were often explicitly feminized—hosting an emotional talk show and leading the beloved children’s program Good Night Little Ones, but her longevity and prominence are hard to dismiss. Behind the scenes, female producers helped create many of the most famous entertainment programs, and several parlayed those roles into successful careers in postSoviet Russian television. At the same time, Soviet television was distinctive for its comparatively limited use of domestic settings or domestic serial formats. This fact set Soviet television apart not only in relation to its capitalist counterparts, but within the socialist bloc, where family-themed serials focusing on private life were very widespread in the 1970s.50 Soviet television producers themselves occasionally bemoaned this state of affairs, since they were well aware of the influence and popularity of domestic serials elsewhere. Although television’s place in the home and its ostensibly pathological, commercial role in the capitalist West (in the view of Soviet intellectuals) did lower television’s cultural status relative to, for example, film and theater, Central Television’s ambitious workers remained committed to the view that, in their hands, television was high-status, masculine, experimental, transformative culture that addressed the state’s most pressing political and economic concerns. These claims were furthered by the unusual importance of the annual holiday calendar in shaping every aspect of Central Television’s programming and production. Holidays, which disrupted the regular schedule for weeks before and afterward, created regular periods of heightened viewing, during which high-stakes, highly politicized negotiations between television and its audience were foregrounded. More broadly, like visionaries of the brief American television “golden age” of the late 1940s–early 1950s, many Central Television staff members remained committed to a festive understanding of the medium itself. Rather than reinforcing domestic routines, television should disrupt them, drawing viewers in as participants in new television rituals that would move and transform them. Even after the introduction, in the mid-1960s, of a schedule with recurring programs at predictable times, and the abandonment a few years later of live broadcasting, ambitious producers of 13

INTRODUCTION

original-to-television content still understood their work in festive, ritual terms. These ambitions, and the specific connections Central Television workers drew between themselves and the theatrical and artistic experiments of the revolutionary avant-garde, also resulted in an unexpected hierarchy of programming genres.51 Although foreign news was high status, as in the West, so were game shows, a genre near the bottom of prestige hierarchies in the capitalist world. As control of news programming intensified after 1968–70, entertainment genres, like holiday musical variety shows, became quite important from the perspective of Central Television staff, because they offered both popular entertainments and more scope for politicized play (audience voting and the like).52 Across programming genres, from game shows to news to serial films, Central Television’s producers described their objectives in terms of both pleasing viewers and pursuing pressing public goals: mobilizing workers, unifying families, constituting new model collectives through play. This set of functions ascribed to all Soviet television programming, no matter how apparently trivial or formulaic in subject matter, brought ostensibly low genres to the center of Central Television’s mission. Certainly, one can look at the hours of tiresome TV films and broadcasts about worker and peasant heroes produced in this period and conclude that there was nothing interesting, much less experimental, to be seen on Central Television. There was certainly a great deal of formalized language, particularly on domestic news and in TV documentary films. But what if we look beyond language, at the myriad visual, spatial, and temporal choices, contained in any single TV show? Like Soviet humor in the same period, which often relied on the contrast between an actor’s words and his physical performance, Central Television’s visual content contains a wealth of details and choices that exposed the extent of Central Television’s experimentation with new ways of unifying the audience and representing Soviet people.53 As in the many other fields of Soviet life, in which cultural innovation was simultaneously encouraged and repressed, Central Television’s more creative shows lived with constant interference from censors.54 Yet Soviet censorship also had particular interests: of greatest concern was who could appear on air, what they looked like, what they wore, and especially what they said (or sang). A 14

INTRODUCTION

great deal of attention was also focused on making sure that any information falling into the very broadly defined category of state secrets was not mentioned on air. These particular concerns and the intense focus on preapproval of written scripts nevertheless made possible a great deal of experimentation with the formal, spatial, or visual aspects of Central Television’s content. As for those shows that were both verbally and visually formulaic, their very boringness—their failure to engage, entertain, or influence—was the source of much alarmed, and revealing, debate about the reasons for and costs of audience disengagement. All of Soviet television, therefore, can be considered interesting and worthy of investigation. Yet this book is, by necessity, selective and incomplete. I focus only on a handful shows and genres produced by or for Moscow’s Central Television, many of which were broadcast only infrequently—once a month, or only on holidays. These shows were popular and widely remembered among both viewers and television staff precisely because they were unusual: they were festive occasions in themselves. The significance of these genres, for viewers and Central Television’s staff and leadership alike, was clearly reflected in Central Television’s state and Party archives—these shows were the subject of extensive debates internally, in the press, and in professional journals devoted to journalism and broadcasting. They also received the vast majority of feedback from viewers, in letters and in surveys that ranked them as the most popular programs on Central Television. The discussions generated by these shows reveal their centrality to both the problems and the opportunities television created for the Soviet state and its citizens. I also look chiefly at shows broadcast on Central Television’s first, allUnion channel—mostly ignoring the very important and diverse programming on the Soviet Union’s national, regional, and local television stations, as well as on Central Television’s other, regional channels.55 What it was like to watch Soviet television depended very much on where you lived. As television journalist Vladislav List’ev joked, the most advanced beings in the Soviet Union were the seals in Anadyr, who saw the first Channel 1 broadcast to the Far East, which went out before the censors woke up and cut the Moscow-region broadcast.56 Although this book discusses shows that were seen and remembered by most Soviet television 15

INTRODUCTION

viewers, I cannot reconstruct the specific linguistic, regional, national, and international contexts in which those shows appeared for different households in very different corners of the vast Soviet Union. I focus on reception largely from the perspective of Central Television’s producers, using sources of information about audiences to which they had access— viewer letters and sociological surveys. The changing ways that Central Television staff members imagined, learned about, and responded to their viewers are important enough to justify these limitations; this book is very much about elites near the center of Soviet power, and the enormously influential television shows they produced for a vast audience.57 They had their audiences always in mind, from distant viewers whose reactions they imagined for themselves or measured imperfectly with letters and surveys, to the more proximate and influential audiences inside Central Television, in the press, and in the Central Committee. I focus on the political center, because game shows, news, serial films, and musical variety programs, among many other entertaining and serious genres, were very much matters of high politics in the Soviet Union. But this does not mean that reception is unimportant: rather, the question of reception was inseparable from Central Television’s programming and is central to this book. This book is organized thematically, rather than chronologically, although I have tried to make it as chronological as possible. As a result, many chapters cover the same chronological ground—beginning in the mid-1960s and ending roughly a decade and a half later, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I have chosen to cross the boundary of 1968–70 multiple times in order suggest its diverse impacts on different programming genres. In some chapters the real transformations take place several years before 1968; in others, 1968–70 saw the (often temporary) abandonment of television experiments closely linked to reform. In still others, 1969 and 1970 were years of especially vigorous experimentation and play, which continued throughout the 1970s. Across multiple genres and chapters, however, I argue that, with the exception of domestic news, most of the television genres I explore here saw more fundamental experimentation with alternative ways of representing Soviet life and imagining new bases for state authority beginning in 1968–70. These changes after 1968 were often based directly on ideas articulated by Central Television staff 16

INTRODUCTION

and their audiences in the late 1950s or 1960s, but were substantially reinterpreted after 1968 and emerged in much more explicit form on the air. From 1970 onward, there were many, more nuanced changes of emphasis in response to changing priorities and shifting pressures from above, but for this book the end of the 1960s was the most important turning point, the beginning of an experimental age that continues into the present. Chapter 1 uncovers the sources, in and around Central Television in the 1950s, of a particular understanding of television as a medium for experimentation and social transformation, placing these ideas in their international context as part of broader postwar European and American hopes about the transformative potential of television (and cinema). It argues that these ideas remained powerful within Central Television long after they were abandoned elsewhere, and despite more systematic censorship and the decline of live broadcasting. Indeed, the impossibility of realizing the most ambitious version of these ideas, articulated in the work of the critic Vladimir Sappak, facilitated the birth of television as a journalistic and artistic profession in the Soviet Union: where complete instantaneity and transparency were unattainable, craft and skill became essential. Chapter 2 shows how Central Television staffs, like their counterparts in film and print journalism, reimagined their relationship to their audience beginning in the mid-1960s. Beginning in 1964–65, changes in domestic and international politics led Central Television to launch a much more extensive program of sociological audience research and to create a television schedule designed to maximize viewership for a new evening news program, Time. Confronting new sociological data about their audience, Central Television workers responsible for creating the new television schedule sought to strike a balance between Central Television’s conflicting imperatives: to convey political messages and to entertain, to attract viewers to the screen but also not to trap them there. Even after the suppression of most sociological research within State Television and Radio after 1970, Central Television continued to broadcast the most popular programming genres during prime viewing hours, at the expense of direct propaganda programs that made fewer concessions to viewer taste. These entertaining programs were anything but apolitical, but even with their implicit moralizing they were substantially different—more 17

INTRODUCTION

inclusive, more experimental—than the dry fare that often prevailed outside prime time. Chapter 3 explores a third distinctive feature of Central Television’s programming: entertainment on Central Television was closely correlated to the annual holiday cycle. This feature of Central Television’s programming emerged during the 1960s as a solution to the problem of television entertainment in a state committed to enlightenment and mobilization. In the 1960s, the problem of justifying the selection of certain musical acts and songs over others for the country’s premier New Year’s TV program could largely be solved by portraying musical entertainment as a holiday gift. By the end of the 1960s, this was no longer adequate. A new holiday program, created in 1970 and entitled Song of the Year, turned to audience voting and other, more procedural, ways of representing a socially and generationally fragmented audience. Chapter 4 turns to news programming and the problem of boredom. Central Television’s producers and various audiences, in Soviet apartments and in the Central Committee, were acutely aware that Central Television’s most politically important programs, particularly news and other documentary programs about Soviet life, appeared awkwardly slow. The comparison with foreign radio broadcasts was particularly unfavorable, but viewers and critics alike complained the contrast was marked even within a single evening’s broadcast of Time: Soviet domestic news had a strange timeless quality, appearing to lack any connection to a specific day or even a specific year, that stood in sharp contrast to the timeliness and eventfulness of life abroad. Of course, this contrast was partly intentional. By the late 1960s, one of the Soviet state’s central claims about the superiority of Soviet life versus life in the capitalist world was that Soviet life was predictable and secure. Yet it proved difficult to represent a Soviet present via television news that was dynamic and exciting and at the same time reassuringly predictable. By contrast, news shows dedicated to foreign news exclusively multiplied in the 1970s and were able to implement many of the changes that television journalists had proposed in the late 1960s. Compared with news, serial films, which flourished after 1965, offered far more aesthetic resources for portraying Soviet superiority, increasingly understood to be based on the superior moral and spiritual qualities of 18

INTRODUCTION

the Soviet people. Chapter 5 examines the most iconic television miniseries of the 1970s, Seventeen Moments of Spring [Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny] (directed by Tatiana Lioznova, 1973). The film’s broadcast generated public conversations about moral complexity, about the need for new, postStalin heroes who might repair the damage of the Stalin cult and refound the Soviet Union’s postwar empire in Europe on firmer ground, and about television’s role in making the superiority of Soviet people (and thus the legitimacy of Soviet empire) transparent and comprehensible to viewers. The miniseries proposed a new deal between state and intelligentsia, based on shared values and, ultimately, subordination to police authority. However, the extreme moral ambiguity of the setting and characters of the miniseries, which made Gestapo headquarters in spring 1945 into a playground of witty bureaucrats and cultured spies, suggested that ascertaining the moral superiority of the Soviet person—the shared conviction that made the film’s new deal possible—was extremely difficult and required careful training. Chapters 6 and 7 address another leitmotif of Soviet culture in the 1970s: the problem of authority. Entitled to pleasure-giving entertainment since the Stalin years, and less afraid to demand it under Khrushchev, TV viewers began to complain, in letters to Central Television, about unfair play and the rules governing Central Television’s game shows and musical contests. As Chapter 6 demonstrates, during the 1960s vigorous conversations between viewers, critics, and TV producers about authority to judge sprang up around the game show Club of the Merry and Resourceful [Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh or KVN]. These conversations took place primarily off the air, in letters from viewers or in professional journals. By the late 1960s, however, this had changed. KVN was canceled in 1972, and its elite student protagonists were absent from Youth Desk game shows until the creation, in 1977, of another game show featuring student youth: Vladimir Voroshilov’s What? Where? When? [Chto? Gde? Kogda?]. But the experimentation with audience judging and fair rules that KVN ’s critics and fans had long called for was realized on a series of new game shows created in 1969–70. These new game shows moved debates about fair play on to the air and engaged viewers as voters and judges in more circumscribed, but politically crucial, contests of taste, consumer knowledge, and working-class youth identities.58 19

INTRODUCTION

Soviet game shows of the early 1970s that followed KVN conjured, in carefully delimited spheres, a Soviet system that observed its own democratic laws. Chapter 7 explores two other long-running game shows, Artloto (1971–78) and What? Where? When? (1977–present), that brought into being a world governed by other rules entirely. These experimental shows offer a broader context for understanding Gorbachev’s fateful decision to experiment with the fundamentals of Soviet political life: he and his generation were raised in an environment where altering the rules of the game was openly encouraged on Central Television’s most popular programming. The book concludes with an epilogue describing the crucial influence of Central Television’s experimental shows of the 1970s— especially game shows, but also musical contests and foreign news programs—on the most famous and politically influential shows of the late 1980s: innovative news programs like View [Vzgliad] and Twelfth Floor [Dvenadtsatyi etazh] that have been credited with both bringing down the Soviet state and launching a new generation of media elites, many of whom still dominate Russian media in the Putin era.

20

CHAPTER ONE

NOT A MIRROR BUT A MAGNIFYING GLASS Soviet Television Enthusiasm

For Soviet television’s early proponents, as for their counterparts in the United States and elsewhere in Europe, television was a new medium for a new era, capable of transforming social and political life.1 Because the spread of television technology was delayed by the Second World War, television gained a mass audience in Europe and the United States during the Cold War decades, becoming profoundly associated with the hopes and fears of that era.2 In Moscow, Vladimir Sappak, a theater critic and the “prophet” of early Soviet television, described the power of television in language that linked the new medium to the chief dream of the years after Stalin’s death: the restoration of sincerity, authenticity, and transparency in public and personal life.3 Television, he wrote, “demands authenticity and won’t tolerate falsehood. It notices each false note . . . in other words, it sharpens our sense of truth.”4 The mediation of the television screen, Sappak argued, made possible the acquisition of something like what Russian avant-gardists, before and after the 1917 revolution, had called “new vision [novoe zrenie]”—that is, a revolution in perception or a secular revelation brought about by art, through which people might be jolted out of their quotidian routines and caused to see the world in a 21

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new, more authentic way.5 “It seems,” Sappak wrote, “that very soon we will be able to speak about television in the words of Maiakovskii: ‘[it is] not a reflecting mirror, but—a magnifying glass’!”6 Television, Sappak proposed, made it possible to appropriate one of the most fundamental themes in Soviet culture—the achievement of “new vision” as a prerequisite for revolution—to the cause not only of de-Stalinization, but of the revolutionary transformation of Soviet life. Soviet television “enthusiasm,” as Kristin Roth-Ey has called the set of values and ambitions espoused by Central Television workers in the second half of the 1950s, was closely intertwined with the domestic Soviet political and intellectual currents of the time.7 But the rhetoric and ambitions of Central Television’s “golden age” also bore a striking resemblance to those of American television’s golden age a decade before, and to earlier Soviet hopes for other new media—this enthusiasm was a thoroughly transnational phenomenon.8 American TV critics and producers had also dreamed about television’s power to transcend time and space, make people transparent, and connect the intimate to the public. In the late 1940s and early 1950s a small but influential group of American television producers, journalists, and critics, including, most famously, Pat Weaver, the president of NBC from 1949 to 1956, began to describe television’s two most important features as its liveness and its power to enhance vision, granting viewers an X-ray view into everyday life, and especially into particular individuals on screen. These qualities, they argued, distinguished television from radio and cinema, which they saw as polluted by commercialism, and equipped it to serve as a powerful new medium for the perfection of American democracy and of every individual citizen, which they held up as a newly urgent goal in light of the perceived Soviet cultural threat.9 We should not be surprised by this broad set of common assumptions and values shared by Soviet, American, and Eastern and Western European television idealists.10 As David Caute has documented, the Cold War was fought in part as a contest over the inheritance of the Enlightenment; as with all contests, the competition was made possible by substantial agreement about cultural values and terms of play.11 The postwar shift toward social welfare and consumer bounty as a major site of competition between the Soviet Union and the United States encouraged the spread of television in those countries and their European spheres of 22

NOT A MIRROR BUT A MAGNIFYING GLASS

influence.12 It also put television at the heart of Cold War efforts to influence individual economic behavior and remake social and political life.13 On both sides of the Atlantic, the combination of postwar optimism and Cold War cultural insecurity intensified hopes that a powerful new technology could transform society, and brought the ambitions of small groups of cultural elites in both places into closer alignment. What is especially distinctive about Soviet television enthusiasm, in this context, is how long it lasted. Vladimir Sappak’s writings remained a touchstone for Soviet television staff long after the demise of live broadcasting at the end of the 1960s. Sappak was cited in the entry on “television broadcasting” in the 1969–78 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and his 1963 book Television and Us [Televidenie i my] is still assigned in Russian journalism departments today.14 At the heart of Soviet television enthusiasm, and likewise its Western counterparts, was the idea that television programming ought to be a special event, which would disrupt routines, rather than mimic and reinforce them. This festive view of television’s nature fit neatly with efforts to define Soviet culture against capitalist mass culture and against the stultifying rhythms of everyday life (byt).15 It also reflected the ambitions of Soviet television workers, who sought to write themselves into the artistic intelligentsia. The idea that television had transformative powers also met a real need, in the post-Stalin era, for cultural solutions to political problems. As the state shifted its primary means for mobilizing the population from coercion to persuasion, the previously marginal importance of propaganda and popular entertainments as a lever of influence grew significantly, just as Khrushchev’s shortening of the workweek increased leisure time for many Soviet citizens. Not every element of Soviet television enthusiasm could weather the major transformations of the 1960s—the decline of revolutionary optimism following the failure of Khrushchev’s tempestuous reforms, ongoing anxiety about foreign radio broadcasts to Soviet citizens, and the expansion of Central Television’s audience beyond educated urban elites. Nonetheless, I would like to stress the persistence, even the flourishing, of a more limited version of Soviet television enthusiasm through the 1970s and far beyond, to the present. After their euphoric debut at the Moscow Youth Festival in 1957, when it seemed to some observers that television could expose the revolutionary transformation of Soviet life without 23

NOT A MIRROR BUT A MAGNIFYING GLASS

recourse to any mediation at all, Central Television’s enthusiasts then shifted focus in response to the practical and political problems raised by this maximalist view of the role of television.16 The result was a flexible television aesthetics emphasizing two claims about the power of television: first, its capacity to create mass media festivals (in controlled, studio settings), where new modes of social and political interaction and participation could be explored; and second, its ability to reveal Soviet individuals more profoundly, locating the Cold War superiority of the USSR not in the material world but in the subjectivity of individual Soviet people.17 These two claims preserved the ideals and ambitious goals of television enthusiasm but proved highly adaptable: the subject of the camera and the content of the festival could change with the shifting political winds.

The Moscow Youth Festival and the Origins of Soviet Television Aesthetics In the narrative of television’s evolution that Central Television workers began to construct for themselves by the early 1960s, the Moscow Youth Festival appeared as the founding moment of a new, festive television aesthetics. The Youth Festival was created and imagined as a “media event,” one of “those historic occasions—mostly occasions of state—that are televised as they take place and transfix a nation or the world.”18 As Kristin Roth-Ey has demonstrated, plans for the Youth Festival paved the way for a long-sought bureaucratic reorganization and greater technical resources for Central Television. In the spring of 1957, following several years of agitation in the cultural press, with advocates including the actor Igor Il’inskii, Central Television was removed from the control of the Ministry of Culture and joined with radio in a new State Committee for Radio Broadcasting and Television, subordinate to the Council of Ministers [Gosudarstvennyi komitet po radioveshchaniiu i televideniiu pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR, henceforth Gosteleradio].19 As part of a new State Committee, Central Television now had direct access to a high-level patron, the chairman of the Council of Ministers, without competition from its rivals, theater and film, whose influence in the Ministry of Culture was far greater.20 Central Television received a new studio building, six new mobile broadcast stations, ten 16-millimeter film cameras, 24

NOT A MIRROR BUT A MAGNIFYING GLASS

and other equipment.21 So equipped, Central Television staff members were able to break out of the confining walls of the studio and into the streets, where the festival’s mass spectacles were breaking down the barrier between actors and audience, turning all of Moscow—remade for the occasion into an international metropolis—into a stage.22 For Sappak, the festival’s transformation of Moscow’s landscape was the most important subject of the camera’s gaze. What viewers saw, Sappak argued, was something greater than the greatest documentary film, a new and genuine fulfillment of the documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s vision of “life caught unawares” and forced to reveal its inner, immanent meaning.23 Like a film camera, Sappak wrote, “the lens of a television camera sees more clearly than we can, it can look into the faces of passersby, it can see that every building has its own identity, it can notice that which we don’t notice in the familiar [primel’kavshemsia] landscape.” According to Sappak, The frame renews and activates, transforms life into the object of observation, into a spectacle, allows it to be glanced at as if from outside. . . . Spontaneously or by the will of the cameraman-director . . . the “composition of the frame,” the artistic relationship between parts, emerges: all of this aesthetically organizes life, places accents, in the final analysis— expresses a relationship to life. And thus, the broadcast of the Moscow Festival was the highest achievement of documentary television.24

But, Sappak contended, television’s achievement at the Youth Festival had been greater than what would have been possible for documentary film. If films about the festival had been made and viewed later, Sappak argued, the experience would not be the same. “What if films had been made, where there was lighting, and intense montage, and a poetic voiceover,” he wrote. “They would also excite us. But it would not be the same unmediated, live, and unique excitement.”25 Because the television coverage was broadcast in real time, the audience’s participation was much deeper, almost physical. The viewers are living the same minute and the same way as those who are walking or riding through the streets, they feel the significance of this minute, its live breath. This is how it is—some in the streets, some at their windows, and others by their televisions, and they all share the same excitement, the same responsibility. We are all participants in the Moscow festival!26

25

NOT A MIRROR BUT A MAGNIFYING GLASS

Only live broadcasting made this sense of participation possible, including viewers in what Sappak identified as “an inspired improvisation—on the scale of the whole city.” Sappak’s presentation of the Youth Festival as a live, geographically dispersed “improvisation” in which people at home could participate suggests how closely linked his ideas about television’s nature and aesthetic qualities were, on one hand, to the mass festivals of the postrevolutionary avant-garde and, on the other, to a particular, optimistic, even euphoric view of the nature of everyday Soviet life during the Khrushchev Thaw. Sappak’s description of how television could create an aesthetic experience beyond that of simply witnessing the events notably leaves out many of the techniques used by the Soviet documentary filmmakers. In the first passage above, Sappak leaves it uncertain whether the “composition of the frame” arises “spontaneously” or “by the will of the cameramandirector.” This nearly passive mediation bears little resemblance to Sergei Eisenstein’s montage, for example, which shook viewers out of their visual routines by juxtaposing unlike images and breaking the frame.27 Unlike the Soviet 1920s, when art was to do the work of the aesthetic revolution, the late 1950s were the peak of Thaw optimism, so it was possible for Sappak to suggest that the revolutionary transformation of everyday life was becoming evident all around. For Sappak, part of what made television an especially promising candidate as an art form, despite the seemingly limited artistic resources of a live broadcast medium, was that life itself was becoming more like art. Sappak made this point cautiously, carefully alternating between the idea that television might help viewers see anew and the idea that this aesthetic revolution had already moved beyond the consciousness of enlightened individuals and into the documentary world of fact. Vertov’s desire to expose life’s underlying meaning by “catching it unawares” might no longer require such subterfuge as hidden cameras. “In our day,” Sappak wrote, “life is laying bare its substrata, forming and carrying to the surface ‘generalized’ characters, so that it seems to be doing art’s work for it.”28 Transforming life into art might require only the most minimal intervention by the artist-cameraman, or perhaps none at all. Sappak’s account of Central Television’s Youth Festival broadcasts thus exposed the special connection between Soviet television enthusiasm 26

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and the particular moment of Thaw euphoria and revolutionary expectation in which it was born, helping us to identify the features that distinguish the early hopes about Soviet television from similarly hyperbolic claims about television in the United States a decade earlier, and about earlier “new” media in the USSR. The problem of the relationship between artistic representation and documentary fact had, after all, a long history in Russian and Soviet art criticism. The idea of a “selftypifying” reality had appeared in Russian art criticism since the late nineteenth century.29 Eisenstein himself had famously imagined a “televisual wizard of the future,” a kind of improvising genius who could edit on the fly, without much recourse to artistic mediation.30 The Soviet novel of the 1930s also sought to bridge the gap between the world as it “is” and as it “ought to be” by moving seamlessly between the realistic and the epic, a feature of Soviet literature Katerina Clark has called “modal schizophrenia.”31 Yet Sappak’s influential account is different: the camera’s “new vision” is not only, as in the West, to promote sincerity by exposing corruption and lies, but also to reveal, without much recourse to mediation, the revolutionary transformation of everyday life and individual people. The kind of documentary television Sappak was describing also offered far less room for artifice than films or novels, and was thus highly vulnerable to the intrusion of the non-ideal. For Sappak, writing about the Youth Festival, television’s X-ray vision and power to interrupt viewer routines were inextricably linked to live broadcasting and to the everyday as the camera’s subject. As they sought to make festive television part of the regular broadcasting schedule, however, Central Television workers encountered a number of problems that made Sappak’s linkage between liveness, unscriptedness, and the everyday impossible. They soon learned to delink them.

The Short Life of VVV and the Long Life of TV “Mass Action” The first and most famous occasion for learning this lesson was a program that had been airing since May 1957 as part of the festival preparations. The program was an entertaining game show of sorts, titled Evening of Merry Questions [Vecher veselykh voprosov] and usually called 27

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by the acronym of its name in Russian, VVV. The story of VVV, and especially its demise, in September 1957, is another landmark in numerous memoirs about early television and subsequent historical accounts of those years.32 In my retelling, I would like to emphasize the show’s importance as, in Kristin Roth-Ey’s words, a “learning experience” rather than a defeat.33 As Roth-Ey has argued, the show’s dramatic cancellation marked the ending of the most ambitious, optimistic vision of television’s subject matter—the idea that unvarnished, unmediated ordinary people and everyday life on screen could convey the revolutionary transformation of Soviet life. It was also, however, a beginning. Conceived as a “mass action” on the model of early postrevolutionary mass festivals, VVV provided a model for the kinds of flexible television ceremonies whose contents could change in response to shifting political circumstances, but whose form offered an enduring place for experimentation and engagement with audiences on Central Television. VVV was a quiz show, based, according to memoir accounts, on a very popular Czechoslovakian TV show. Broadcast before a large studio audience, VVV mixed light and humorous trivia questions with musical and other performances. As part of the Youth Festival’s emphasis on youthful self-expression, VVV also promoted amateur, rather than professional, musicians and other performers.34 But the most striking feature of VVV was that it was not only live, like all Soviet television at the time, but largely unscripted, and there was no special set of contestants set off from the audience as a whole.35 Members of the studio audience were called up on stage at random—via the selection of seat numbers from a lottery drum, for example—to chat with the hosts and answer trivia questions for small or humorous prizes.36 The show’s questions and merry tasks sometimes took up moral themes, as part of a first attempt to use television to promote “politeness, ethics, and other questions of morals,” as one internal reviewer of the show put it in 1957.37 One moment, which the reviewer praised, featured a skit that showed a young man seated in a tram, while a young woman was standing; the audience pointed out the incorrectness of this behavior to the contestants on stage.38 Most of the show’s questions, however, were even lighter; as the show’s staff noted, the main goal was for it to be “merry and entertaining.”39 28

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The principle of direct audience participation extended to the television audience at home as well: the show announced contests in which any viewer at home could participate. This process was, of course, unpredictable and hard to control. VVV was canceled on September 29, 1957, after an excessively easy audience contest led to the arrival of an unruly crowd of nearly seven hundred poorly dressed Muscovites—some drunk, one carrying a live chicken—who flooded into the theater, overwhelming the stage and tearing down the curtain.40 Like both the Youth Festival broadcasts and quiz shows in the United States, however, VVV before its cancellation was far from a totally spontaneous slice of real life.41 Instead, VVV was, like the Youth Festival broadcasts, an “improvisation” akin to those in theater or music. This kind of improvisation incorporated moments of unpredictable and spontaneous creativity—the appearance of real people on screen in unscripted roles— into a carefully scripted framework (a parade, a game show), the terms of which were not meant to be violated. Unlike the visual experiments of avant-garde film, transgression had little role to play here, at least from the perspective of the show’s producers.42 The dramatic spectacle of its final episode (though greeted enthusiastically by callers to the station that day and by Sappak watching at home) was a nightmare scenario that some of the show’s production staff had worried about for months. In fact a television worker had raised this problem at a June staff meeting with a warning that turned out to be nearly prophetic: “the biggest catastrophe would be if some scoundrel [merzavets] manages to get through to the microphone. If that happens, then no excuses can save us [i togda my s vami ne otkupimsia nichem].”43 In the years after its cancellation, therefore, VVV came to be remembered and celebrated in the memoirs and other writings of participants in two contradictory ways. First, the show remained legendary as a warning about the limits of unmediated spontaneity on Central Television. As A. A. Alexeev remembered, “VVV stayed in our memory as a colossal exclamation point, as an inscription carved on a cliff in the Pamir mountains: ‘Traveler, beware! You are like a tear on an eyelash.’ ”44 More importantly, however, VVV was described as a key precedent for other programs, an example of a new, festive television genre, the television mass action [deistvo]. 29

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The word deistvo was used in the first years after the 1917 revolution to describe a new form of festive performance that would merge drama, myth, and ritual.45 For Central Television workers who sought to write themselves and their new and comparatively low-status medium into the heart of Soviet culture, the word had a number of charms.46 The early Soviet experiments in amateur theater and mass festivals offered VVV’s creators in the late 1950s a useful model for celebrating social unity at a time of enormous political conflict and psychological upheaval.47 The attempt, in early Soviet mass festivals, to break the barrier between audience and stage also took on renewed meaning in the context of de-Stalinization and Khrushchev’s call to reengage the Soviet people in public life.48 Among VVV’s central objectives was to “draw in,” or “attract [vovlech’]”—another word drawn from the theatrical avant-garde—television viewers. Indeed, VVV most closely resembled a planned mass action proposed by the Constructivist Aleksei Gan for the May Day holiday in 1920. Gan’s mass action was to be set in unbounded everyday spaces, featuring action that would be “not strictly choreographed and directed, but rather emerge spontaneously” from the masses.49 Unlike the best-known mass theatrical production of this period, Nikolai Evreinov’s reenactment in November 1920 of the storming of the Winter Palace, Gan’s mass action emphasized unscripted, spontaneous participation across a physical space too large to be taken in by any one spectator.50 Looking back in his memoir on his role in creating both VVV and its successor, a famous, and much longer-airing, game show called KVN, Sergei Muratov made the connection to Constructivism and Gan directly, calling himself a “constructor of play [konstruktor igry].”51 There were, of course, many important and revealing differences between Gan’s mass action and VVV’s deistvo, including the fact that VVV’s action took place indoors, on a stage, and with professional personnel directing the action. VVV also offered a version of mass action that was based on play, rather than on historical reenactment, which made the resulting spectacle’s meaning even more dependent on the behavior of its participants.52 In the tradition of workers’ amateur theater, VVV was a show whose most important meaning was to be found in the experience of participation.53 However foolish and entertaining VVV might be, its political meaning derived not from any specific messages (or lack thereof), 30

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but from the experience of unification and direct participation that it provided to viewers. As Roth-Ey has argued, VVV’s dramatic cancellation made clear that, from the perspective of the Central Committee, more direct political messages were necessary.54 The result, after a four-year hiatus during which Central Television created no new game shows, was the creation of a show called KVN (Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh, or Club of the Merry and Resourceful), likewise described by its creators as a television deistvo. Unlike VVV, KVN featured no “uncomfortable domesticity, no intrusion of personal objects and problems”; its contestants, initially limited to young male students at prestigious institutes, were “well screened and well scrubbed.”55 The addition of politically meaningful heroes did not, however, mean the end of television shows modeled on mass festivals. Indeed, memoir and other retrospective accounts describing VVV and KVN as mass actions helped preserve the ideals of television festivity by delinking those ideals from any particular subject matter. By stressing television’s ability to engage viewers in a new, televised form of deistvo, Central Television staff focused their understanding of television festivity on the formal qualities of television ceremonies, including their invitation to audiences to become direct and spontaneous participants in this new kind of performance, “organized by television,” a “little piece of life that is born at that very moment, before the viewers’ eyes.”56 This focus on form and on the interaction between viewer and screen (rather than camera and subject) made it possible to separate festive television ceremonies from any specific content (including “everyday life”) and ultimately, by the early 1970s, from live broadcasting itself.

The Model Person on Screen The television festival was not the only enduring strand of early TV enthusiasm that emerged from the 1950s on Central Television. As the replacement of VVV’s ordinary members of the public with KVN’s male intelligentsia youth suggests, however, the idea that the television camera could reveal the inner qualities of Soviet people also offered a route to the kind of transformative powers that Central Television workers sought 31

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to attribute to themselves and their medium. These programs could realize television’s potential as an art form by focusing on individuals, not street scenes or festive crowds, and revealing the transformation of particular people, not the whole of Soviet everyday life. This offered a conveniently limited stage on which to demonstrate the superiority of Soviet society. Most important, these programs could be produced in the studio, and demanded no special mobile equipment, yet they too could claim to take advantage of the unique nature of television, including its liveness and intimate setting in the home. Questions and conflicts quickly arose, however. Precisely which people were the camera’s ideal subjects, and how easy would the process of revealing their inner states and thoughts be? Did it happen automatically, via the (nearly nonexistent) mediation of the camera, or did it require careful training? The answers were related. As many Central Television staff and critics saw it, members of the intelligentsia—already fully developed “personalities [lichnosti]”—were best suited to stand up to the camera’s scrutiny. In the late 1950s, Central Television staff and commentators from the artistic intelligentsia had begun to describe two partially contradictory visions of the role of the television worker on screen—as guest in the home and as hero of the air. The first role was embodied by Central Television’s continuity announcers (diktory)—all female until Igor Kirillov joined them in the fall of 1957—who were responsible for everything from reading news reports to announcing each program as it began and ended.57 As with their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, close attention was paid to their clothing and hairstyles.58 They were famously known to viewers by the intimate diminutives of their first names, forms reserved for the closest friends and family members: Valentina Leont’eva was “Valechka,” Nina Kondratova, “Ninochka.”59 For many observers, including the film director Mikhail Romm, the popularity of the female diktory revealed one of television’s central qualities: its intimate mode of reception. Television’s location in the home, its reception by viewers alone or in small circles of family and friends, meant that television workers needed to adjust their manners and forms of address to fit this evening environment, where they were engaging with viewers as individuals, rather than as members of a crowd.60 A 32

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great deal of early commentary on the nature of on-camera performance was therefore focused, like contemporary discussions of radio, on the kinds of language required by television’s intimate setting and live broadcasts, rather than the visual dimension of television performance.61 Like their radio colleagues, television workers and critics in the late 1950s were responding to widespread criticism of artificiality in language, which began after the war and took on greater momentum after Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956.62 Artificial, stilted speech, official phrases—none were appropriate for television. Television was to be a “guest” in the home, a formula that was also widely used to describe broadcast media in the United States and elsewhere.63 As V. Ardamatskii put it in Literaturnaia gazeta in 1960, this domestic, intimate setting meant that television producers and performers “should sense the inappropriateness of stilted [vysprennego] conversation with viewers. They should be sure to toss out worn-out [tertykh] words like so much garbage, and seek the sort of precision in thought and expression that was indispensible in direct, intimate [zadushevnom] conversation with a friend.”64 For television workers and critics caught up in these currents, television’s visual nature also had a special role to play in exposing falsehood and promoting powerful, emotional connections between the person on screen and the viewer at home. Once again, Vladimir Sappak articulated this claim most eloquently, in a famous paean to Valentina Leont’eva.65 In Leont’eva’s on-screen manner, Sappak saw a kind of improvisation much like that of the Youth Festival, but relocated into the personality of a single, model Soviet person. “She acts on her own behalf . . . before us is not a carefully rehearsed event, checked against a stopwatch, but a live process being born before our eyes.”66 The stakes for the success or failure of this kind of television performance, however natural for someone like Leont’eva, were thus quite high. Sappak argued both that television “demands authenticity and won’t tolerate falsehood” and that such authenticity could not be created artificially, through extensive rehearsal, for example.67 This rhetoric, familiar from early American television enthusiasm as well, had very high stakes in a society that had quite recently seen the return of public “unmasking” of enemies in the years preceding Stalin’s death.68 Although he avoids the word for “unmasking” that 33

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was widely used in the press during the Terror, oblichenie, Sappak substitutes the foreign-origin equivalent, demaskirovat’, in one of his essays in 1961.69 The awkwardness of this substitution was not coincidental; the belief that television could “unmask” falsehood linked it dangerously closely to the unmasking of ostensible political enemies under Stalin, still a fresh and traumatic memory, and a source of social conflict in the wake of the 20th Party Congress. Television workers quickly found a solution: television’s X-ray vision would be theorized in entirely positive terms, as a way to grant viewers access to the interiority of model people. The challenge was to find the right subjects for the camera’s gaze, subjects who could withstand its powerful scrutiny.

The Intelligentsia on Screen The high political stakes associated with the television camera’s gaze by the early 1960s quickly led to the curtailment of the roles played by Central Television’s female continuity announcers in the imaginations of television critics and, ultimately, on air.70 Leont’eva and the one or two other female diktory who went on to host high-profile programs that allowed them to speak as if spontaneously, rather than openly reading from an approved text, were the exceptions that proved the rule. The kind of intimate connection with viewers that television made possible was simply too important: what was needed was not merely a guest in the home, but a hero of the air, a model personality who might exploit the intimate connection with viewers that television made possible in order to transform viewers in their own image. For many television critics, the people most suited to this new role were their own friends and peers—members of Moscow’s artistic intelligentsia.71 “Most needed, irreplaceable on television,” Sappak wrote in 1960, “are the kinds of people like Kornei Ivanovich Chukovskii [a poet and critic], like Iraklii Andronikov [a playwright and storyteller], like Ehrenburg [a writer and journalist], Iutkevich [a film director], Obraztsov [a puppet theater writer and director], Alpatov [an art critic], Shklovskii [a writer and critic]— people who not only have something to say, but who are able (and this is an unusual gift) to speak—no, to think—freely and openly in front of the camera.” 34

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In Sappak’s view, these individuals were characters “in an epic mode, whose inner selves . . . are in complete harmony with their outer selves and their social roles.”72 As in his description of the Youth Festival, here Sappak seemed to imagine that, with the right subjects, television’s mediation could indeed resemble that of a magnifying glass—as something that happened automatically via the lens, without the need for craft or skill on the part of television workers. Television workers, themselves enamored with the intellectual celebrities of those years, and responding to an audience still made up largely of educated Muscovites, created numerous programs that featured prominent intellectuals and artists as hosts and guests. These covered nearly every sphere of artistic activity, from the Television Journal “Art” [Televizionnyi zhurnal “Iskusstvo”] (1954) to Cinepanorama [Kinopanorama] (1962), to recurring broadcasts from the House of Actors in the late 1950s and early 1960s that, starting in 1964, came to be known as Theatrical Encounters [Teatral’nye vstrechi], as well as numerous programs that featured writers reading from their work. Yet it quickly became clear that television workers could not limit themselves to intellectuals on screen—in January 1960, when the Communist Party Central Committee issued its decree “On the future development of Soviet television,” it listed “leading people of industry and agriculture”—workers and collective farmers—first among the kinds of people that television should promote.73 As Leont’eva’s example suggests, for Sappak, too, the people most suited to television were not limited to members of the artistic intelligentsia. In an essay written in 1961, Sappak proposed another list of people ideally suited to television’s “microscope of truth,” including more conventional Communist heroes. “Very much needed are exemplary people [liudi-premery] like the communist with a crystal soul Julius Fucˇik, like the strong young woman Anne Frank, like the French doctor Alain Bombard . . . and like the man who achieved the ‘feat of the century,’ Yuri Gagarin.”74 But the television staff and intelligentsia observers debating and developing Sappak’s ideas in the early 1960s were quick to point out that only a few such individuals, and certainly not most factory workers and farmers, were capable of conveying their off-camera heroism in the unnatural circumstances of a television interview.75 Iraklii Andronikov described the problem in a lengthy article in Literaturnaia gazeta in 1961.76 “In order to 35

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speak before an audience,” he wrote, “you need to have a very important quality—the ability to think publicly [emphasis in the original]. This is difficult, because a speaker often gets nervous before a large or new audience.” The stakes were high, because of television’s enormous potential, as Andronikov saw it, to enhance communication. If the speaker was able to overcome his nerves, Andronikov argued, his sincere and unconstrained gestures and facial expressions could “increase the range of the spoken word, reveal more and more new reserves of meaning, make speech unusually accessible, graphic, expressive, and emotional.”77 Andronikov, a frequent guest on both radio and television, believed that television took another step beyond radio toward perfect communication: its ability not only to convey the improvisation and intonation of live speech, but also to make visible gesture and facial expression, was the realization of Maiakovskii’s vision of the complete conveyance of poetic intent, as demonstrated by on-air readings by the poet-author himself. Who, if not the intelligentsia, could meet these high standards for a successful on-screen performance? Not yet under significant pressure to replace mostly intelligentsia heroes with mostly working ones, as they would be by the late 1960s, Central Television staff members put themselves forward as candidates: television continuity announcers would be transformed into, or replaced by, professional journalists.

Journalists on Screen Soviet journalists, like their American colleagues, were quick to seek new and prominent roles on television. For many, television’s X-ray vision was a call to professionalization. In the late 1950s, TV staff ’s aspiration to speak spontaneously, in one’s own words, was linked to live, out-of-studio broadcasting, where the need for technical expertise and the celebration of live immediacy could help justify the choice of a journalist (rather than, for example, a scholar or Party official) to appear in the role of interpreter of Soviet life. Although out-of-studio broadcasts had begun with live transmissions of soccer games in 1949 (figure 1) and included several broadcasts from factories and airport runways, the debut of large-scale out-of-studio broadcasting for Central Television was, once again, the Moscow Youth Festival of June–July 1957. 36

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figure 1. “Television Broadcast from a Football Game at Dinamo Stadium.” M. Ozerskii, 1955. (GBU “TsGA Moskvy,” no. 0-17464; used with permission)

The team of television workers who broadcast live from the Youth Festival had undergone careful training in improvisational speaking on camera in order to create the illusion of spontaneity.78 However, extreme conditions during the festival quickly led to a breakdown in the broadcast plan, which had imagined carefully timed broadcasts from various points around the city. The result was actual spontaneity and exhilaration. As the young TV reporter Yuri Fokin was watching the festival parade from his broadcast point, he was hit by falling rubble when a roof collapsed under the weight of people who had climbed up for a view of the streets. Bleeding from his forehead, with his clothes ruined, Fokin caught a ride on a police motorcycle, made it to the Luzhniki stadium and, cleaned up and liberally injected with stimulants by medics, managed to broadcast live—on his own—for three hours, since his colleagues could not get through the crowds outside the stadium.79 This experience of coordinating the Youth Festival broadcasts

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stood in stark contrast to Central Television’s participation, just weeks earlier, in the spring of 1957, in a campaign promoting Khrushchev’s reorganization of the Soviet government into Economic Councils [sovnarkhozy] instead of ministries. Television’s new cameras supported the campaign with images of demonstrations in favor of the change, along with a prescribed text to be read by the diktory. Similarly, in the weeks before the Youth Festival, television had joined with the rest of the Soviet mass media in denouncing the Anti-Party Group for their opposition to these and other changes promoted by Khrushchev. For television workers this meant reading the text of the Plenum’s decree on air several times, a role that offered far less professional satisfaction than nearly dying under collapsing buildings and heroically going on to broadcast live.80 The rising ambitions of television workers in this period mirrored developments in the West. In the United States and Western Europe, journalists in the 1950s appeared on screen in increasingly active roles that quickly made them famous. The high-stakes geopolitics of the Cold War demanded more of journalists than simply the recitation of facts; in response, radio and television journalists recast themselves as intellectuals, experts who could give meaning to events and help viewers orient themselves in the changing political landscape.81 In 1958, Soviet journalists gained their own professional union, the Union of Journalists [Soiuz zhurnalistov], a professional organization akin to those established under Stalin for writers and visual, theatrical, and cinematic artists.82 Yet there was a specific focus to the way Soviet journalists articulated their role and ambitions during the Thaw, particularly in relation to domestic, rather than foreign, life. What mattered most to TV journalists about their participation in the Youth Festival was not so much what they said but how they said it; the way that their own emotions and experiences on camera directly conveyed the “enthusiasm” of the festival, relocating its action and meaning into their own on-screen personas. It was this relocation of the act of interpretation, the source of meaning, into the persona of the journalist that made it possible for television journalists to claim powerful new roles for themselves. By drawing on their personal qualities and emotions, they argued, they could communicate the meaning of events that were far less exciting, transgressive, and visually appealing than the Youth Festival had been. 38

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The assumption of more prominent on-air roles by Soviet television journalists, however, did not immediately follow the Youth Festival. Instead, the change took place gradually, alongside related changes in radio and print journalism. It was also driven partly by exposure to European television, where program hosts and commentators played a larger role on screen than their Soviet counterparts in the late 1950s. Although Soviet television workers had always had some sense of television in Eastern and Western Europe and the United States, through access to foreign publications and especially the stories of colleagues and friends who traveled abroad, their first major direct exposure came in 1958, when the first group of television workers to be sent abroad traveled to Brussels for the World Expo. The group, made up of cameramen, editors, directors, and announcers, was to set up and staff a working television studio in the Soviet pavilion of the exhibition.83 It was precisely the roles of journalists on European “conversational” programs that most struck one Central Television editor, Lidiia Glukhovskaia. Over the course of the preparations and the exhibition itself, the Soviet television workers could watch the European TV teams at work among the exhibits. “We were overwhelmed,” she wrote, “by the unaccustomed diversity of jobs for commentators. Our acquaintance with so many European television commentators was a clear lesson for all of us for the future. Their mastery, their technique in plying their craft were worth studying, not least because at the Central Television Studio in 1958 we didn’t have a single commentator on staff !”84 The European commentators impressed Glukhovskaia and her colleagues with their ability to create fully realized, “dramaturgically structured” programs while seeming to use only interviews with randomly selected people on the street and, of course, broadcasting live. Over the course of the exhibition, they gained insight into the methods the Europeans were using—for one broadcast, they had scrupulously prepared portraits of particular colleagues working in the various national pavilions, but interspersed them with unplanned mini-interviews with passersby to create the feeling of complete spontaneity.85 The “feeling” of spontaneity, carefully planned and executed in advance, was precisely the goal of Soviet television journalists, who sought to realize their vision of television enthusiasm through professional skill, rather than giftedness and serendipity. 39

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Glukhovskaia’s memoir also suggested how the craftsmanship of the European television reporting teams offered Soviet television workers a second path to higher status on the air, one that did not depend on relocating the action of a news story into the personality of the journalist himself. In the work of European journalists in Brussels, Glukhovskaia saw journalists working not as model individuals, but as directors, artists themselves, actively bringing out meaning by portraying other people. In this version, the art of the television commentator included several diverse skills. Glukhovskaia admired the European commentators’ careful planning and preparation, as well as their skillful, creative selection of particular people or examples from a body of extensive research. The best commentators, including the French reporter (and Russian-born émigré) Leon Zitrone, were also skilled interlocutors and listeners, asking precisely the right question and bringing out the person being featured.86 As Glukhovskaia remembers, Zitrone listened to his subject “with concentration and without any false emotionality, as if absorbing the interviewee’s every word and simultaneously rewarding and encouraging him with his gaze.”87 In this role, the television commentator might be on screen and in a prominent, prestigious role, but he or she was also clearly there to facilitate the viewer’s acquaintance with another person, who was the true subject of the program. This version of the television commentator’s role, balancing a sense of pride in professionalism with subordination to the interview subject as the real focus of television’s “microscope of truth,” had, as it turned out, a bright future. As television’s reach and prestige grew, so too did the interest and concern of the Communist Party’s highest leadership. And, like the creative intelligentsia and television workers themselves, they had particular ideas about what kinds of people television ought to propagandize.

The Party Intervenes: The 1960 Central Committee Decree on Television The Party leadership’s first public entrance into the debate about television’s nature and purpose took place only in January 1960, when the Central Committee published its first explicit statement about television’s 40

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future, the decree “On the Future Development of Soviet Television.”88 As Kristin Roth-Ey has observed, this was a surprisingly belated intervention, given the state’s already significant investment in the new medium.89 According to the decree itself, in 1960 there were over four million television sets in the Soviet Union, and a network of seventy television centers and rebroadcasting towers reached a territory encompassing seventy million people.90 In light of this significant commitment to television, the decree laid out the Central Committee’s expectations not only for Central Television, but for local television studios and recalcitrant local Party officials and existing Soviet arts organizations, who were still failing (or refusing) to cooperate with the new medium. What the decree on television also suggests, however, is the surprising extent to which the Central Committee in January 1960 agreed with the basic premises about television’s form being outlined in the press by television critics and put into practice by television workers. The committee differed on the question of what and who was to be shown, not how. As Roth-Ey has shown, the 1960 declaration (and another that followed in 1962) mandated regular appearances by Party officials on television, calling for more discussions with “leading people of industry and agriculture, ministers and their vice-ministers, directors of Party, state, and social organizations, and state farms,” in addition to existing coverage of “editors of newspapers and journals, leaders [deiatelei] of science, literature, and art.”91 The expansion of Soviet television’s audience by 1960 was another motivating factor behind the publication of this decree. “Television opens great new possibilities,” it proclaimed, for the daily political, cultural, and aesthetic development [vospitanie] of the population, including those of its layers that are the very least reached by mass-political work.”92 Those least reached by mass-political work meant, chiefly, workers, collective farmers, and viewers in remote regions, where Party agitators were thin on the ground and poorly trained; it also referred to housewives, the elderly, and the disabled, since so much of Soviet propaganda and agitation was organized through the workplace. The Central Committee decree of January 1960 thus foreshadowed the direction of future pressures from above, which would focus, in the 1970s, on making a lesseducated mass viewer the most important imagined audience for Central Television’s programming. 41

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These calls for changes in television’s content were to be accompanied, however, by improvements in its form that sounded very familiar from the enthusiasts’ writings in Literaturnaia gazeta and elsewhere. There should be more out-of-studio reporting, but from rural areas and regions outside Moscow. Although the document did not quite use the word “improvisation,” it did note that television conversations often were not (but, implicitly, should be) “sincere [zadushevnyi]” and “uninhibited [neprinuzhdennyi].” These were both Thaw keywords that were frequently held up as ideals in articles on television in Literaturnaia gazeta and in Sappak’s work.93 Finally, the document criticized television workers for copying cinema and theater, and for not devoting enough attention to “the creation of various types and forms of artistic programs specific to [svoistvennykh] television.”94 In effect, the Party’s 1960 decree largely affirmed the enthusiasts’ formal agenda. When local Party officials refused to appear on television or were so unsuccessful that they were not invited back, television staff members stepped in with their own proposals about the necessary qualities of television personalities, and how best to convey those qualities televisually.95 The exuberance of television workers about their own roles on screen, playing themselves as model people and ingratiating themselves as friends and guests of every Soviet family, was captured in the first meeting of what would become an annual event, the Seminar on Reportage [seminar po reportazhu or, in fine Soviet acronym style, Sempore] in Tallinn in 1961. Taking up their role as representatives of the leading television studio in the Soviet Union, Central Television staff members, including Leont’eva and Yuri Fokin, delivered speeches to an audience of television directors, journalists, and editors from studios all over the Soviet Union. If in 1958 there had been no commentators at Soviet Central Television, leaving Glukhovskaia and her colleagues to wonder at the diversity and skill of the European television commentators they met in Brussels, by 1961 Fokin could speak as a celebrated television commentator himself and an authority on the profession. What for Sappak happened nearly automatically, for Fokin was the result of careful craft. Fokin gave the audience of local studio workers detailed instructions on how to tailor their behavior on screen to maximize viewers’ engagement. The first key step to gaining viewers’ trust and 42

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attention was to speak honestly and authentically, he told them, and take on an intimate tone appropriate to the living room. In your appearance, your manner, your work with people, your conversations with others in the studio, you must be not only very direct, as Valentina Mikhailovna [Leont’eva] said, but also very charming and intimate. If you make contact with people, if you can speak thoughtfully, target them precisely, make exact contact, then an invisible spindle [os’] will appear between your crystal lens and your invisible interlocutor, and then things will go just great for you . . . if you aren’t didactic in your manner, if you don’t use stereotyped phrases, then they will believe you.96

Truthfulness and sincerity were explicitly connected to the objectives of the Party—in order to serve as a commentator, “who brings meaning to events,” not just a “reporter who only talks about [them],” the television worker’s honesty had to extend to his political orientation. “The commentator reflects and bears the entire Party perspective, all the positions and tasks standing before our Party,” Fokin told the assembled audience. “It is he who holds in his mind all the passion of Soviet Party-minded journalism.”97 Fokin had just informed his audience that he, unlike Valentina Leont’eva, did not use the Stanislavsky method, since he was not trained as an actor. Yet the idea that commentators had to truly believe in the message they were presenting was an essential part of Stanislavsky’s theory of acting. In My Life in Art, Stanislavsky wrote about the necessity that the actor believe in what he is performing: “The actor must first of all believe in everything that takes place on the stage, and most of all he must believe in what he himself is doing. And one can only believe in the truth.” In the face of the artificiality of everything around him on stage, the props and bright lights, the truth was to be found inside the actor himself. “I speak of the truth of emotions,” Stanislavsky wrote; “I am interested in the truth that is within myself, the truth of my relation to this or that event on stage.”98 Following Stanislavsky, Fokin relocated the meaning of Soviet events and everyday life into the Party-minded subjectivity of journalists themselves. By 1961, television enthusiasts could bask in the glory of significant accomplishments. It was a euphoric year in Soviet history generally. That

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spring, Yuri Gagarin flew into space; that fall, at the 22nd Party Congress, Khrushchev announced that the current generation would live to see communism. Central Television was also clearly ascendant. Construction had begun on the massive Ostankino television center in 1960. In 1959 Pravda had begun printing the Central Television schedule in its daily editions, foreseeing a time when nearly everyone who could get a copy of Pravda could also watch Central Television, broadcasting from Moscow.99 Central Television’s enhanced power and prestige by 1961 were also clearly visible in its coverage of a festive occasion that resembled the Youth Festival in several ways: the live broadcast of Yuri Gagarin’s return to Moscow on April 12. Euphoric crowds, Gagarin’s youthful, telegenic face—it was another one of those special moments when the official script of Soviet history came true, and everyone’s behavior could be at once scripted and spontaneous, Party-minded and authentic.100 Once again, television cameras, with the help of more than ten mobile broadcast stations, followed the path of a festive procession that wound its way like a conquering army through Moscow’s streets. No longer confined to the crowded streets below, a team of Central Television reporters took to the air in a helicopter loaned to them by the military.101 Once again, international boundaries broke down as the whole world was gathered in Moscow, this time virtually.102 Television cameras, broadcasting not only to Soviet screens but to Eastern and even Western Europe and beyond via the newly established “Intervision” system, followed Gagarin’s progress from his arrival at Vnukovo airport to his entry into Red Square itself.103 Once again, Sappak was in the audience at home. For him, Gagarin’s arrival, like the Youth Festival, was a “glimpse into the future.” Television made it possible to take this person and “break through [prorvat’sia] to something internal, trustworthy, intimate, avoiding the pathos of the radio announcers, the crowded press conferences, the stiff and measured [arshinnye] portraits on the front page of the newspaper.”104 As Sappak imagined it, television ideally captured Gagarin’s status as “personexample” and conveyed it to viewers. Unlike the Youth Festival, where it was unclear who the heroes were—the multinational crowds? The television reporters themselves?—here the spotlight was on the progress of a single conqueror, whose triumphant entry into Moscow reenacted his recent conquest of the universe. 44

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By definition, events like Gagarin’s return from the cosmos could not happen every day, and most people who appeared on television were nothing like Gagarin. Central Television’s staff had had to abandon Sappak’s claim that everyday people and street life could be just as impressive (if they had ever believed it). As they encountered the challenges of the post-Thaw decades, however, Central Television workers found that they had already identified the bases of a more modest and flexible television aesthetics, one that could accommodate these new pressures while pleasing cultural authorities in the Gosteleradio leadership and the Central Committee. Indeed, by accepting that life was not necessarily becoming more like art and that the television lens would not reveal the revolutionary transformation of people or life without a great deal of help from TV workers themselves, Central Television’s staffers facilitated the birth of their own profession. If special festive programs—rather than simply cameras on the street—were necessary to draw viewers in and make the future visible in the present, then TV workers could create them. If exposing the admirable qualities of model Soviet people required a great deal of special training, then TV workers could acquire those skills. The decline of optimism was thus a spur to craft and experimentation. A television aesthetics based on the creation of television ceremonies— variety and game shows in particular—and penetrating television portraits proved very useful to the late Soviet state. There were substantial continuities between the imperatives of the Thaw and those of the later 1960s and ’70s: even as Thaw optimism waned, the state was still looking for ways to dramatize and foster social unity, engage viewers actively, and promote heroes that could convey new structures of feeling that would be appropriate to the Soviet present. The Brezhnev-era state still needed an innovative culture, not least because of the abandonment of both large-scale coercion and economic reform as ways to mobilize the population and increase economic productivity. Documenting the transformation of Soviet life and exposing the revolutionary meaning to be found in it came to require more and more intervention, and correspondingly Central Television became all the more necessary. In the 1970s and ’80s, television workers could still claim to unify journalism and art by “aesthetically giving meaning” to the camera’s subjects, now arguing that pretaped reportage and television films could carry out the same artistic functions as live television.105 In 45

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1982, echoing Sappak, Fokin, and, through them, Maiakovskii, Vertov, and Stanislavsky, a young TV announcer named Tatiana Vedeneeva told the journal Television and Radio Broadcasting: “The [television] screen is a big magnifying glass. Everything is visible, even the things in life you usually don’t notice. If you don’t believe in the things you’re talking about, the viewer will never believe you.”106 Despite the obstacles they faced, Central Television workers could thus imagine themselves, across three decades, as continually engaged in the same, experimental project.

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CHAPTER TWO

P R O G R A M M NA I A P O L I T I K A Audience Research and the Creation of the Channel 1 Schedule

The articulation of an aesthetic and political role for television was not the only fundamental task for Central Television in its first decade after the 1957 Youth Festival: the relationship between this new, experimental medium and its audience remained to be negotiated.1 Here, Sappak’s influential writings proved much less helpful. Sappak’s relationship to real viewers was based on enormous optimism: in the era of Sputnik, Gagarin, and communism within our lifetimes, it was still possible to assume, as Sappak did, that all viewers would naturally share Sappak’s own euphoric experience of television viewing, regardless of what was actually on, or when.2 By 1964–65, however, when Leonid Brezhnev’s more sober administrators replaced Khrushchev’s at Central Television, this optimistic unconcern with the real television audience was no longer tenable. Concerns about the impact of foreign broadcasting to Soviet audiences had preoccupied Soviet radio professionals and driven them to seek new, more engaging forms in the 1950s and early 1960s.3 As television began to reach a mass audience, its producers felt similar pressure to ensure that the new medium would really serve as an alternative to foreign radio listening. 47

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Debates about how to imagine and respond to Central Television’s audience were intensified by a more proximate problem as well: the ongoing construction of the Ostankino Television Center and the anticipation, with its opening and the launch of the Molniia communications satellites, of an all-Union broadcast channel—Central Television Channel 1—that would reach all eleven Soviet time zones by 1967.4 The creation of a new, all-Union Channel 1 schedule was a momentous task—technically, symbolically, and politically—that required a clear understanding of Central Television’s relationship to its audience. As the television producer and scholar Rudol’f Boretskii put it in an important book titled Television Schedule: An Essay in the Theory of Propaganda (1967): “The relationship between the audience and the screen is the foundation of the construction of the schedule.”5 If the newspaper was limited by space, and its priorities conveyed spatially, television was limited by the hours when viewers might plausibly watch and had to convey its priorities temporally.6 Each decision about what to include in Channel 1’s schedule and when was thus predicated on a number of other decisions, about the relationship between cultural producers and cultural consumers, which groups of viewers it was most important to reach, and how to reach them most effectively. Revealingly, the conflicts and questions surrounding the television schedule became known, at Central Television, as “programmnaia politika,” a term that literally means “scheduling politics,” but that also evokes another, much broader sense of “programma” as a political agenda or platform. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Central Television staff engaged these fundamental questions about whom Soviet television should serve and how.7 The Liberman-Kosygin reforms, which increased the accountability of Soviet film and print journalism to their audiences by shifting those institutions to a self-financing basis (in which ticket or subscription sales became an important source of income), did not extend to television and radio.8 But Central Television was nonetheless affected, in the second half of the 1960s, by the accompanying surge in sociological research on media audiences.9 Central Television participated actively in the new audience research, both intensifying traditional ways of learning about its audience, such as the study of viewer letters, and adopting new ones, such as the sociological survey. 48

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Central Television’s encounter with audience research and its effort to rethink “scheduling politics” in light of diminishing Cold War optimism led to a new consensus about the purpose of television broadcasting in the Soviet system, which was reflected in a new television schedule developed in 1968–70. The new schedule sharply limited direct political messages and propaganda, which viewers and many television staff members saw as boring and alienating, to the periphery of the television schedule, filling the most-watched evening and weekend hours with popular entertainments and news that sought to attract the largest possible audience and aimed to influence that audience only indirectly. While directly propagandistic programming never disappeared from Central Television, it was, by the beginning of the 1970s, increasingly marginalized and excluded from desirable time slots. This approach to the Channel 1 schedule, developed in the late 1960s, remained in place throughout the Brezhnev era.

Imagining the Soviet Television Audience Central Television’s reconsideration of its relationship to its audience in the mid-1960s was one discrete moment in a much longer conversation among Soviet media producers about the proper relationship between media and their audiences in a revolutionary socialist state. This was not an exclusively Soviet problem: measuring audience response is essential for any state or other entity that wishes to engage, persuade, or otherwise influence a group of people. But it posed unique problems in a state without a legitimate role for markets and without a spontaneous political arena. Soviet cultural products were always to be created “in the interest” of the Soviet people, but that interest could be defined in multiple ways: as enlightenment, as mobilization, or as the provision of consumer pleasures.10 The marketing of cultural products was further complicated by the fact that television shows, like movies, books, and radio, were a luxury, not a necessity.11 Their consumption was in most regards entirely voluntary, unlike attendance at political lectures organized in schools and workplaces, for example.12 Soviet cultural producers in the 1920s and 1930s had developed several approaches to the problem of how to account for audience demand in 49

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light of the Party’s exclusive role as cultural “vanguard.” One response was to imagine that everyone wanted to see, read, or listen to the things the state wanted them to see, read, or listen to. And if they did not, then their bad taste excluded them from the legitimate audience in any case. When this approach seemed to doom cultural products to molder on the shelves, cultural producers argued that real audiences could be transformed into ideal ones. As Brian Kassof has shown, book publishers in the 1920s proposed that, without competition from lesser alternatives, the right books could create their own market by transforming audiences’ tastes and creating an ideal audience where there had been none before.13 A third response acknowledged that the media would need to engage the audience in order to enlighten or mobilize it, using entertaining content instrumentally. This entailed, of course, determining what music and which narrative forms were popular. That might be accomplished by employing cultural producers who were themselves from the targeted groups.14 Or it could be found out, via meetings with the target audience, attention to their letters to state institutions, or rudimentary market research.15 Finally, a fourth solution was to make pleasing and entertaining a large audience an end in itself, even if that meant moving any enlightening or mobilizing messages far into the background. There were many possible reasons to adopt this last approach, including justifying the state’s claims to represent the interests of regular people, competing with foreign cultural products, and the sense that having a good time should be a natural part of being a good Soviet citizen. At the beginning of the 1960s, all of the above responses to the problem of audience tastes could still be invoked by the Central Television staff. In the early 1960s, viewer complaints about boring programming and the lack of quality entertainment on television were often dismissed by simply excluding those viewers who expressed dissatisfaction from the legitimate Soviet television audience. As I. G. Katsev, the vice editor of the Film Programs Desk, put it in a meeting of Central Television’s Party committee in January 1962: There are letters and then there are letters . . . I do not understand why we even need to discuss letters from undiscerning [netrebovatel’nye] viewers here. Of course we get letters requesting that we show intellectually and

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artistically weak films. What, are we going to treat those letters as a typical viewer’s opinion? What would be the point of that?16

Katsev’s comment reflects a total lack of interest in whether “undiscerning” audience responses were in fact typical of any significant group of viewers, or indeed most of them. This was because acknowledging such a fact would not contribute to any goal held by Soviet television broadcasters, as Katsev saw those goals in 1962. The notion that some viewers’ opinions could be ignored or dismissed was likewise the basis for Central Television’s approach to audience research before the mid-1960s. From its earliest years, Central Television’s staff personnel learned about audience reactions to their programs via informal methods. They knew of the immense popularity of the quiz program VVV in 1957 only from conversations overheard in public transit or opinions solicited by simply leaving the studio and stopping passersby.17 Over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s, Soviet television workers developed more active methods for learning about their audience. These methods, however, focused primarily on particular model audiences that could stand in for the whole Soviet audience, not as a representative sample, but as an ideal version of the population of viewers. One method that served both to demonstrate Central Television’s interest in viewer opinions and to gather feedback from a broader range of audiences was to organize ad hoc meetings between a few Central Television producers and groups of television viewers drawn from a factory or other institution. By the early 1960s, these meetings between television and radio workers and viewer-listeners had been taking place for more than a decade, organized by a special office of the State Television and Radio Committee, the Scientific-Methodological Division [Nauchnometodicheskii otdel (NMO)]. Founded quietly in the summer of 1944 as the Scientific-Methodological Office [kabinet] and staffed by only one person, the division gradually expanded the scope of its activities in support of its 1944 mission, to “study methodological issues facing local and central radio broadcasting, promoting the spread of best practices learned by radio broadcast divisions, and studying the practices of foreign radio broadcasters.” In 1954, the Scientific-Methodological Office was promoted to the status of a division; in 1957 a new decree on its organizational mission

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included, for the first time, the obligation to “develop methods for studying the effectiveness of radio and television programs.”18 In 1959, as part of Khrushchev’s campaign to promote popular engagement in state institutions, this aspect of the Scientific-Methodological Division’s work was made more explicit still. The NMO was to “organize and run, jointly with radio and the Central Television Studio . . . meetings with radio listeners and TV viewers to acquaint them with the work and plans of All-Union Radio and the Central Television Studio.” In fact, such meetings with audience members had been taking place since 1948, and had always been intended to gather feedback as well as to inform viewers about changes and new programs.19 Meetings with viewers could also serve as a forum for the distribution of opinion surveys, a practice that began in the Central Television Studio on a very small scale as early as 1945.20 Still, both their limited scale and the sense that these meetings were chiefly designed to help viewers to learn about Central Television, rather than allowing Central Television to learn about viewers, were typical of Thaw-era audience research.21 The study of viewer letters offered the Central Television staff a somewhat broader slice of viewer feedback. Like other Soviet institutions, Central Television had received and taken account of viewer letters since its early years, including letters that were sent to newspapers or Party organizations rather than directly to Central Television.22 With the growth of Central Television’s audience and the increase in Party scrutiny of its content and responsiveness to audience demands in the late 1950s, however, Central Television’s treatment of viewer letters began to change. In 1957, the Central Television Studio gained its own “Letters and Work with the Masses” Desk [redaktsiia], separate from radio’s listener letter department.23 This new Letters Desk began to produce reports on television viewer letters, analyzing their number and distribution between the different content-producing bureaus, and providing samples of their content, including direct quotes from individual letters, and summaries of topics that received multiple letters.24 Television producers working on particular shows were at least theoretically expected to respond to viewer complaints about their programs, both by implementing changes and by writing back to individual viewers. By 1960, the Letters Desk was producing an annual report not only analyzing 52

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the viewer letters for the previous year but also providing statistics on how many letters individual program desks had answered in a timely manner (and chiding those content desks that had performed poorly).25 The Letters Desk tabulated viewer letters in a manner resembling the treatment of sociological data, but letter writers were another kind of model audience, and Central Television responded to them as such.26 Viewers who identified themselves as Party members and sent their letters about television directly to the Central Committee were handled more attentively, for example. The Central Committee archives have preserved several such letters and the detailed investigations and responses they could generate, even when their content strayed into the realm of the paranoid delusional.27 Despite Central Television’s desire for critical feedback from viewer letters, the vast majority of letters were requests for the address of a medical clinic or model workplace that had been featured.28 These letters can be read in various ways—as reflections of an information deficit, or as indirect protests of Central Television’s constant focus on a handful of success stories that were remote from most citizens’ everyday experiences. But, regardless of their content, letters were a valuable source of information about one question in particular: how many people were watching particular shows. For this reason, letters were carefully counted to determine which programs and content desks were receiving the most mail. The absence of significant viewer response in the form of letters was viewed as a serious problem for an individual program. Viewer write-in quizzes [viktoriny], a practice borrowed from radio and typical of Western commercial broadcasting as well, were widely used on Central Television to generate viewer letters, allowing programs that were otherwise unpopular to appear less so.29 Despite the diverse uses the Letters Desk found for viewer letters, in the mid-1960s the Central Television NMO began to express dissatisfaction with letters and meetings as the sole source for information about the television audience.30 Letters and meetings with viewers, one NMO report concluded in 1965, were all “mediated [posrednicheskie]” rather than direct sources of information about the audience’s tastes and habits. “The general problem of these methods,” the report’s author wrote, “is that they are partial, not complete; they do not sufficiently reflect the opinion 53

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of the whole listening or viewing audience. They cannot tell broadcast staff about the size of their audience or how viewers and listeners would rate a given program.”31 That kind of information could only be gathered via a method that was just beginning to gain prominence in other media (and official acceptance) in the mid-1960s: the sociological survey.32

The Television Schedule as a Problem Central Television’s growing interest in more accurate and comprehensive information about its audience coincided with a growing consensus among Central Television’s leadership and the content desks that Central Television could not afford to ignore the real preferences of its audience if it aimed to persuade them. In reports urging the adoption of scientific, sociological methods of audience study, the NMO staff argued that television’s (and radio’s) form demanded compromise with viewers’ tastes, since viewers could simply turn off programs they found unappealing. “Everyone knows about the noble goals of Soviet radio and television,” one report observed in 1965, “but good intentions cannot always be realized unless we make programs with sufficient tact and mastery.”33 This need for compromise had not been properly recognized in the past, the report continued. For a long time a “theory of imposition [teoriia naviazyvaniia]” held sway, and the ability to impose your will was seen as the best quality of an executive [rukovoditel’]. The logic went as follows: if a person does not understand that something is being done in his best interest there’s no reason to wait until he reaches that understanding . . . later he’ll get it and thank us for it. This is an extremely primitive and false view . . . with one quick gesture the TV viewer and radio listener can get out from “under the influence” of a program that’s boring him. That’s the unique quality of radio and television, which differentiates it from lectures, films, or plays. There someone can be snoring, but nonetheless stay in the hall or theater pretending that he’s paying attention. But with television or radio . . . he can just turn off the set and go play dominos . . .34

Because of radio and television’s setting in the home, in other words, realizing the “progressive goals” of Soviet broadcasting seemed to require both concessions to audience tastes and a great deal of skill on the part of 54

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television’s writers, directors, and editors. Their “mastery and tact” was needed for the creation of shows that were enlightening, but not boring. The report’s authors also offered a highly politicized, post-Stalin reading of the shortcomings of Central Television’s programming. Television that was unconcerned with viewer reactions was not only unsuccessful, it was based on a dangerously mistaken understanding of leadership. Rather than “imposing their will,” the report suggested, Central Television should understand the power of viewers to reject unappealing content and should work to attract and persuade them.35 At the heart of this new approach was a much more attentive relationship to the television schedule, which was central to engaging viewers—no matter how appealing the content, if it was on when most viewers were not watching, it would not have an audience. Indeed, Central Television’s analysis of letters from viewers in the early 1960s had revealed that they were enormously dissatisfied with the schedule. Their numerous complaints about interruptions and inaccuracies in the published broadcast schedule were discussed at internal staff meetings.36 Many of their complaints were part of a larger problem, already familiar from the experience of radio. Different parts of the population had different scheduling needs and demands, many of which were not reconcilable; a system that set out to satisfy everyone’s demands was bound to fail. A State Radio and Television Committee meeting in 1957 fixed on just one aspect of the problem: schoolchildren studying in the second shift (a widespread practice in Soviet schools) did their homework in the mornings, during the same time when factory workers on the first shift took their lunch breaks.37 Which was worse—distracting schoolchildren from their homework or denying workers entertaining content during their leisure time? A significant amount of viewer mail was devoted to this kind of scheduling dilemma. Despite this, in June 1963, Central Television solicited yet more viewer feedback by publishing a draft schedule and requesting responses by mail. More than seven hundred letters came in, with complaints ranging from the time slots of favorite programs to the overall timing of the viewing day. Collective farmers wanted evening programs to begin later during the growing season, to reflect their late return from the fields; parents wanted them to end earlier, since in their one-room 55

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communal apartments they had to turn off the set along with the lights when the children went to bed. While some of these viewer scheduling conflicts were simply unsolvable, the television schedules of the Khrushchev era had other problems that many in the Central Television administration recognized as obstacles to reaching viewers. In the 1950s and at least into the first half of the 1960s the Soviet television schedule was quite irregular and frequently inaccurate.38 Writing about her trip to Brussels with Central Television colleagues for the World Expo in 1958, Lidiia Glukhovskaia recalled her astonishment at learning that Belgian television closely followed a schedule, printed in the national newspaper, that featured the same programs at the same time each day: neither was true of Soviet television in 1958.39 The following television schedules from 1959, when Pravda began publishing them on its back page, suggest how little consistency there was in the evening’s lineup, making it difficult for viewers to know when to turn on their sets if they were interested in catching the news or a play or a film. Monday, July 13, 1959 6:00 p.m. Children’s program. Concert by the Minsk Palace of Pioneers song and dance ensemble. 6:45 p.m. Bringing Books to the Masses. 7:15 p.m. Latest News. 7:30 p.m. Lev Tolstoy’s Power of Darkness, performed by the State Academic Little [Malyi] Theater. Afterwards, Latest News. Monday, October 12, 1959 7:00 p.m. Children’s program. Interesting Meetings Club. 7:30 p.m. Latest News. 7:45 p.m. “A Mission of Peace and Friendship”—Television account [khronika] of N. S. Khrushchev’s arrival in the United States. 9:15 p.m. “The Writer Leonid Leonov”—television essay [ocherk]. Afterwards, Latest News.40

These schedules have a certain basic organization. The evening’s broadcast began with a children’s program; there were two very brief news broadcasts, modeled on the radio news program of the same name, one of which finished the broadcast day. A directly propagandistic program usually preceded the first broadcast of Latest News but sometimes 56

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followed it if there was an event of unique importance, such as Khrushchev’s visit to the United States. Yet these schedules were far from completely predictable for viewers, even when they were accurate. The second broadcast of Latest News had no fixed time, for example, remaining dependent on when the artistic program ended. The artistic programming, moreover, was strongly high-cultural in emphasis; the “television essay” on Leonov was likely based mainly on interviews and footage of Leonov reading—talking heads, in other words. In 1965, Central Television’s Channel 1 schedule was substantially more diverse. Thursday, January 14, 1965 Channel 1: 5:00 p.m. For schoolchildren. School of Beginning Athletes. 5:30 p.m. For schoolchildren. Lenin Listens to Music. 6:00 p.m. Television News. 6:10 p.m. On the 50th anniversary of the first Russian revolution. “The Party’s Flag.” Film essay. 6:30 p.m. S. Lvov’s “Seventh Move [Sed’moi khod].” Television play premiere. 8:00 p.m. In the Stadiums and Playing Fields [a sports news program]. 9:00 p.m. “From Melody to Melody.” Film-concert from the Kiev television studio. 9:30 p.m. News Relay [a weekly news commentary program led by Yuri Fokin].

This weekday broadcast schedule still began with children’s programming, with news (Television News—now renamed to distinguish it from radio’s Latest News and News Relay, a lengthy news show hosted by the journalist Yuri Fokin) still beginning and ending the main block aimed at adult viewers. New genres were appearing, including made-for-television plays and films (the first television serial film on Central Television, Drawing Fire onto Ourselves [Vyzyvaem ogon’ na sebia], was broadcast in 1965), and old ones increasing in quantity, as with sports programming.41 Still, the lengthy, talk-based programs on political and news themes continued to have a significant place in the schedule. This particular day featured a long block of entertainment—a TV play, sports news, and a concert. But News Relay, which featured Fokin and his artistic and scientific elite friends 57

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expounding on political and aesthetic topics, also took up a very large part of the evening schedule. News Relay was irregularly scheduled intentionally —it was always broadcast last, so that its participants could be free to follow their thoughts and ideas for as long as they deemed necessary. The show often lasted two hours or more. Sappak had, of course, written in praise precisely of talking heads on television, provided they were the right heads—eloquent members of the artistic intelligentsia and other “crystal souls,” talented television professionals like Valentina Leont’eva and Fokin himself. By the mid-1960s, however, the question of whether viewers actually agreed had become unavoidable.

Sociological Surveys and Their Findings Sociological audience research seemed able to solve multiple problems that faced Central Television by the mid-1960s, offering a new, scientific basis for decisions about both individual shows and their place in a new all-Union Channel 1 schedule. Despite some limitations on the validity of their data, the surveys conducted by the NMO in the second half of the 1960s did reveal a great deal about the Soviet television audience’s preferences. As Central Television workers quickly found, however, there was not always a clear path from findings to policies. Instead, knowing more about audiences raised yet more questions about Central Television’s relationship to its audience, and about the meaning and purpose of audience research in a socialist media system. Central Television had conducted audience surveys on a very small scale, as part of face-to-face meetings with audience members, since the immediate postwar period.42 The use of written surveys increased substantially in the early 1960s, however, and they began to focus on areas of particular interest to broadcasters, such as viewers’ opinions on particular shows during times of the day or week for which schedule changes were being considered.43 The use of surveys expanded exponentially, however, beginning in 1965, when Soviet sociology dramatically raised its public profile.44 In 1965, NMO surveys began to be referred to as “sociological research [sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia],” rather than simply “written surveys [anketnye oprosy].” They also began to be conducted separately from meetings with 58

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viewers, and administered in person by small teams of NMO staff or volunteer interviewers, or by telephone.45 Sample sizes also began to increase—one 1967 survey covered almost 3,500 viewers in twenty cities and towns around the USSR that received Central Television—and NMO researchers began to use somewhat more complex sampling methods, although, as Ellen Mickiewicz has noted, these were not the most sophisticated available.46 The surveys conducted by the NMO from 1965 to 1967 suggest that the information sought by Soviet broadcasters was very similar to what American broadcasters were interested in finding out from the Nielsen ratings system. NMO surveys asked who was watching what and when. At what times of the day and week was the largest viewing audience gathered? Which shows attracted which segments of the population (divided most often by the key Soviet identifier, profession, but also by age, gender, educational level, and rural or urban place of residence)?47 These interests were motivated by the need to develop a new broadcast schedule that would take into account the daily habits of the large new audience that Ostankino and satellite broadcasting would bring into Central Television’s range. The most basic finding of the audience surveys the NMO conducted during the second half of the 1960s was the preference for entertaining content, and the corresponding belief that television ought to complement, rather than compete with, radio and newspapers by providing movies, plays, game shows, and popular music. In a survey of Moscow employees in the Ministry of Trade from 1963, one respondent complained that television “often carries speeches and lectures on different questions, and often these speeches take up a lot of time. Would it not be better to put all that on the radio and use the television schedule entirely for its primary purpose, that is, showing movies, concerts, plays, and other forms of art?”48 Viewers writing comments on their surveys complained that television’s entertainment offerings were often inferior to those of newspapers and radio, and that television was taking them away from those media. Rural viewers, a new and important audience for television, were particularly vocal in their calls for entertaining content. Over and over, they argued that, unlike their urban peers, they had few alternatives to the mass media for their leisure time. A collective farmer from Riazan 59

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reported that viewers kept watching in the vain hope that something good might be on next. “We sit in the evenings by the television and wait,” she wrote. “What if all of a sudden they show something good? Because of this anticipation, we do not even listen to the radio in the evening anymore.” “Newspapers and journals print interesting articles and stories about heroism, the exposure of spies and so forth,” added a milkmaid from the same farm, “but television does not want to ‘seduce [zavlekat’]’ us. These are the kinds of programs that rural viewers want to see.”49 These findings were confirmed in studies being conducted for other media audiences. In 1967 the newspaper Izvestiia conducted a nationwide survey of its readership, which found that the four categories of articles relating most directly to Soviet ideology and domestic news were the ones that respondents reported reading least often. Other politically important parts of the paper, such as foreign news, were read regularly by a large percentage of readers, however. According to an article in the journal Zhurnalist, the Izvestiia sample was based on the responses of 26,000 readers out of seven million who received the survey; given the level of political engagement required to respond to the survey at all, it seems likely that mass opinion was even less favorable toward domestic news and direct propaganda.50 Asking viewers to compare their feelings about discussions of MarxismLeninism and popular music concerts was highly problematic in the Soviet context. A survey in 1965 of the “popularity” of television and radio programs, for example, had been careful to divide shows into categories so that popularity of a given news or propaganda program was measured only relative to other shows in the same category.51 Similarly, NMO surveys in 1965–66 often focused on just one genre of program—artistic programs, for example, or those for young audiences—in order to prevent awkward comparisons between political and entertainment genres.52 As sociology’s star rose and Soviet intellectuals were caught up in the ideas that underlay socialist reform movements of 1967–68, however, some of these barriers began to fall. Beginning in 1967, the NMO began to ask viewers even more directly what they were and were not watching, and its reports did not shrink from juxtaposing the popularity (or lack thereof) of directly political programs with that of entertaining programs. One survey defined its goal as “getting data characterizing TV viewers’ 60

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relationship to the major programs on Central Television.” Viewers were asked two main questions: which programs should stay in the current Central Television schedule and which should go? Twelve additional questions were intended “to uncover in more detail which aspects of these programs viewers like and which they do not like.” The survey also listed thirty-five Central Television programs by name and asked viewers to give their opinions on them.53 Another NMO survey in 1967 asked viewers to rate how “satisfied” they were with the programs produced by particular content desks.54 In 1967 the NMO also began to administer surveys that asked audience members to simply report what they had watched, from all categories, over the course of the previous week. The result, in at least one survey, was a ranked list not unlike those provided by the American ratings system, with the most-watched programs on top. That survey, conducted among employees at seven Moscow factories and other institutions for the period July 30–August 5, 1967, found that the top four programs viewed by the respondents were soccer, boxing, the variety show Little Blue Flame, and a Soviet Navy parade. The program after the parade, Fokin’s News Relay (which contained a good deal of information on foreign affairs and cultural life) was seventh. After that, the next news program was the daily Television News, at a distant fourteenth. Other than a youth journal, called Youth on the Air [V efire molodost’], which mainly featured contests and musical performances, no propagandistic programs had been mentioned often enough even to make the list.55 Central Television’s leadership, and even the survey authors in the NMO itself, were not entirely comfortable with these explicit new data about the popularity of directly propagandistic programming. Although the NMO staff asked many of the same questions as American media audience research and explicitly sought to borrow their methods, they stressed that they were motivated by a different relationship between broadcasters and their audience than that of the capitalist West. “We are often told to study their [American] sociological research methods for learning about the television and radio audience,” an NMO report from 1965 commented, “but we forget about the means and goals for this research, and their goals are completely unacceptable [nepriemlemy] to us.”56 Defining the difference between Soviet audience study practices and 61

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American or capitalist ones became a critically important topic in discussions of how the new sociological research would be put to use in Central Television’s programming and scheduling decisions. The first distinction Central Television and the NMO staff drew was in the purpose of socialist broadcasting, and its relationship to audience tastes. This was a distinction that underlay the official Soviet understanding of the goals of state action, and of Soviet superiority in the Cold War competition with the West. As Nikolai Mesiatsev, the chairman of Gosteleradio from 1964 to 1970, put it in a 1966 speech to the committee’s Party members, television sets were not only a consumer good essential to the leisure-oriented culture of a wealthy society. “It seems clear,” he observed, “that the criteria for determining the wealth of a particular society should include not just material goods per ‘soul’ of the population, but, if we can put it this way, the production of that soul itself. The well-rounded development of the individual is the factor defining the economic and cultural, material and spiritual progress of society.”57 Likewise, one NMO report stressed that the damning data they were presenting “in no way means that broadcasting should only chase after majority tastes, sink to their level . . . the way American television does. That would be to risk turning broadcasting into ‘tailism,’ making it lose its progressive meaning.” Instead, the report continued, Soviet television should seek to make progressive, enlightening, or mobilizing content pleasurable for most viewers. “We’re talking about making programs that, while serving progressive goals, interest many people,” the report’s authors continued, “programs that the majority of people enjoy, that would enter their consciousness, and that are not turned off because of their boring presentation, insufficiently interesting content, or lack of clarity.”58 The problem of viewer discontent with explicitly political programming was thus about quality improvement and professional skill—important state messages must be made meaningful and appealing to “many people . . . the majority of people,” so that they would not be turned off and thereby fail to meet their persuasive goals. This professional task for television workers was made more urgent by another important finding of the sociological studies of the mid to late 1960s: the Soviet audience was listening to foreign radio broadcasts, and Soviet TV and radio news programs were failing to compete. One survey 62

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of the viewing and listening habits of employees at seven Moscow institutions, including the Red October chocolate factory, an electrical lighting factory, a computing center of the Central Statistical Directorate, and the Ministry of Trade, revealed that 54 percent of those surveyed listened to foreign radio broadcasts. Many of them, the NMO’s audience research group reported, “explained that they listened to foreign stations because of the insufficient timeliness and concreteness of our [Soviet] news.” NMO interviewers drew their respondents out on this theme. “It’s shameful,” one viewer stated, “that our radio and television are not as timely as their foreign counterparts. Radio and television should broadcast and explain more facts, not only important ones, but also minor but characteristic ones.” “Less mechanical recitation of facts [nachetnichestvo] and boring theoretical explanations,” another viewer suggested. “Inform us in a timely manner about political events, and do not let the bourgeois radio stations’ news go without proper explanation.”59 Unlike the more ambivalent responses of print journalists at Komsomol’skaia Pravda to similar audience survey results, Central Television’s response to this new information was not entirely negative. The sociological survey data produced by the NMO required a careful response, since a Soviet media organization could not embrace entertainment without regard to political content. At the same time, many in Central Television had long advocated for content that influenced its audience indirectly and avoided precisely those elements that most irritated viewers, such as dry, formalized language and the production delays and censorship requirements that made Soviet news so much slower than its foreign radio competitors. Their responses to the encounter with sociological audience research, designed to explain the unpopularity of directly political programs in a way that preserved the enlightening values of a socialist political system, amounted to a redefinition of the “mass” television audience and the kind of programming that should be aimed at that mass viewer.

The Demanding and Differentiated Soviet Viewer Central Television’s encounter with sociological audience research took place in the context of a broader reassessment of the nature of the Soviet audience that was happening at the same time in film, radio, and print 63

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journalism as well.60 Central Television staff members, like many of their colleagues in print media and film, sought to explain and respond to the revelations from audience research about the unpopularity of enlightening and mobilizing content in two ways. The first was to explain the unpopularity of overtly political content and news programming with reference to the rapid cultural advancement of the Soviet audience— their intellectual demands were outpacing the qualifications of Central Television’s staff. As Soviet people moved into new private dwellings, the argument went, their cultural level rose. “In the old apartment, we watched everything,” one television viewer told the journalist and television critic Georgii Fere in 1967, but “since we moved, we’ve started to watch more selectively.”61 In response, staff members needed to adapt programs to meet viewer demands, particularly for visual content, timely news reports, and lively presentation devoid of formulaic language.62 This resort to viewers’ sophistication offered a convenient fiction: it both confirmed the historical narrative about unerring progress that underlay the Communist Party’s legitimacy and returned to a familiar discourse that depicted bureaucrats lagging behind a dynamic Soviet population. The idea that viewers demanded sophisticated, timely, appealing programming further provided a pretext for journalists, directors, and writers who sought greater freedom to create just such complex, engaging, and timely work.63 It was also linked, however, to serious concerns about the cynicism and disillusionment of viewers who had lived through the public criticism of Stalin under Khrushchev and, following his ouster in 1964, of Khrushchev himself.64 Another way to explain the unpopularity of certain kinds of politically significant programming was to argue that these programs had never been intended for all television viewers in the first place, but rather, were better suited for narrowly defined subaudiences. Here, like their counterparts in film and the press, Central Television workers turned to the idea of a differentiated audience, calling for a programming strategy based on targeting specific groups of viewers.65 The idea of focusing on specific viewers was not entirely new to Central Television, but the nature of that specificity changed significantly after 1965. As early as the late 1950s television enthusiasts had called for creating content that had an “exact address”—a particular viewer—in 64

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mind. They had meant this rather abstractly, however, as a kind of mental practice for television professionals like Valentina Leont’eva. Ideally, they were to imagine an educated, curious, enthusiastic Soviet citizen as their audience, and shape their on-screen manner to facilitate connection with such a person, who might be found in many milieus. With the expansion of sociological surveys this “exact address” came to refer primarily to concrete subgroups of the population, defined by categories like gender, education, and profession. Despite the strong resemblance between this strategy and Western marketing research with its demographically defined target audiences, Soviet television producers, like their counterparts in film, put the differentiated audience at the center of their claim to distinctiveness relative to Western commercial broadcasters.66 For broadcasters in America and other capitalist countries, the NMO observed, the objective was to have the largest percentage of the total audience tuned in, and to keep them viewing as long as possible. Their studies, one NMO report in 1965 on survey results declared, aimed to “discover the most fashionable, stupefying programs, in order to use them as a model and glue as many people as possible to their televisions and radios, regardless of their interests or needs.” Soviet broadcasters, by contrast, had objectives that “coincide with the interests of viewers and listeners . . . That’s why,” the report continued, “our programs are not addressed to everyone, but to certain groups of people, with consideration for their interests, age, gender, education, even place of residence.”67 Not every show would appeal to every person, and that was the point: TV viewing would not turn Soviet citizens into zombies. After a program that interested them they would turn off the set and go pursue some other valuable activity. Yet although Central Television programmers and executives often rattled off a list of social categories like age, gender, and educational level to describe the kind of differentiation they meant, in practice they were far more comfortable describing viewers in terms of tastes and interests, rather than social identifiers. Gender was an especially striking example of this discomfort. The difference between a theater aficionado and a sports fan, for example, often served as a way to talk about gender indirectly, as when female viewers described the “total breakdown” in the household when a boxing match conflicted with a movie.68 The notion 65

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that social differences represented substantive, potentially insurmountable divisions within the television audience—gaps that could not be bridged by shared appreciation for sport or opera—remained an uncomfortable one. The striking lack of interest in appealing to women viewers as such was also reflected in Central Television’s daytime schedule, which was based, from the late 1960s onward, on a rebroadcast of the previous night’s programming.69 The politically important audience for Soviet daytime television was not women working in the home, or even retirees, but workers and schoolchildren who worked or attended school during the second shift and were thus unable to watch the evening broadcast.70 When Central Television executives or journalists mentioned the specific viewing habits of female viewers, it was usually in reference to their extremely limited leisure time compared with men, thus hinting that women were only marginal members of the television audience and further rendering female viewers invisible.71 At a time when anxieties about this absorbing new medium’s impact on the Soviet cultural system were still high, however, differentiating Central Television’s programming by taste gained a foothold among some Central Television executives as a way of promoting a limited role for television in Soviet people’s leisure time.72 In 1967, Anatolii Bogomolov, the head of the Central Television Programming Desk, which was responsible for setting the schedule, published an article in Zhurnalist titled “Watch Less Television,” in which he responded to accusations in the press that Central Television’s content was boring. Critics assumed, he argued, that every minute of the television schedule should interest every viewer. This was an impossible and undesirable goal, especially since Central Television’s broadcasts on two Moscow channels totaled eighteen hours per day, and would soon, with the opening of Ostankino, increase to fifty hours per day, on four Moscow channels. Instead, Soviet television programmers sought to “teach the viewer to choose . . . teach him to watch as little as possible,” because There’s such a thing as too much entertainment [ob”estsia zrelishchem]. The misuse of television is dangerous, for both viewers and television itself. [After hours of watching] viewers . . . can no longer make sense of what they’re seeing and hearing. We get letters surprisingly similar to those of

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the critics: “yesterday I watched all evening and nothing good was on.” It’s hard not to answer, “Do not spend the whole evening in front of the TV! Watch one or two programs, a broadcast of Television News, and then go read for a while or take a walk.”73

This view was enduring; it was still widespread enough in 1970 to be mocked in a cartoon in the satirical journal Krokodil’ (figure 2). The cartoon depicts a stern male diktor leaning out of the screen to scold a viewer: “What are you doing lazing around the house? Go take a walk or something!”

figure 2. “What are you doing lazing around the house? Go take a walk or something!” S. Spasskii, Krokodil 33 (November 1970). 67

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A second response was to accept that certain programs could hope to appeal only to a limited audience. As one survey report in 1965 observed, one major reason why certain kinds of propagandistic and educational programs were not attracting viewers was that they failed to properly understand the narrowness of their audience. If they were promoting the latest advances in chemical engineering, for example, they should not pitch their content toward a high-school-educated audience, who were not likely to be interested. If they did so, they would also alienate the specialists that such programs most needed to reach.74 This response raised as many questions as it answered, however. Who, after all, would decide which shows were for all viewers, and which were for narrow audiences? Targeting differentiated audiences was also a formidable bureaucratic task, particularly given the multi-channel situation that Central Television’s arrival would create or augment in regional cities. In December 1965, the NMO organized a conference on the question of programming and coordination between channels in advance of the opening of Ostankino, which would increase the number of channels available in Moscow to four and, outside Moscow, would create a competitive situation between local stations and the newly national Central Television Channel 1. The conference brought together representatives of the Aesthetics Section of the Ministry of Culture’s Institute of History of the Arts, the Moscow State University Department of Radio and Television, and the Sociological Research Laboratory of Leningrad State University. There were also powerful listeners in the room: representatives of the Central Committee’s Higher Party School, the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Philosophy, and the Academy of Social Sciences (all central institutions for the formation of Soviet ideology); as well as members of the Writers’, Cinematographers’, and Journalists’ Unions, and students from Moscow State University and the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography. The conference was timed to coincide with a quarterly meeting of local TV editors in charge of scheduling [programmnye redaktory], so local schedulers from forty cities were also present.75 The conference report stressed the unique task facing Soviet television as it sought to create a single national schedule for Central Television Channel 1 that would adhere to “socialist” principles of broadcasting, based on limiting viewing and the avoidance of market competition 68

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between channels. “As soon as a second channel appears alongside an existing one, a ‘competitive’ situation arises,” the conference report observed. This situation demanded the coordination of different channel schedules, the creation, for each channel, of a distinct “profile [litso].” The question for television programmers, the report continued, was “should the viewer have the chance, every day, to make a free choice between channels, or should the viewing audience be more or less proportionally divided between separate channels” targeting their particular social or interest groups?76 The conference discussions had generated an answer to this question: viewers should indeed have a choice, but within fairly strict terms that would prevent both excessive viewing and unwanted “competition” between different channels and individual programs. Scheduling should be based on the division of programs into two categories: those for “a mass audience, i.e. the whole audience” and those “for a differentiated audience, for particular groups among the audience, differing from one another by age, sex, education, profession, interests and so forth.” Conference participants proposed that programs aimed at a mass audience, but of different genres (movies and sports, for example) should be scheduled to coincide with one another. When programs aimed at specific audiences (like agricultural workers) were on one channel, the other channel should also show a narrowly targeted program, but for a different subgroup of the audience. Most important of all, they noted, was to “carefully ensure that a political program did not share a time slot with a movie or entertaining variety show” on the other channel.77 Putting aside the basic impossibility of this level of control and coordination every day across central and regional channels, the NMO offered two conflicting interpretations of what kinds of programming should be considered of interest to the whole audience. In one report in 1965, the NMO defined programming for a mass audience as only events of the “greatest social significance, like the opening of the 22nd Party Congress.”78 At the December conference on scheduling later that same year, however, mass audience programming had largely been defined as movies and musical variety shows.79 This uncertainty about what programs were appropriate for a mass audience revealed the contradiction—apparent to filmmakers and print 69

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journalists as well—between the two major characteristics of “socialist” television’s relationship to its audience that Central Television’s Programming Desk and the NMO sought to publicize. Soviet television could not easily “produce [viewers’] souls,” raising them up with enlightening programs, if it was also committed to limiting their viewing by making television that was narrowly targeted, and thus not interesting to many or most viewers.80 After all, viewers could and did choose to limit their viewing by simply switching off the set; their alternative forms of leisure might, moreover, not be enlightening—they might take a walk, as Bogomolov and the Krokodil’ cartoonist suggested, but they might also play dominos or, worse, get drunk with friends.81 Thus boredom in front of the screen was a problem at least equal to, if not more serious than, the problem of “too much entertainment.” The fear that viewers might be bored by television’s offerings was reflected in a cartoon in Krokodil from 1965 (figure 3). The caption reads “TV viewer-innovator”—a reference to state-sponsored workplace innovation contests. Here, the viewer has fitted his television with an alarm clock, and has fallen asleep while an old man on screen reads from a script, the kind of illustration-free lecture about which viewers frequently complained. Soviet programmers’ basic assumption that political or philosophical lectures did not belong on prime time distinguished Soviet television from, for example, French state television, where leading philosophers appeared regularly from 1951 onward, as part of an ongoing effort to address France’s past and articulate a French national identity.82 Central Television was also constrained by the schedules of actual viewers—only part of the television viewing day found most viewers at home and ready to be engaged. Sociological audience research had revealed that Soviet television had a weekday evening equivalent of the American networks’ “prime time,” which the television staff referred to as “the most-watched time [samoe smotrovoe vremia].” As one survey in 1967 revealed, on weekdays viewing among the Moscow audience jumped from about 13 percent of the audience at 5 p.m. to 27 percent at 6 p.m., to 52 percent at 7 p.m. (a whopping 66 percent in the provincial cities surveyed), to a peak of 62 percent (76 percent in the provinces) at 9 p.m., then declined substantially beginning at 11 p.m. There were also revelations about weekend viewing audiences, most importantly that they were 70

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figure 3. “Television viewer-innovator.” E. Gurov, Krokodil 17 (June 1965).

sizable. On Saturdays, the increase in viewing began an hour earlier, at 5 p.m., and lasted until 11. On Sundays, daytime viewing was far greater than on Saturdays or weekdays, but evening viewing was also high, peaking at 8 or 9 p.m.83 How should these data be reconciled with the division of the schedule into programming for a mass audience versus narrowly defined subgroups? In a 1968 speech at another conference devoted to the improvement of television scheduling, chairman of the State Television and Radio Committee Nikolai Mesiatsev touched on the fact that the mass audience was, by definition, also a prime time audience. “Programming is impossible,” he declared, without taking into account the many kinds of sociological data that in large part determine television’s effectiveness . . . One of the goals of 71

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television scheduling is to bring a given program to the group of viewers for which it is intended. Sometimes that group is 5 percent of the population, sometimes all 100 percent. But however small or big this audience is, television can only hope to gain the attention of the great mass of viewers during their leisure time.84

Mesiatsev’s rather evasive formulation suggested the problem at the heart of the differentiated audience idea—given that television had a mass audience for only a few hours each evening and on weekends, it made little sense to devote those hours to narrowly targeted programming. Why invest so heavily in television’s infrastructure if the state was not going to use it to influence as many viewers as possible? Central Television’s “prime time” should be devoted to programming that met viewer demands for entertainment, but without compromising the goal of influencing viewers. The nature of that influence, however, might be defined in multiple ways: providing a “good mood” to recharge workers after a long day, meeting the demand that surveys had revealed for timely and dynamic news programming, and engaging viewers with game shows and musical contests featuring audience participation, another way of making socialist television “active” without requiring viewers to turn off their sets. The loser was non-news, directly propagandistic programming, now understood to be aimed chiefly at a narrow audience of professional propagandists. To a striking extent, this was the solution reached by Central Television for its Channel 1 schedule, beginning in 1968–69. The weekday evening bloc of programming, which began at 5 p.m. and ended at 11 p.m. on weeknights (at 12 a.m. on Friday nights), reserved only one half hour for direct propagandistic, non-news programming—lectures on MarxismLeninism and the like. In 1969–70 schedule, for example, that half hour was scheduled for 6:30–7 p.m., and was devoted to a continuing education program for professional propagandists called Leninist University of Millions—a name that belied its peripheral timeslot and narrow target audience—on Mondays and Tuesdays, and Problems of Agriculture on Wednesdays and Thursdays.85 Beginning at 7 p.m., when most office workers were just arriving home, the 1969–70 evening schedule followed a clear organizational structure: a bloc of entertaining content, usually with mass appeal, such as a movie, a 72

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sports match, a concert, or a television theater program; followed by Time [Programma “Vremia”], the new evening news program, first at approximately 8:30 and then, from 1972, firmly at 9:00, the hour when television viewing peaked. This was followed by another bloc of entertaining content, often an original television program about movies, sports, theater, or music. In its first year, Time’s starting time, like that of Latest News before it, often varied to fit in the intermission between halves of a soccer game or an operetta.86 In this larger context, the schedule made some effort to coordinate viewing, albeit primarily toward the goal of making the schedule more predictable, ensuring that viewers were able to find the entertaining content they were most interested in seeing. A 1968 document explained the changes to the 1968–69 schedule planned for 1969–70 as follows: The main artistic program for the evening, from 7–8:30 p.m., will continue to be aimed at the widest audience and include works in various genres, but their sequence will be changed in the new schedule. Before, on Mondays, for example, the schedule included musical TV plays, dramatic theater, productions of literary adaptations, and (pre-taped) sports broadcasts. Now, every artistic genre will be assigned to a particular day. . . . This will be more convenient for the viewer and improve coordination . . . of the channels, preventing the broadcast of one kind of program (movies, music, literature, theater) on different channels.87

Regardless of this coordination of different varieties of mass-audience entertaining content over the course of a week, the evening schedule’s exclusive devotion to news and entertainment was abundantly clear to the Social-Political Programs Desk staff. In July 1966, the Social-Political Programs Desk submitted a formal complaint to Gosteleradio’s leadership regarding the exclusion of their programs from the evening timeslots. “We are interested in ensuring that social-political programs gather the largest possible viewing audience, capturing the widest possible range of social groups: workers, collective farmers, intelligentsia and especially youth,” the complaint declared. However, if you look closely at the current schedule for Central Television Channel 1, you can only conclude that the great majority of social-political programs are broadcast at times when they can only gather the smallest

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number of viewers. The most-watched time on television is the period from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. At that time the largest audience gathers in front of their screens. Nonetheless, social-political programs are almost never broadcast during those hours.88

If direct propaganda programs could not be broadcast during weekday evening prime time, surely that left many other times in the schedule when they might be welcome. But as the case of weekend programming suggests, all periods of time when viewership was expected to be high were increasingly defined as times of rest—from work and, likewise, from direct political messages.

Weekend Programming: Enlightenment for a Mass Audience Weekends, when viewers had many leisure options and were not exhausted from the workday, seemingly offered an ideal opportunity to focus on specific social groups defined by occupation and taste, allowing programmers greater scope for realizing the conflicting goals of Soviet audience research and broadcast scheduling. Since television programming ran all day, it could theoretically accommodate targeted content for multiple constituencies, including programs with titles like Village Hour and For Soldiers of the Soviet Army. But weekends also found a mass audience glued to their TV screens.89 The weekend schedules of the late 1960s and 1970s suggest that even on weekends Central Television programmers understood any time that attracted a mass audience as an opportunity to influence only indirectly, with pleasing and popular programming. The weekend schedule was designed to mirror viewers’ routines, which were understood to revolve around rest and affect their receptivity to political messages. Saturday evenings featured two blocs of very popular entertainment content, including variety shows, humor, the very popular youth comedy game show KVN, movies, and a musical “entertaining [razvlekatel’naia]” program. 90 Sundays featured more “cultural-enlightening” and educational programming than weekdays or Saturdays, because “Sunday is the second day of rest, when viewers are able, after some time to unwind, to devote a large part of their leisure time to expanding their

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worldview and deepening their knowledge.” Nonetheless, “Sunday is still a day of rest, and for that reason the broadcasting schedule on Sundays will contain a sufficient quantity of artistic programs.”91 Educational and social-political programming on Saturdays and Sundays was also designed to be maximally attractive to all viewers. As an NMO report in 1972 noted, although educational programming made up a large percentage of the Sunday schedule—16.5 percent of total broadcasting on Sundays versus 8.6 percent on weekdays and 7.5 percent on Saturdays— the very socially diverse weekend audience meant that all of these programs aimed to be accessible and interesting to any viewer. They were created, the NMO report stressed, “in a form that is engaging and accessible to the most diverse groups of viewers,” a form that necessarily limited their content. Most of these Sunday “educational” programs were so entertaining and covered topics so interesting to viewers that they were among the most popular (and now fondly remembered) shows on Soviet television in the 1960s and 1970s. Among examples of “educational” programs the report listed Musical Kiosk [Muzykal’nyi kiosk] and Cinepanorama [Kinopanorama], shows that featured news about current music and films, as well as performances and interviews by famous performers, and Club of Cine-Travelers [Klub kinoputeshestvennikov], which featured short films on foreign life and geography. Interspersed with these shows on Sundays were musical programs disproportionately featuring popular, rather than classical, music, and children’s programs, which were also very popular with viewers.92 Moreover, even those programs like Village Hour and For Soldiers of the Soviet Army that contained direct propagandistic messages and explicitly targeted politically important, working-class audiences were carefully designed to attract and retain viewers, including those outside the target group. Village Hour, for example, featured frequent intervals of folk dancing and singing, which, as viewer letters attested, appealed as much to urbanites as they did to actual collective farmers.93 For Soldiers of the Soviet Army included a lengthy segment of dedications and song requests sent in by soldiers and their families, a popular tactic for engaging audiences on the radio in Britain and the United States as well. By the late 1970s, the tactic of interspersing “serious” content with appearances or performances by screen and musical celebrities was so common that it had 75

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a nickname among television workers: the “layer-cake [sloenyi pirog]” approach.94 Finally, shows like Village Hour, which made up a large proportion of the Soviet weekend schedule, were serial programs: they appeared at the same time every week, under the same title, with the same hosts and with a recurring opening song or other sign-on. These serial programs made up roughly 10 percent of the Saturday schedule and 13 percent of the Sunday schedule in 1972, versus 0.8 percent of the weekday schedule. As the 1972 NMO report put it, the use of serial programs “undoubtedly makes possible the development among viewers of consistent viewing habits, increases the size of the audience, strengthens the connection between television and viewer, and, most importantly, increases the effectiveness of broadcasting as a whole.”95 By the early 1970s, the temptation to maximize the television audience simply outweighed the ideological commitment to limiting and coordinating viewing for a differentiated audience. This approach proved surprisingly enduring, despite the significant changes to Central Television’s own sociological research bureau, the NMO, that began in 1970.

The Lapin Era: The End of Audience Research and Rise of Prime Time The months before the arrival of a new Gosteleradio chair, Sergei Georgievich Lapin, in April 1970 brought significant changes in the tone and conduct of audience research.96 In February 1970, the committee leadership met to discuss a recent scandal that had led to the firing of several NMO employees. In a survey conducted jointly with the Academy of Sciences’ International Workers’ Movement Institute, the NMO had asked viewers—alongside more standard questions regarding their viewing habits—questions about controversial social issues such as unwed couples and, most scandalously of all, whether they felt that “the leadership, bosses” make mistakes “almost never,” “less often than others,” “as often as others,” “more often than others,” “very often,” or “not sure.” The NMO workers who had participated explained that they had been tasked with studying the “effect of radio and television on the formation of the worldview of various social groups,” and that particular question 76

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had sought to test whether there was a correlation between viewing habits and trust in the state and Party leadership.97 Such directly political questions were unacceptable, and the scandal marked the beginning of greater attention from the State Committee’s leadership and the Central Committee above them to what the NMO was asking and how.98 Changes soon followed. Beginning in 1971, the Letters Desk’s monthly and annual reports on viewer letters began to be preceded by a series of positive declarations (often not borne out by the letter statistics that followed) about the population’s positive response to direct propaganda programs, for example. “As we can see from [viewers’] letters,” one such annual report began, “the programs dedicated to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s July Plenum and to current questions of economics, as well as programs like The Communist in Our Time were well received [by viewers].”99 Such statements could be backed up by quotations from individual letters from Party members and activists, who were among Central Television’s more active correspondents. They were not based on evidence drawn from surveys, or on claims about the perspective of the entire audience, but rather on the anecdotal feedback of a very limited, model audience. The NMO’s sociological research activities were also curtailed after Lapin’s arrival. Although it was renamed the Center for Scientific Programming (TsNP) in September, 1970, the number of sociological surveys it conducted dropped from at least five in 1969 and at least six in 1970 (to judge from the reports on their results that have survived in the NMO/TsNP archive) to just one in 1971. That one was dedicated to the viewership of Leninist University of Millions, a program aimed at professional Party propagandists. Alongside this much smaller number of survey reports, there appeared analyses of programming written by the NMO/ TsNP staff themselves—statistical reports on the contents of Time over the course of a sample week, for example. This kind of analysis was also an important source of critical analysis and perspective, but it did not claim any external referent in the viewing audience. Sociological survey research did not disappear entirely from the NMO’s agenda during the first half of Lapin’s tenure, but it declined sharply.100 Despite this turn away from survey-based audience research after Lapin’s arrival, however, the basic organization of the Channel 1 schedule 77

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remained the same. The following schedules, for example, were printed in Pravda for January 1971. Tuesday, January 12 10:15 a.m. Concert by the Children’s choreography ensemble of the ZIL Factory Palace of Culture. 10:40 a.m. “A Glass of Water”—film play. 12:25 p.m. Musical Kiosk [rerun from the previous Sunday]. ... 5:10 p.m. Variety Show with L. Mirov and M. Novitskii [two famous comic performers]. In color. 6:05 p.m. “Youth Creations”—report from the Central Exhibition Hall. 6:30 p.m. Leninist University of the Millions. “The Leading Role of the Working Class in a Socialist State.” 7:00 p.m. Concert by the Russian Folk Song and Dance Ensemble of the Uralmash Factory Palace of Culture. 7:30 p.m. Children’s film. “Two Captains” (in color). 9:00 p.m. Time—news program. 9:30 p.m. “Classic Russian Ballads [Starinnyi russkii romans].” Concert (in color). 10:05 p.m. World of Socialism [a news journal featuring the politics, economics, and culture of socialist-bloc countries]. 10:30 p.m. People’s Artist of the USSR T. Cheban. [a famous folk song performer]. Wednesday, January 13 11:15 a.m. For children. “Nature’s Guardians.” 11:45 a.m. The Government Inspector [Gogol]—dramatic film. 2:00 p.m. Bandy Dinamo (Moscow) vs. Zorkii (Krasnogorsk). 2nd half. 5:10 p.m. For schoolchildren. “Encounters in the Land of Music.” 5:35 p.m. “Celebration of a Wheat Farmer”—television essay. 6:05 p.m. Cartoons. “Musicians of Bremen” and “Photographs” (in color). 6:30 p.m. Festival of the Soviet Republics. Ukrainian SSR. Broadcast from Kiev. 8:00 p.m. Time. News program. 8:30 p.m. USSR Figure-Skating Championship. Pair skating (free program). 9:50 p.m. Vanina Vanini. Dramatic film (GDR).

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On both of these days in 1971, the news program Time was still the filling of the evening schedule’s “layer cake” of artistic/entertaining content, although its timeslot was not yet firmly fixed at 9:00 p.m., as by 1972 it was. Tuesday’s post-Time entertainment offerings, while more staid, included two concerts and a foreign (socialist bloc) news show—a genre popular with younger audiences because it offered information about foreign artistic celebrities, fashions, and so on. Wednesday’s foreign-made movie and figure skating would have been very popular with almost all viewers. Most significantly, television producers working for the former “SocialPolitical Programming Desk”—now simply called the Propaganda Desk —continued to complain that their programs were always aired at undesirable times, and scheduled irregularly, only when there was some kind of opening.101 This was an explicit and consistent policy by the Programming Directorate, and one that even Lapin’s first vice chairman, Enver Mamedov, was not able or willing to alter. “Comrade Egorov [a director for the Propaganda Desk] has launched his new series, A Family’s Honor,” Mamedov told a Central Television Party committee meeting in November 1972. “It’s good, it’s fulfilling its tasks, with lively portraits of people and all that. But . . . neither Comrade Egorov nor I can get the program on at 8 p.m. Comrade Terekhin, Comrade Babakhin (of the Programming Directorate) will not let us, they block the way, they will not let one of Egorov’s programs occupy such a golden spot.” Moments later, Mamedov explained why such resistance to directly propagandistic programs on prime time might often be justified, although not in this case. “There’s some sense in their policy, that is, naturally we must be very careful about putting purely documentary programs on during these golden hours. But we are going to do so . . .”102 Yet the introduction of “purely documentary” content into prime time remained very rare. Despite his reputation as a political and cultural hard-liner, Lapin understood the necessity of providing popular content during prime time hours.103 In an article published in Zhurnalist in May 1972, Lapin described the need to consider viewers’ preferences in creating the Central and local television and radio schedules. “When we talk about programs on economic themes, on production and producers,” the article asserted, “we need to always think about what place they occupy 79

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in the schedule as a whole, how the local and Central television schedules work together, are we keeping the necessary balance between text and music, the right balance of social-political, scientific-educational, and artistic programs.” At a recent meeting of the directors of the Central Television content desks, he reported, a “Central Committee member and worker,” A. V. Viktorov, had complained about too many talking heads [razgovornye peredachi] on television. And this, the article continued, from a Moscow television viewer, who can choose among four channels. But what about viewers in cities where there’s only one television channel? Those cities are the majority in this country. And when news and propaganda programs displace musical, entertainment, sports programs, and movies, then those viewers are dissatisfied. It would seem that there’s nothing easier than replacing an entertainment or musical program with one devoted to problems of production. You can even justify such a substitution with high ideals. But is such a substitution necessary?

Such a question was important, Lapin continued, because listeners and viewers had alternatives. “We should not forget,” he wrote, that we no longer have a monopoly on the airwaves, and that if our programs do not satisfy, then listeners can tune in to foreign broadcasts. Of course, this is not yet a threat for television. But on television too we need to be careful that viewers do not turn off their sets, that our programs do not put them to sleep. . . . After a long workday, workers are within their rights to expect us to provide them a chance to rest, listen to music, watch an interesting movie, be entertained, have a laugh. If television and radio are not going to create a good mood for viewers, then they will not attract them.104

This attitude became even more prevalent during the second half of the 1970s, when the Central Committee issued several important decrees on propaganda that sought to make state messages more lively and audience-oriented.105 As the 1970s wore on, Central Television’s leadership continued to tweak the schedule in order to increase viewership during times when the foreign radio “voices” were most active, and to increase viewership for particular key programs, especially the international news and commentary programs that proliferated during the 1970s in response to the threat of foreign radio. The overall shape of the sched80

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ule, however, had been set during the debates of the mid to late 1960s, and that changed very little. Torn between conflicting imperatives to both shape viewers and limit their viewing, Central Television’s scheduling staff came to embrace entertaining programming both as a means of gathering the largest possible audience for the highest-status political programming—particularly the new evening news program launched in January 1968, Time—and as an end in itself. This embrace of entertainment programming, however, did not mean abandoning the goal of influencing viewers. All of Central Television’s entertaining content, from serial films to game shows to musical contests had explicit, if indirect, political objectives, ranging from influencing viewer moods to making them into active participants in various politicized contests of taste.

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CHAPTER THREE

FROM CAFÉ TO CONTEST New Year’s Variety Shows and the Soviet Festive System

Holiday broadcasting offered Central Television another framework for evaluating and negotiating audience needs, beyond the daily routines and quotidian demands that were exposed by sociological research and embodied in the daily and weekly television schedule. Among the most important holiday programming events were musical variety shows, part of a longstanding variety and cabaret tradition in Russia. These holiday variety show broadcasts offered an opportunity to explicitly dramatize and reimagine the relationship between state and citizens, cultural authorities and audiences, in a heightened, festive setting. Precisely because of their close connections to the most important annual political rituals, holiday variety shows were among the most experimental genres on Central Television. Like other symbolically important genres, holiday variety shows underwent a dramatic transformation in 1968–70. Over the course of the 1960s, the most important variety show on Central Television, Little Blue Flame [Goluboi ogonek] (1962–present), gradually became a holiday program, with its broadcast eventually limited to a handful of annual festive dates. Set in a café, Little Blue Flame depicted a harmonious Soviet

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public that celebrated intelligentsia heroes and gratefully received gifts of entertainment from them. From 1970 onward, Little Blue Flame was displaced by a New Year’s musical contest called Song of the Year [Pesnia goda] (1971–present) that searched for new ways of unifying the Soviet television audience, experimented with methods for measuring audience tastes, and explicitly negotiated generational and social conflict in a divided audience.

Television in the Soviet Festive System Soviet holiday celebrations had always been an essential medium for defining and promoting new revolutionary and Soviet social relations and symbolic systems, for imagining the communist future and bringing it closer.1 They were also one of the primary means by which the Communist Party sought to mobilize the Soviet population and disseminate political messages, to both urban elites and non-Party, remote, and rural audiences.2 By the mid-1930s, the Soviet holiday calendar structured economic production, the distribution of consumer goods, and even the interactions between Soviet citizens and the state—holidays were the best time to make demands on the state for a promotion or better housing.3 Holiday symbolism and dates also powerfully shaped the content and production of Soviet media.4 The symbolic and economic importance of holidays was not, of course, unique to the Soviet context, but the Soviet state faced the particular dilemma of revolutionary states: having to create or elevate new holidays and co-opt or repress old ones.5 From its earliest broadcasts, television had sought a place at the center of the Soviet festive system. Television’s early, experimental years before the war, and its first postwar decade, had imitated the holiday orientation of Soviet radio. Among the very earliest, experimental television broadcasts in Moscow was a film recording of the Revolution Day parade on Red Square.6 The first live television broadcast from Red Square was in May 1956, becoming a regular tradition subsequently (figure 4).7 Like Soviet radio, television also broadcast whatever popular entertainments it could acquire during the festive period surrounding holidays and Party Congresses.8 By the mid-1960s, the high-stakes live parade broadcasts were preceded and followed by hours of special popular entertainments, 83

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figure 4. “Central Television Studio operator reports from Red Square during the celebration of May 1.” D. Chernov, 1959. (GBU “TsGA Moskvy”; used with permission)

including films, plays, championship soccer and hockey matches, reviews of the year in figure skating, humorous sketches, made-for-television movies, and especially concerts.9 By 1971, the five major state holidays (March 8, May 1, May 9, November 7, and December 31–January 1), plus Party Congresses and Central Committee Plenums, were each accompanied by special entertainment programming that lasted for at least two and as many as ten days; lesser holidays, like the days celebrating various professions, were marked by evening concert programs. Even smaller, noncalendrical festive occasions, such as the visit of a foreign leader or the national holiday of another socialist country, were reflected by special, thematically related 84

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entertainments in the television schedule.10 In 1974, Central Television had to remind its staff that broadcasting episodes of the American cartoon Mighty Mouse was not an appropriate way to mark Richard M. Nixon’s visit that year.11 How did this situation emerge? The idea that television would celebrate festive occasions with popular entertainments was far from the only possible understanding of television’s relationship to holiday times in the late 1950s. Many other accounts of how television should contribute to the Soviet festive system circulated from the late 1950s onward. During the Thaw, many inside and outside of Central Television saw the medium itself as festive in a way not limited to traditional holidays, capable of bringing on a heightened state in viewers as they encountered almost any subject matter on screen, at any time of year. They understood television as a way for viewers to meet and learn from the heroes of the Thaw—artists, intellectuals, scientists, and cosmonauts—and to experience the new vitality of everyday Soviet life.12 Youth Desk members, who saw early Bolshevik mass festivals as an important precedent for their work on television game shows, also put festivity at the heart of their understanding of the medium as a whole: television ceremonies and games offered a way to not only visualize the future, but also bring it into being. Other theories emphasized television’s affective power, its ability to shape viewer “moods” for calendrical holidays. This meant aligning viewers’ feelings with the holiday calendar, offering popular entertainments to enhance feelings of well-being on politically important dates.13 This account of television’s role during Soviet holidays resonated with viewers, many of whom saw television as a way of pleasantly passing the new leisure time that resulted from Khrushchev’s shortening of work hours.14 The two television holiday shows considered here, Little Blue Flame and Song of the Year, stood out from the general background of the Soviet festive television schedule. They were special occasions in their own right, explicitly prepared for by Central Television and anticipated by TV viewers long in advance of their broadcasts. They offered their own rituals and liminal moments, and presented a fully realized alternative to the hierarchical representation of Soviet society provided by the Red Square demonstrations.15 The evolution of Little Blue Flame illustrates how these competing visions of television’s role in Soviet life shaped Central 85

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Television’s holiday programming, leading to the emergence of the musical variety show as the centerpiece of Central Television’s holiday program lineup. The most famous Soviet holiday show of all, Little Blue Flame, was originally conceived as a weekly variety show and broadcast every Sunday from 10 p.m. to midnight—a regular, routine event that was nonetheless seen as festive, by virtue of its illustrious intelligentsia guests and café setting.16 By 1970, however, Little Blue Flame was exclusively a holiday program, broadcast five times a year, on March 8, May 1, May 9, November 7, and the night of December 31–January 1. The transformation of Little Blue Flame from a weekly program into a holiday show took place gradually, as a solution to the specific problems of television broadcasting in the Soviet 1960s.

How Little Blue Flame Became a Holiday Special First broadcast in April 1962, Little Blue Flame was a variety show shaped by the new social styles and settings of the Thaw. The program’s creators, a team of editors and directors from the popular music and variety stage division [otdel estrady] of Central Television’s Musical Programming Desk, modeled the program on the “youth café” that opened on Gorkii Street in Moscow in 1960. That café had quickly become a very popular gathering spot for an educated and free-thinking young crowd, drawn by its performances by poets and musicians.17 Combining this new café setting with the humor and musical traditions of the Russian variety stage, Little Blue Flame gathered actors, musicians, poets, television professionals, foreign celebrities, cosmonauts, and representatives of the national republics around café tables set with tea, fruit, and other treats (figure 5).18 In keeping with the principles of Thaw-era television, the program was minimally scripted. The picture of Soviet society presented by Little Blue Flame was very different from that reflected in the holiday parades on Red Square. On Little Blue Flame, Soviet society appeared as a relatively nonhierarchical, voluntaristic, international community based on friendship, with a revitalized intelligentsia at the center of things. The show emphasized the new sights, sounds, and people that the cultural Thaw had opened up to Soviet audiences.19 Like other premier television programs of the early 86

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figure 5. “Romanian performer Emil’ Konstantinescu performs on Little Blue Flame.” A. Makarov, 1963. (GBU “TsGA Moskvy,” no. 0-3563; used with permission)

1960s, Little Blue Flame aimed to offer viewers interactions with new kinds of model socialist persons and the experience of virtual travel, not only to its Moscow youth café as an alternative center, but also around the Soviet Union and the world.20 Little Blue Flame’s attempt to combine a heterodox, festive model of Soviet political life with a weekly entertainment show quickly ran into problems. The program immediately came under pressure from above to include more conventional Soviet heroes—model workers and military officials—whose presence was not always as spontaneous or friendshipbased as the show’s format would require. Already in 1963, barely a year after its first broadcast, Central Television was receiving complaints, in both letters and in sociological audience surveys it had begun to conduct, that the show had lost its initial charm. Little Blue Flame “only rarely lives up to its name: it is neither interesting, nor lively, nor warm,” one employee of the Ministry of Trade wrote on a Central Television survey form. “It features the strangest conversations about achievements in 87

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production . . . boring, long reports of various kinds. It would be nice to hear more good music, more songs, more witty humor.”21 At the same time, the show’s focus on humor and lighter musical genres made it an awkward vehicle for direct political messages (figure 6). In 1967, Sergei Muratov, a Central Television employee who became a prominent television critic and scholar, harshly criticized the inclusion, in one regular Sunday Little Blue Flame, of the celebrated wartime radio announcer Yuri Levitan. Levitan had read the texts of wartime radio announcements. “They were harsh words,” Muratov acknowledged, “and they rang out solemnly [torzhestvenno].” But in the salon setting, surrounded by little tables, smiling girls with senseless hairstyles, and accompanied by polite applause it looked vulgar and was simply shameful. Of course, the show’s organizers obviously had other intentions: “Even an entertaining program like Little Blue Flame doesn’t have to be mindless! Let’s give it some direction, sharpen its political

figure 6. “Holiday Little Blue Flame dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the victory over Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War.” S. Gerasimov, 1965. (GBU “TsGA Moskvy,” 0-8870; used with permission)

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message. Let’s have Levitan read those announcements.” But Little Blue Flame is Little Blue Flame, and the café table is not the Presidium’s table.22

Fulfilling audience demands for humor and light comedic genres on a weekly basis was impossible for other reasons as well. Securing popular performers was not easy, and Central Television, with its mass audience, was subject to much stricter standards of taste than other media and venues. As V. Merkulov, chief editor of the Musical Programming Desk, who had enthusiastically supported the creation of Little Blue Flame, put it in 1962, “the tasks of communists in the Musical Programming Desk . . . are especially great and complicated when bad taste reaches us via bourgeois movies, records, and the often completely unselective ‘musical services’ in parks, skating rinks, and trains.”23 A 1965 viewer letter complaining about Little Blue Flame summed up these problems. “Millions of people anticipate [Little Blue Flame],” the viewer wrote, “often giving up the chance to go to the theater or cinema. . . . Guests arrive at the homes of television owners. . . . But week after week, with the exception of your holiday shows [emphasis added], you don’t improve your work and don’t provide us with the great joy that you are supposed to provide.”24 In 1965, Little Blue Flame’s editors and directors decided to stop producing the show, since they felt it had lost its original spirit and become outmoded.25 But Little Blue Flame was not canceled, because of the success and continued political importance of its holiday broadcasts, which, as this television viewer’s letter suggests, were the exception to the rule. Denial of permission to cancel Little Blue Flame came directly from Nikolai Mesiatsev.26 The first reason given was that the show was too popular to cancel—even with all the complaints, Little Blue Flame was among the most popular shows produced by Central Television. This was especially true of the holiday broadcasts, which had always enjoyed greater resources of time, energy, and money. Mesiatsev reminded the Musical Programming staff of the show’s high profile. Viewers judged Central Television’s holiday broadcasting on two grounds, he claimed: the live parade broadcast from Red Square, a significant technical feat, and the quality of that evening’s Little Blue Flame.27 In 1965, Little Blue Flame ceased to be a regular program, and from then on appeared only sporadically outside of holiday times. By 1969, it was exclusively a holiday show.

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Turning Little Blue Flame into a holiday special, like the broader practice of broadcasting more popular entertainment at holiday times, offered a way to ameliorate the tensions underlying the production of Soviet television. As in other spheres of Soviet economic and cultural production, holidays provided a way for Central Television to create the experience of bounty in an environment of limited resources.28 Holidays acted as focal points for the Musical Programming staff ’s creative and logistical efforts. A musical variety show like Little Blue Flame also offered the Soviet state a very good way to celebrate the holidays on television. Popular music on the variety stage offered a highly effective and politically flexible way to engage the entire Soviet audience.29 The lineup of stars could be adjusted to reflect particular political messages—for example, on the fiftieth anniversary of 1917, the desire to have all Soviet people, regardless of nationality, join in celebrating the revolution. The broadcast of Little Blue Flame on November 7, 1967, featured famous Russian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Armenian, and Uzbek vocalists, singing in Russian but also in their native languages, mostly on patriotic themes but with much lighter music mixed in, including a frivolous French song called “The Girls of My Country” performed by the Uzbek singer Batyr Zakirov.30 Yet the policy of linking Central Television’s most popular programs to the holiday calendar raised new problems. Holidays offered a clear way to structure negotiations between the television audience and censors, ensuring that even the most apolitical entertainment retained a clear connection to state myths. But they also raised the stakes of these negotiations, by limiting them to a set number of occasions per year. These negotiations also gained importance over the course of the 1960s as concerns grew about the influence of foreign radio listening.31 Viewers were encouraged to write in, both as a way of demonstrating the state’s responsiveness to viewer demand, and as a way of engaging them in dialogue about matters of taste that were also matters of Cold War politics. Ideas about the nature of television as a medium also raised the stakes for these negotiations. The show had been founded on the idea that television was a powerful medium for the promotion of model Soviet persons—the television camera would allow viewers to penetrate external appearances and see the true nature of those on screen, allowing them to connect deeply with the model persons featured. The flip side of this 90

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belief was that the persons featured needed to be politically acceptable, and also look appealing in close-up.32 Yet deciding which performers’ musical styles and appearances were acceptable was increasingly challenging, particularly in the case of foreign performers.33 At the same time, the Thaw unleashed the expression of opposing viewpoints in the intelligentsia, the public, and within the state and Party apparatus itself. As a result, on Soviet television holiday programs, the lineup of artists was subject to last-minute changes; editors met shortly before the holiday to view recorded performances and cut acts they found inappropriate or add those they felt had to be included. Censorship could, paradoxically, create unpredictability. Even after live broadcasting of holiday concerts was ended, in the mid-1960s, the broadcasts of these shows could be quite unpredictable. One final factor increased the importance of this small set of holiday television shows as a forum for negotiations with the television audience: the fact that the holiday calendar itself had one central occasion for symbolic exchange between state and people, the New Year’s holiday. The New Year, the only Soviet holiday with no connection to either 1917 or 1945, was also the holiday most closely associated with family and the home. Television, like radio, also played a key role in New Year’s celebrations simply because people needed the television or radio set to tell them when the exact moment of midnight occurred. From the early 1960s, but definitively by 1968, the New Year had become the most important holiday in the television calendar.34 Cyclical programs concluded their arcs during the New Year’s season, and the most expensively produced programs, concerts, and television films were broadcast then.35 The New Year’s holiday, including the New Year’s Eve broadcast of Little Blue Flame and, after 1971, Song of the Year on New Year’s Day, thus became Central Television’s main forum for representing the relationship between audience demand and the entertaining content it offered them.

Gift Exchange on New Year’s Flame in the 1960s The New Year’s broadcasts of Little Blue Flame in the 1960s found the show’s café tables set around a New Year’s tree; guests threw streamers and had confetti in their hair. The program’s action centered on the ex91

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change of New Year’s toasts and well-wishes between the guests in the café and to the audience at home, who were gathered at holiday tables that mirrored the ones in the café. This connection was made explicit beginning in the late 1960s, when the show began to feature “visits” to the homes of celebrity workers and artists who were shown gathered with their families around a laden holiday table.36 The café guests were made up of the usual suspects from Stalin’s gift-giving discourse—explorers (now cosmonauts), women, non-Russian Soviet nationalities—but with a rather heavily overrepresented artistic intelligentsia at the center of things. There were merry role reversals and other carnival magic, but for the most part there was comedy and music, offered spontaneously or elicited by a graceful invitation from the program’s hosts. This way of presenting the evening’s entertainments amounted to an implicit exchange of gifts—a useful device, since one cannot choose what gifts one will receive from others—but also a natural one for the New Year’s holiday. Often this was accomplished simply, by indicating that the performer had chosen the song in question him- or herself, or without reference to any process of selection—a simple announcement by the diktor-host of the number’s title, for example. Beginning in the 1963 New Year’s broadcast, however, the notion that the songs were gifts began to be employed explicitly. In 1963, the concept was introduced very late in the program, at the end of the second, postmidnight half of the show, with a skit by the comedians Lev Mirov and Mark Novitskii.37 In it, Mirov and Novitskii greedily anticipate opening the “gifts” under the studio’s tree, only to discover that they are two taped performances, one of a performer from the GDR and one of the Ukrainian child singer Boris Sandulenko singing “O Sole Mio” in Italian.38 The show’s closing act sought to address the sense that these “gifts” could not easily be reciprocated: after the taped performances were over, Mirov expressed anxiety that he and Novitskii had nothing to give in return. The safe completion of the symbolic transaction was ensured by the host, however, who informed them that Central Television has already prepared a gift—a toast from the Soviet cosmonauts to the Soviet people and “our foreign friends.” In the 1967–68 New Year’s Flame, the gift-giving device was used to motivate a much larger percentage of the program’s content.39 That year, 92

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the program was broadcast from Seventh Heaven, the restaurant atop the newly completed Ostankino television tower. An opening animated sequence revealed that the tower had been turned into a Christmas tree, posing a problem: how could it be decorated? In a series of role reversals typical of the program, one guest, a real Soviet pilot in full uniform, organized a group of actors who had played pilots in recent movies to conduct a military operation to decorate the “tree.” Each actor stood up from his table and, with a cutaway special effect, was transformed (poof !) into his costumed military film character. Once the matter of decorations had been addressed, the pilots had to “hang the presents,” and more merriment ensued as they accepted presents from guests arriving from afar (including three hockey players who had been to Poland and brought back a “gift” from a Polish singer, Irena Santor, titled “So Many Lovely Girls”). The show also made repeated reference to the “gift” given by Moscow builders—the construction of the new television tower, tallest in the world. The “pilots” delivered presents directly to representative citizens watching at home, in this case, an Azerbaijani couple celebrating their platinum wedding anniversary, who were briefly shown in their home. Yet the device of gift-giving had not always been seen as sufficient explanation for featuring certain performers rather than others on Little Blue Flame. This was particularly true in the program’s earliest broadcasts. The first New Year’s Flame, in 1962, used a lottery ball machine on air to “determine” which performances from the past year would be rebroadcast that evening. Later on, the hosts unveiled a call center that took viewer requests, half in jest (the telephone operators also sang and danced) and perhaps half seriously, since in these early years Central Television was accustomed to receiving immediate viewer feedback by phone.40 In 1963, Mirov and Novitskii performed a sketch at the beginning of the broadcast, pretending to determine the lineup with the help of a giant robot with buttons on his body devoted to different genres and performers. Mirov and Novitskii put in ten kopeks, pushed a button labeled “acrobats,” and the robot’s chest opened, letting out a troop of acrobats. Of course, with the telephone call center the program’s producers did not really cede editorial control to viewer requests, nor did the use of a lottery ball machine or a giant robot mean that decisions were made 93

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by chance, or automatically. But it is indicative of the new emphasis on responsiveness to their audience that Central Television felt the need to appear to take requests (the call center) or externalize decision-making power to a “neutral” authority, like pure chance.

Festivity and Authority in Triumph and Crisis: 1967–70 The emergence of Little Blue Flame in 1965–67 as a modest, flexible form of television festivity based on gift exchange was shaken up by the events of late 1967–70. The 1967–68 Little Blue Flame, broadcast from high atop the Ostankino tower and featuring extensive special effects, was designed to celebrate the opening of the new television center, timed to coincide with the festivities surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the October revolution. This moment of Central Television’s triumphant arrival as a truly allUnion television service, centered in Moscow, took place as socialist reformism was flourishing among intellectuals in the USSR and Czechoslovakia. Then, in August 1968, Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring reform movement, in which television staff members there had played central roles.41 The following two years, from the fall of 1968 to spring 1970, saw a significant crackdown at Central Television, culminating in the ouster of Nikolai Mesiatsev as Gosteleradio chairman and the appointment of Sergei Lapin, close associate of the conservative ideology chief in the Politburo, Mikhail Suslov, as his replacement. During these years of triumph and crisis, Central Television’s leadership and the Central Committee considered and rejected a more ambitious, politicized vision of television festivity, one in which television would displace the local Party organizations and take a predominant role in celebrating Soviet holidays. This decision was precipitated by an August 1967 proposal from Gosteleradio chairman Nikolai Mesiatsev to the Propaganda Section of the Central Committee apparat for the creation of a new national television ritual, to be launched for the fiftieth anniversary of the October revolution.42 The plans were grandiose. For weeks before the anniversary, Central Television would broadcast special programs instructing Soviet families about the elaborate preparations each family member was to undertake. Men were to create places for “Lenin Bonfires” in their town, 94

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women were to prepare special bread and salt recipes, girls were to prepare small presents, and boys were to clean and ready historical sites linked to the revolution. Family members should keep their activities secret from one another via the use of secret codes, which Central Television would also provide. When the day of the holiday arrived, each family member would play his or her part, cued by the television set, until the holiday broadcast reached its climax with an appearance by Brezhnev himself on screen, addressing the citizenry and calling on them to stand up and go outside. At the very moment they did, the program would switch over to radio broadcast towers in the streets, and all the historical sites prepared by the men and boys would be suddenly illuminated.43 Mesiatsev’s proposal implausibly combined the costliest elements of French son et lumière spectacle, an ambitious vision of television’s power as a medium of direct social control, and, at the same time, a remarkable ambivalence about the role television could or should play in the remaking of Soviet holiday rituals in the post-Stalin era—precisely the ambivalent attitude toward television that had been rejected for the prime-time Channel 1 schedule. After all, the central moment of the ritual asked audiences to stand up, turn off their sets, and go outside. From a more practical perspective, the new ritual offered nearly countless opportunities for spectacular failure. It was summarily dismissed in a letter from Pavel Moskovskii, the head of the Central Committee Propaganda Section, and his deputy Alexander Yakovlev (later Gorbachev’s close associate and chief official in charge of media and propaganda during perestroika), who noted that it was hardly a good idea to “regiment the behavior of Soviet people with a call to go out into the streets, take off their hats, embrace, etc.,” especially since at that hour, 10 p.m. Moscow time, “popular celebrations will already be going on in parks and squares.”44 Local Party organizations had already made plans for popular festivities that would “take into account national characteristics and local conditions.”45 While Mesiatsev’s proposed television ritual fit with broader efforts in this period to invent new, Soviet rituals in order to compete more effectively with religious belief, it also flew in the face of much of what television workers and critics had come to see as television’s special strengths—its intimacy and its ability to persuade and influence without resort to direct political messages (or, in this case, orders).46 95

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The flexible holiday variety show, by contrast, could adjust to any political storm. For the New Year’s Little Blue Flame the most visible change between 1967 and 1968 was the disappearance of foreign musicians, who had been unusually numerous in the 1967 show. In 1967, the postmidnight segment of the program was almost exclusively devoted to Eastern European performers, and included two songs in French by the beloved Mireille Mathieu; in 1968 no foreign performers appeared, and within the all-Soviet repertoire there was a noted Russian national theme, with an opening number entitled “Voice of the Motherland, Voice of Russia,” and performances by two Russian folk song and dance ensembles in costume.47 These changes reflected a broader redefinition of “mass genres” to include the tastes of the older, provincial viewers that Central Television was reaching by the late 1960s, part of a broader political reorientation toward less educated audiences and Party members whose support for the Soviet state was not significantly shaken by the invasion.48 In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, in internal, pre-New Year’s holiday meetings in November 1968, the Musical Programming Desk was criticized for producing content that was disproportionately devoted to “purely entertaining” programs. A report noted that, in response, the definition of “mass” or “entertaining [razvlekatel’nyi]” genres—the category to which popular music and Little Blue Flame belonged—had been expanded to include “choral ensembles, light orchestral music, [and] folk instruments.” Programs would now focus on civic themes, revolutionary romanticism, patriotic song, and folk dancing, despite the fact that television producers and executives had long been aware that most viewers who wrote in preferred pop music [estrada].49 Yet this crackdown was surprisingly ephemeral. The importance of genuinely popular music as a key arena of Cold War competition was, in fact, enhanced by the events of 1968. As a November 1968 report from the Musical Programming Desk to Gosteleradio’s leadership put it, in the “current stage of intensified ideological conflict, music is becoming more than ever one of the most important means of winning hearts and minds.”50 As a result, many of these new policies were quite quickly reversed. Détente in Cold War diplomacy opened the way to a more visible role for foreign musical styles; and the creation of a “good mood” for the holidays gained importance in the absence of popular political enthusi96

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asm. The Cold War made the provision of attractive entertainments more important, at a moment when popular demand for foreign musical styles and sounds, particularly among politically crucial young viewers, was expanding rapidly. Since holiday television programs aimed to unite the Soviet audience, television was also left to catch up, as best it could in light of its much more intense scrutiny from censors, to other media in which foreign music circulated freely. By 1971, the Central Television New Year’s holiday schedule again featured Czech popular musicians, and by the second half of the 1970s foreign popular music was again prominently featured in the New Year’s television lineup, including styles that would have been unimaginable in the early 1960s, not least because Western popular music itself had changed dramatically.51 August 1968 did, however, deal a serious blow to the harmonious, voluntaristic Thaw vision of Soviet society reflected on Little Blue Flame; it also ended the Soviet intelligentsia’s claim to play the most important role in Soviet life. The collapse of Little Blue Flame’s vision of Soviet life was vividly reflected in the show’s precipitous decline in popularity. In 1970 the New Year’s show continued to include popular estrada performers, including the glamorous Edita P’ekha [Edyta Piecha] in a glittering gown, but it had become a stilted collection of pre-taped performances, no longer unified by the elaborate gift-giving plots, expensive special effects, and unscripted conversations among intelligentsia figures of the previous decade. The café set gained an elevated stage.52 The show still featured popular performers, but became largely a collection of video clips, weighed down by scripted interviews with model workers.53 A report in 1972 on viewer letters to Central Television put the matter directly. “Interest in the program is declining,” the report declared. “The reason, in our opinion, is the poorly assembled program. The songs are old, and are performed by the same singers over and over. [The show] lacks humor and satire. In their letters, viewers often repeated the same request: ‘if it’s impossible to make new broadcasts, we would be glad to watch recordings of the old ones.’ ”54 This request was fulfilled in 1972 with the creation of a show called Through the Pages of Little Blue Flame, which featured clips from the broadcasts of the 1960s. The sense of rupture with the pre-1968 past was so great that the Little Blue Flames of the 1960s could become the object of nostalgia less than a decade later.55 Scholars and critics continued to ask, 97

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“what happened to Little Blue Flame?” (as one article put it) and what to do about it throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.56 They struggled, however, to imagine how the show’s post-1968 “falsity” and “grimness [nevesel’e]” could be transformed into the “immediacy” and “honesty” of the earlier Little Blue Flame broadcasts.57 This critical discussion of the decline of Little Blue Flame formed the backdrop for a new set of musical programs and game shows, created after 1968, that began to manage and dramatize the relationship between audience demand and Central Television’s programming very differently. The centerpiece of these musical programs was the creation, in 1971, of a new New Year’s musical program—one that aired the night after Little Blue Flame, in the evening on New Year’s Day. Entitled Song of the Year, this new show was organized not as a conversation in a café, but as a contest.

Responding to a Divided Audience on Song of the Year Song of the Year was a national song contest that made the relationship between audience tastes and the show’s roster of artists its central subject. Instead of introducing the performances as an implicit exchange of gifts, the show presented its lineup as the outcome of a long process of exchange and negotiation with the audience, much of which was conducted on air. Song of the Year’s premise was the selection, on the basis of “votes” by Soviet television viewers, of the best Soviet songs of the previous year. The show was thus part of a whole corpus of similar Eastern and Western national and international television song contests launched in the 1950s and ’60s, ranging from the Eurovision song contest, first broadcast in 1956, to the Polish Sopot festival, founded in 1961.58 Beginning in spring 1971, the program ran preliminary broadcasts, referred to internally as “advertisements [reklama],” roughly once a month throughout the year, featuring a few carefully selected performances and reminding viewers to write to Central Television to nominate their choices.59 TV viewers’ first encounter with the show in 1971, therefore, was not with the already accomplished fact of a holiday concert, but with the invitation to participate in putting together such a concert. The final concert that resulted, broadcast in the evening on New Year’s Day, featured performances of the selected songs and also awards for the per98

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formers, composers, and authors of the songs’ lyrics. Each of these New Year’s final concerts was referred to by the name of the year that had just passed: Song-74, for example, was broadcast on January 1, 1975. Each annual finale thus purported to review and usher out the old musical year and welcome in the new. In the show’s final minutes its hosts, a male-female pair of Central Television diktory, pronounced the ceremonial phrase “farewell Song-75 [for example], hello Song-76!” It would be easy to miss the innovation that Song of the Year’s format represented if we focused on the show’s rather formal style and setting in its early years, particularly in contrast to the friendship around the café tables on Little Blue Flame in the early 1960s. Song of the Year offered a far more stratified picture of Soviet society. The arrangement of people on stage and in the audience was hierarchical: in 1971 a jury made up of the hosts of television and radio musical shows sat on stage, well above the audience in the hall (figure 7). That audience was organized into professional groupings, identifiable by their uniforms as factory workers or military officers. The composers and lyricists whose songs had been nominated likewise sat together in the first few rows of the audience, a demotion from their place at center stage on Little Blue Flame. Yet, from its first broadcast in 1971, Song of the Year’s focus on justifying the selection of particular songs for inclusion in the final concert revealed problems with this hierarchical reflection of Soviet society, offering multiple accounts of how the show represented popular tastes and opinions, precisely whose tastes were being represented, and what exactly was being selected—the best songs of the year? Or the most popular? Exactly how the selection of the show’s roughly twenty finalists took place remained rather vague, or rather, was extremely overdetermined. The advertisements throughout the year proposed multiple ways for viewers to understand the task at hand, and the New Year’s broadcasts justified the selection of the included songs in a dizzying number of different ways. Over the course of the preceding year, the show’s preliminary broadcasts had offered contradictory accounts of how viewers were to make their selections, and what exactly they were choosing. In one November 1971 promotional spot, viewers were invited to submit not one but three songs that “they would include in a show called ‘Best song of the year.’ ” “Ideally,” the ad’s hostess told viewers, “these three songs would be differ99

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figure 7. The Song of the Year jury, 1971

ent in character and theme.”60 But another “ad,” just four days later, simply showed a reporter asking Muscovites on the street what their favorite song was.61 Song-71’s preliminary broadcasts also posed some of these questions directly to viewers, including the politically sensitive question of whether to include older, patriotic songs from the Civil War era or, most important, from World War II. As the host of a preliminary broadcast in November put it, “of course our marvelous songs from years past are still alive, still sung . . . are we to say that they aren’t popular, that we have forgotten them, don’t sing them, that they no longer bring us joy? So what is the ‘best song of the year’? How do you understand that definition? A song written yesterday? Or one created several decades ago, but still living and resonant?”62 The Song-71 final concert was similarly ambiguous about whether viewers were expressing personal preferences or judgments of quality, whether the songs that were selected were the most popular or the best (if there could be a difference), and how precisely the decisions were made. 100

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Indeed, the show’s whole status as a contest was constantly downplayed; the show was referred to on air as a “festival” rather than a “contest [konkurs],” and no single winner was selected from among the twenty “laureates” that made it into the final concert. The show’s hosts, television diktory and continuity announcers Igor Kirillov and Anna Shilova, began the broadcast by announcing that viewers would hear twenty songs that had been “named by viewers as the best songs of 1971.”63 After introducing the performers, Kirillov and Shilova turned to the question of how exactly the show had selected these songs on the basis of viewer letters. Shilova began by quoting one viewer letter that described the difficulty this had presented. “This was very hard for television viewers,” the author, a farmworker from Krymskaia oblast’ wrote. “We have to choose the best song of the year. How can this be done? It is a problem.” Kirillov told the letter’s author that indeed she was right—it had been a very pleasant, but very complicated problem. He announced that Central Television had received thirty thousand letters from viewers, each listing three songs. Moreover, he explained, many letters were signed by large collectives; although it remained unspoken, Kirillov implied that the letters themselves could not be counted as individual household votes.64 Kirillov then unfurled one such letter that dangled all the way to the ground because it contained, he explained, 150 signatures.65 He noted that only a computer could have done the necessary calculations, but that since “song is a delicate matter, a spiritual one,” they decided “not to turn to modern technology” but rather to “the most passionate propagandists of song,” radio and television musical program hosts.66 Echoing Lapin’s criticism of sociological audience research along similar lines, Kirillov justified the rejection of the rationalism of sociological data and espoused the value of model audiences better equipped to represent the “true” tastes of the Soviet populace. The remainder of the show, however, referred frequently to more direct measures of audience opinion. The radio and television musical-show hosts on the jury mentioned the numerous requests each song had received on their shows, as well as for Song-71—these were not only “passionate propagandists,” but also professionals with independent sources of information about audience tastes, based, for example, on record sales. One song was prefaced by a testimonial from a representative of Melodiia, the Soviet record label, 101

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who stated that the song had caused the album it was on to sell particularly well. Some songs were not performed live, but shown in film clips from the movies in which they had originally appeared, linking the success of the song to the success of the popular movie. Later in the show Kirillov and Shilova made reference to an explicit count of viewer votes—the giant collective letter they had shown at the beginning of the show, they explained, had supported one song by a particular composer, but another song by that same composer had in fact received more viewer votes, so it was included in the program instead.67 Song of the Year aimed to offer a middle path between the ideological purity of collective letters from model audiences and the changing whims of real audience tastes, measured scientifically. It would both offer exemplary opinions and count real votes, including everyone while fitting within the existing boundaries of socialist taste.

Accommodating Youth Tastes Among the greatest challenges to this effort was how to reflect the musical tastes of Soviet young people in the show’s lineup. As memoirists and scholars have documented, the consumption and underground circulation of Western jazz and rock music and Soviet guitar poetry and rock increased rapidly throughout the post-Stalin period.68 Viewers understood that much of what was genuinely popular, at least with many Soviet young people, could not be shown on Soviet television; as a result, the question of how exactly audience preferences were being measured was highly fraught. The second, related challenge the show faced was to mediate generational conflicts of taste within the set of music that could be broadcast on television, in order to appeal to as wide an audience as possible and successfully convey the unity of the Soviet people. Song of the Year aimed to provide a Soviet alternative to Western popular and rock music for Soviet young people—it explicitly excluded foreign composers and performers—while also demonstrating that youth tastes were not so strange after all. Instead, the show suggested, youth tastes were intimately connected with the same Soviet song tradition that had moved their parents and grandparents during the revolution and the Great Patriotic War, and which still, as the refrain of the show’s theme song put it, helped 102

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Soviet people “build and live.”69 On Song-71, Kirillov and Shilova stressed the unity of viewer opinion—claiming that viewers had supported a given song “unanimously”—and the agreement of the professional jury with the viewers’ selections. But they also referred to conflicting tastes among viewers. Between musical numbers, for example, Kirillov read aloud a letter suggesting that the program create a separate category for songs preferred by people under the age of twenty-three. Kirillov laughingly dismissed this letter—what would happen to those unfortunate people who had just turned twenty-four, not to mention fifty-five? Would they have to wait, he asked incredulously, for their own shows? Kirillov quickly countered this troubling letter with one from a family saying that their three generations all loved a particular song.70 This problem could not, however, be so easily dismissed. In a move that hinted of things to come, Song-71 concluded with exactly the kind of separate category that the viewer in favor of a special youth category had proposed, but for older songs: there was a contest of “knowledge of old songs” for the audience in the hall, ending with a rousing chorus of the Thaw-era hit, “Evenings Outside Moscow.” In its second season finale, a year later, Song of the Year developed an elaborate structure to help mediate these tensions, dividing the show’s performances into separate thematic and generational categories—in essence replicating Soviet media sociology’s “differentiated audience” approach within a single show.71 As in the previous year, Kirillov and Shilova’s welcome to viewers was followed by the introduction of performers; this year, however, after the usual individual singers and vocalinstrumental ensembles, Kirillov and Shilova introduced a series of mass choirs—a military band and choir, a Russian folk choir, a Moscow choir of “youth and students,” and Central Television and Radio’s children’s choir—each of which performed a song.72 This brief medley of songs foreshadowed the structure of the concert as a whole, which likewise contained segments directed at particular social groups, most visibly veterans and other fans of patriotic song, student youth, and young children. The sense that Song-72 represented the separate tastes of a socially divided audience was furthered by the continued prominent role of a jury made up of the hosts of radio and television musical programs, each of which had its own particular audience and musical focus. Song-72 struck 103

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a similar balance regarding the inclusion of older songs on the show— attempting to resolve the tension between the task of summing up current Soviet popular music trends and the classicism of Soviet culture, which sought to identify songs for all time. Song-72 made much of its status as a newly invented tradition, and included performances of several songs that had won the previous year. At the same time, these songs were separated from the main concert program as a separate medley; their titles and authors were not announced and no time was allowed for audience applause between them. Song-72 also explicitly addressed the problem of youth tastes. Roughly midway through the broadcast, a jury member from the “Youth” radio station, which focused on popular music and aimed to compete with foreign radio broadcasts, announced a contest for the students of Moscow universities who were in attendance. He then introduced a young Central Television host, Yuri Kovelenov, who, after insisting that this was not a contest but a “little festival within our big festival,” introduced several groups of Moscow students, many of whom were foreign students from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These teams sang several songs from their seats in the audience, then Kovelenov called some of them on stage to sing the “Hymn to the Democratic Youth of the World,” with the audience singing along. Then they were all presented with small tinsel New Year’s trees and ushered off the stage.73 In this first attempt to acknowledge youth as a separate category within the viewing audience, Song-72 offered a highly circumscribed portrait of Soviet and international socialist youth, one limited to the kinds of songs and interactions directly sponsored by the Soviet state. The following year, however, Song-73’s version of this contest came closer to acknowledging actual youth tastes, even as it stressed their membership in the cohesive social world of Soviet song. That year, Kovelenov’s “microfestival” included an initial round where students in the audience were asked to “prove that they really know and love [Soviet] song” by singing songs that had won at previous festivals, and naming their authors and composers. But then Kovelenov asked the students to send a member of their group who knew how to play an instrument up to the stage; he explained that they were about to form a little orchestra, or “as is now the style, a vocal-instrumental ensemble.” Kovelenov proceeded to ask each 104

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student which instrument he played, so that they could borrow instruments from the orchestra on stage. When all but a handful answered that they played the guitar, Kovelenov, the students, and the audience all laughed. Kovelenov reassured everyone that “we know that the guitar is probably the most popular instrument among young people,” and that the show had six guitars on hand for the students to use—enough for all those who wanted one.74 The structure of Song-72, featuring a jury, the division of the musical program into segments directed at particular social groups, and various similarly targeted contests-within-the-contest, proved quite enduring: it became the basic framework for the show, within which the producers experimented, for the next five years. Each year, the show offered a slightly different approach to the problems of mediating potential conflicts of taste, representing a unified Soviet public, and authenticating the show’s musical lineup as truly popular. After Song-72 the size and composition of the jury changed significantly from year to year, with only Eleonora Beliaeva, the host of the TV show Musical Kiosk, appearing every year. Sometimes it was made up predominantly of musicians and choral directors; in other years it featured mostly heroes of socialist labor and cosmonauts. The contests for audience members in the hall and at home multiplied: in Song-72, -73, and -74 there was a contest for the author of the hundred thousandth letter the show received that year, who was invited to the finale and interviewed on the air.75 That contest made no demands on the viewers’ knowledge or expertise; it simply encouraged letter writing and emphasized the show’s massive popularity. Yet Song-73 and Song-74 also had contests that asked viewers to predict the lineup of the final concert, a task that encouraged audience members to anticipate the judgment of the show’s producers and censors. Yet against this background of constant experimentation, we can see two patterns that resulted, by the late 1970s, in the breakdown of Song of the Year’s socially divided format. First, beginning on Song-72, the show began to question the generic and social divisions that structured both the way viewers were invited to nominate songs and the lineup of the final concert. On Song-72’s final broadcast, a jury member from the radio show Good Morning reminded the audience that viewers had been asked to nominate three songs: one “song with civic resonance [pesnia grazhdanskogo 105

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zvuchaniia],” one “popular song [estradnaia pesnia],” and one “folk song [pesnia v narodnom stile].” “We received a lot of letters,” the jury member continued, “justifiably questioning whether it is possible to differentiate songs in this way.” For example, she explained, the category “a song with civic resonance includes songs about labor, songs about great deeds, songs about your native land . . . isn’t that so? And when we first played a song on our show about our North, we received an enormous quantity of letters.” She then introduced a song by the composer Mark Fradkin, entitled “I Will Carry You Off to the Tundra,” performed by the Nanai pop singer Kola Bel’dy and featuring an opening guitar hook reminiscent of the surf guitar at the beginning of the Batman theme song (figure 8).76 The implication was one that was familiar to young Soviet rock fans: that there need not be any contradiction between appreciation for Western musical styles and belief in Soviet socialism.77 Why shouldn’t a good guitar hook have “civic resonance”? And if any popular song might be civic, why shouldn’t Song of the Year feature the songs that were most popular, without worrying about whether they could also be deemed the best by some external aesthetic standard? The second pattern that emerged on Song of the Year in its first five years was that including older, explicitly political songs in the lineup seemed to require more justification than programming recent popular music without direct political messages. From Song-73 through Song-77, the show used contests to encourage viewers at home to link their own life experiences to patriotic Soviet music, both recent songs and songs from previous decades.78 On Song-74, for example, the show featured a new viewer contest for the coming year, entitled “The Song Sings About Me.” Eleonora Beliaeva announced the rules: viewers were to listen to several songs connected to great events in Soviet history, performed by groups of Moscow students who had been participating in work brigades all over the country. Then they were to write to the show, “interestingly, movingly [chtoby zakhvatilo dushu],” about some event from their “personal life, your friends’ or families’ lives,” that they associated with these songs. Viewers responded: the show received more than a thousand letters within a few weeks, mostly from older viewers. These letters were then featured in the show’s advertisements for Song-75. Some viewers wrote in, however, to criticize the contest’s premise. I. G. Bardzilova, a pediatrician in 106

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figure 8. Kola Bel’dy on Song of the Year, 1972

Severomorsk, wrote that “music has been in my life like a best friend and trusted confidante. But I cannot boast that even one of the songs selected for the contest is about me, about the difficulties I have faced in life, about the victories I have experienced.”79 When a similar contest was announced on Song-76, it was given a more neutral name, “Song Is My Love [Pesnia moia liubov’].”80 These new contests were part of a growing divide, on Song of the Year in the mid-1970s, between the ways of presenting songs with direct links to Soviet history and ideology and those without them. A pattern began to emerge whereby lighter, poppier songs were presented without extensive reference to viewer letters or the specific individuals who had requested them. This distinction had become extremely sharp by the time Song-77 was produced. That year there had been a kind of poster contest for viewers entitled “Picturing the Song.”81 Viewers had submitted artistic renderings of the subject or meaning of particular songs, which were projected on a blue screen behind the show’s hosts as they introduced each song, usually with direct quotes from viewer letters about their emotional 107

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and personal connection to the events described in the song (figure 9). This treatment was mostly accorded to older songs and those that dealt directly and exclusively with patriotic themes. Songs about love or those from popular television films were not usually accompanied by these audience images or quotations. Instead, they were announced simply, with a phrase like, “the song ‘Moments’ continues our concert.” For these songs, the only thing projected on the blue screen behind the hosts was an image of a rotating New Year’s tree, covered in tinsel. Song-77 was also divided into two acts, and these audience images were absent from the more lyrical, poppy second half.82 Thus, as Song of the Year worked increasingly hard, starting in the mid1970s, to engage viewers with songs linked to key state myths and to justify the inclusion of those songs in the concert lineup, it also increasingly marginalized those songs and set them off from what was more and more clearly the concert’s main purpose, the provision of popular entertainment. Indeed, the prizes for the various write-in contests for viewers,

figure 9. Aleksandr Masliakov and Anna Shilova on Song of the Year, 1977 108

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which asked them to link their life stories to songs about Soviet achievements, were albums with autographs and pictures of the show’s celebrity performers.

From Differentiated Audience to Mass Youth Taste The transformation of Song of the Year from a juried selection of the “best” Soviet songs that represented Soviet society as harmonious, but hierarchically divided, to a popular song contest aimed at a mostly undifferentiated, primarily younger audience initially took place gradually, then all of a sudden. On Song-73 the jury was moved off-stage and into the audience, where it remained; on Song-77 the jury members seated in the audience were not introduced by name and did not speak at all; the following year the jury had disappeared altogether, replaced only by a brief, silent scene, at the beginning of the second half, showing television staff, other musical professionals, and attractive young people looking through record albums and (apparently) discussing their merits (figure 10). On Song-75 Kovelenov’s “microfestival” within the festival began to be called a contest [konkurs]; on Song-76 the show’s hosts repeatedly quoted from letters that included the phrase “we vote for this song”—language that had rarely been included in previous years.83 Song of the Year’s focus on youth also meant the inclusion, for the first time, of new genres: beginning with Song-77, Song of the Year began to include guitar poetry, often from the soundtrack of popular movies, such as The Irony of Fate (1975).84 Perhaps the most visible sign of change, however, was in the show’s increasingly youthful hosts. Indeed, as the Brezhnev politburo aged, Song of the Year grew younger. Kirillov (b. 1932) and Shilova (b. 1927) were replaced, on Song-76, by Aleksandr Masliakov (b. 1941) and Svetlana Zhil’tsova (b. 1936), who were strongly associated with the younger generation from their time as the hosts of the Central Television game show Club of the Merry and Resourceful [Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh, or KVN] (1961–72). On Song-80, Masliakov and Zhil’tsova were replaced by Muslim Magomaev (b. 1942) and Tat’iana Korshilova (b. 1946), the host of With a Song Through Life. Little Blue Flame, the other pillar of Central Television’s New Year’s programming, had undergone similar changes in the late 1970s. Like Song of 109

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figure 10. Song of the Year, 1978. A silent scene of television staff and musical authorities discussing new albums.

the Year, Little Blue Flame came more and more to resemble a regular concert, with much less ceremony devoted to representing a unified Soviet public that was either spontaneous and harmonious, as on the Little Blue Flame shows of the 1960s, or the result of a long, hard process of deliberation and negotiation, as on Song of the Year. For the 1977–78 New Year, Little Blue Flame abandoned the lengthy and stilted interviews with model workers that had characterized the show in the ’70s. Younger viewers (and some older ones) responded with great enthusiasm. “Fewer words, more action,” as Alexander Bulaev, a thirty-seven-year-old miner from Donetsk, put it. “Although I am already twenty-eight years old,” another viewer from the city of Gor’kii wrote, “and have already outgrown uncritical praise for the ‘guitar’ trend, I vote with both hands for this development in our entertainment programs.”85 Many older or more conservative viewers, however, objected vigorously.86 These conflicting audience responses mirrored conflict within the Party elites in the Central 110

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Committee and the Gosteleradio leadership with regard to the proper line on popular music.87 These conflicts emerged most starkly in late 1977 and early 1978, just months before Brezhnev’s criticism of formalism and clichés in ideological work at the Central Committee Plenum of November 1978.88 Lapin was outraged by greater accommodation of youth tastes. “The entire 1977 Little [Blue] Flame was a pop [estradnyi] concert,” he railed to a meeting of Central Television Party members after the holidays. “Of course naked propaganda is not necessary in this case, but why can this not be done with talent . . . is it necessary to completely disarm [razoruzhat’sia] here?”89 Younger executives within Gosteleradio disagreed. Shortly after its broadcast, Eduard Sagalaev, the youngest member of Central Television’s executive body and the second in command of the Youth Programming Division, denounced that year’s other New Year’s concert, Song-77, as having been produced “by people with an aging worldview,” calling it “the television of yesterday.”90 Song of the Year’s shift, in the second half of the 1970s, toward representing a largely undifferentiated audience with shared, youth-oriented tastes did not mean the end of the show’s experimentation, however. Instead, the show continued to seek new ways of representing the relationship between the show’s contents and audience demand (and occasionally return to old ones). Censorship continued to limit the show’s lineup. The very popular young songstress Alla Pugacheva was introduced during the opening minutes of both Song-76 and Song-77, but there were no performances by Pugacheva included in those concerts; she was finally included only on Song-78, when she performed twice.91 Her appearance at the beginning of the show on Song-76 and Song-77 was most likely the result of her numbers being cut from the show’s lineup, but the decision not to edit her out of the opening introductions signaled the producers’ desire to establish their credibility with viewers. The didactic purpose of Song of the Year’s contest form also remained intact. Song-79 briefly reintroduced contests for the hundred thousandth viewer letter and the “most active” correspondent that had been missing since Song-75, although they were gone again in Song-80. Youth also remained, to some extent, a distinct constituency on the show. In 1976 Central Television created another musical contest show, With a Song Through Life [S pesnei po zhizni].92 This program featured young professional 111

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musicians (a key qualification at a time when unsanctioned but regularly performing rock bands were proliferating), and ostensibly based the selection of finalists on votes from the studio audience and viewer letters.93 The winners of this contest began to appear on Song of the Year, as representatives of youth tastes. This new show, like Song of the Year, was understood as an important means of engaging and educating viewers. “The fact that television viewers participate in judging the contestants,” one television viewer wrote approvingly, “forces them to take responsibility, to be more attentive and demanding of performers and their repertoire as they grade them.”94 It was also, like Song of the Year, quite popular with viewers, who wrote in to praise the show’s less well-known, more youthful performers, or to criticize the decisions of the studio audience.95 The show’s camerawork also changed over time, reflecting a broader shift in Soviet domestic propaganda of the 1970s toward individual emotions as the key site of political influence and meaning.96 The camera increasingly focused on individual performers, at the expense of panoramic shots of the fully lit, hierarchically arranged hall. The use of close-ups of individual performers, and the darkening of the hall for particularly lyrical and intimate songs, or especially popular performers, increased greatly in the second half of the 1970s. This strategy highlighted strong emotions—love, longing, loss—implicitly connecting them to the state (which provided the concert) and to shared experiences of wartime suffering or communion with nature. But the show’s emphasis on individual responses could just as easily be read as highlighting spontaneity and acknowledging the diversity of possible responses to the show’s entertainments and political messages. As with game shows and other politically symbolic entertainment programs, Song of the Year’s camerawork had always been relatively informal by Central Television’s standards. But by Song-75 viewers were treated to shots revealing the looks of skepticism and very faint applause among the composers in the audience during a speech by Kara Karaev, the head of the Union of Composers, as well as the surprise on the faces of two singers when they were hit in the knees by bouquets. On Song-76 viewers could see someone yawning, and on Song-77 they saw a woman putting her hands on her cheeks, mouth agape, eyes wide, as Soviet sex-symbol Muslim Magomaev came on stage. 112

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As they turned toward a more explicit focus on youth, Song of the Year’s producers began to acknowledge the limitations of their own project: to provide a harmonious and unified picture of Soviet society and to include every Soviet citizen’s tastes. With a Song Through Life was not the only new musical program added to Central Television’s holiday lineup in the second half of the 1970s. A few of these new shows, such as Melodies and Rhythms of Foreign Popular Music [Melodii i ritmy zarubezhnoi estrady], created in 1976, were devoted exclusively to foreign music. In the early hours of New Year’s Day in 1978, Soviet TV viewers could hear the Swedish pop superstars ABBA and Euro-disco group Boney M on a special New Year’s broadcast of Melodies, titled The Stars Smile for You [Vam ulybaiutsia zvezdy].97 Song of the Year, always in dialogue with the Little Blue Flame broadcast the night before, now became just one among several different shows offering music to meet different tastes. This fragmentation of Central Television’s holiday musical programming began to be reflected in Song of the Year’s own broadcasts. Beginning with Song-78, Masliakov and Zhil’tsova acknowledged, late in the show’s program, that everyone wished to hear his or her favorite song on Song of the Year, a sentiment that left open the possibility that the show had not met those expectations. They then expressed the hope that the songs performed thus far had fulfilled many of those wishes. Song-80 included several popular performers who had not previously appeared on the show, including the rock and disco-influenced Stas Namin Group. At the end of the concert, however, Korshilova acknowledged that Song-80 could not please everyone. “Maybe during our concert today not all of the songs that you wanted to hear were played,” she said. “But our evening of song continues, and the New Year is just beginning.”98 That year, for the first time, Korshilova and Magomaev did not recite the show’s traditional closing incantation, “Farewell, Song-80, hello, Song-81!” Instead, they simply wished viewers happiness in the New Year, and the performers gathered on stage as usual to sing the show’s anthem. The Soviet jazz great Leonid Utesov, a special guest of the show in the year of his eightieth birthday, sang lustily in the front row. Although the traditional closing phrase returned in subsequent years, it was a kind of goodbye.

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Growing pessimism about the Communist Party’s ability to deliver on its promises after 1968 posed a significant challenge to Central Television’s festive programming. Not only did decisions previously made by the Party without much reference to popular demand, such as the inclusion of certain acts over others in concert lineups, now have to be explicitly justified on other grounds, but the very idea of a unified Soviet public was increasingly under threat. Faced with the problem of creating a single, all-Union New Year’s musical review and justifying the selection of certain songs and artists over others for inclusion, Central Television struggled, throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, with the question of how to represent the entire Soviet television audience while acknowledging and attempting to mediate the increasingly visible generational and social fissures that divided that audience. Critics argued that by the early 1980s Song of the Year suffered from overreach—it sought to include everyone, with hundreds of acts from completely unrelated musical genres, in a multi-hour extravaganza that ultimately failed to please anyone.99 Despite dissatisfaction with a sociological approach that divided the audience along demographic and cultural lines, however, Central Television found it difficult to entirely replace this strategy. If common belief in the communist future no longer seemed to unify the audience, what could? Rather than proposing a single new answer, Song of the Year and other holiday musical programs of the 1970s searched for ways to bring the audience together via a mix of limited democratic proceduralism and appeals to shared values and a shared past.100

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CHAPTER FOUR

TIME AND THE PROBLEM OF BOREDOM

On March 13, 1969, an art critic and commentator named Andrei Zolotov appeared on a new news show called Time [Vremia], to explain the significance of the show’s musical sign-on. The new “musical symbol” for the show, Zolotov explained, was a fragment of the overture from Georgii Sviridov’s score for the movie Time Forward! [Vremia-vpered!] from 1966, based on the 1932 socialist realist production novel of the same name by Valentin Kataev. “We chose the musical symbol of our program specifically from this piece,” Zolotov explained, “because it is an unusually broad, vivid, and effective symbol of Time—its driving rhythm, its unceasing movement, its all-encompassing breath. And this music also contains the image of Man, the Master of Time, capable of unceasingly discovering new horizons in life.”1 Both the new sign-on music and Zolotov’s comments suggested the symbolic importance of Time, the centerpiece of Central Television’s evening schedule. Far from a collection of predictable political formulas, Time was to engage viewers aesthetically and emotionally, via a direct, mimetic relationship with time itself. Yet Zolotov’s appearance suggested some of

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the tensions underlying the production of Time. By referring to Kataev’s novel, Zolotov suggested that conveying the dynamism of the present was best accomplished by a return to the past, specifically to the culture of the First Five-Year Plan. However, Zolotov’s emphasis on the role of “Man, the Master of Time,” hinted that Time might be more closely connected to the socialist realism of the mid-1930s, with its focus on the transformation of individual model people, than to the breadth and visual dynamism of Soviet documentary film of the late 1920s and early ’30s. Moreover, Time had already been on the air for more than a year by March 1969. The chief editor of the News Desk, Nikolai Biriukov, had appeared at the beginning of the first broadcast, on January 1, 1968, to explain the new program’s name in terms very similar to Zolotov’s. “We named this program Time,” Biriukov told viewers, “because we want it to be as dynamic, interesting, and saturated as our times.”2 Why, only a year later, did Time already seem to need updating? Zolotov’s comments reflected the difficult choices faced by the writers, editors, and journalists who made Time: creating a new, flagship television news program required constant experimentation and negotiation between conflicting objectives implicit in representing “time” and “man” in the context of the Soviet late 1960s and 1970s. Ever mindful of competition from foreign radio broadcasting, Central Television journalists fretted that the monotone delivery of Soviet television news would affect viewers’ perceptions of the content of that news, which was, as Time’s producers and critics repeated over and over, Soviet life itself.3 In a journal article in 1967, Sergei Muratov, a former television producer turned critic, harshly criticized one of Time’s predecessors, a show called simply Television News. He described “endless shots of meetings, openings, closings, award ceremonies, ribbon-cuttings, factory machinery, and applauding people. . . . Uniform shots and uniform phrases, astonishingly similar to one another. Not long ago,” he noted, the program’s anchors had read “a piece about one factory while showing footage of another, and they didn’t notice the mistake until after the broadcast.”4 This kind of slipup was extremely dangerous, he warned. Television News “supposedly gives us a panorama of time,” but instead “creates in the viewer a sense of the boringness of this time. Do we always understand,” he asked, “the responsibility of television at that moment, when the viewer goes up to his 116

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television set and, with chagrin, turns off the present day? [emphasis in the original].”5 Time was created in response to these concerns: where previous Soviet news programs had been slow, it would be fast; where they had been dull, it would be dynamic. How would this look? In the show’s initial publicity in the Soviet press, journalists described a new news program using language that recalled Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye in its temporal and geographic scope and emphasis on the presentation of visual “facts.”6 On Time, Soviet life was to appear fast-paced, exciting, a “panorama of time,” in which “excursions . . . from New York to Donetsk” would join “brief visits to the builders of a gas pipeline and to film studios.” “Multigenre” and “multiperspectival,” the program aimed to create a “television equivalent of the day . . . in which our very epoch speaks in the language of facts and events.”7 Yet Time’s early rhetoric also suggested that the show would at last resolve the central paradox in Vertov’s work (and documentary film more broadly) between purportedly unmediated film “facts” and the reality of the director’s aesthetic intervention in the film via planning, montage, and editing.8 Time’s panorama, articles celebrating its creation assured readers, would boast a transparent and singular meaning, its facts “subordinated to a unified directorial vision, a single higher task.”9 By returning to 1920s documentary styles, its producers implicitly suggested, Time could compete directly with the speed and style of Western television broadcasting. The new show was also explicitly modeled on Western evening news programs, which Central Television staff and Central Committee officials alike understood as a powerful medium for influencing audiences.10 Yet its content—the superiority of the Soviet way of life, and the Party’s leading role in creating that way of life—was to remain distinctly Soviet. The new show thus faced contradictory pressures: to mimic foreign news formats and embrace the visual dynamism of Vertov’s kino-eye but document the gradual realization of the Party’s promises about progress toward communism; to give viewers rapid, direct access to domestic and foreign events and people but ensure they drew the right conclusions; and to reflect Soviet reality in a way that viewers would recognize without admitting weaknesses before listening enemies. As they balanced these objectives, Central Television’s News Desk staff discovered an awkward fact: it was far easier to produce visually dynamic 117

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news coverage of events taking place outside Soviet borders. The result was a marked and uncomfortable divergence in the style and content of coverage between domestic and foreign news in every evening broadcast of Time. This contrast was, as everyone recognized, not in the Soviet Union’s favor. Juxtaposed with foreign events, Soviet life appeared static and dull. Groups ranging from Central Television executives and ambitious journalists to astute television viewers and Central Committee apparatchiks expressed alarm at this situation and proposed solutions. In all cases, the problem was presented as having extremely serious ideological consequences. In 1973, the vice chairman in charge of television at Gosteleradio, Enver Mamedov, was bemoaning the same situation, this time on Time. “As paradoxical as it sounds,” he began, the international part of Time, the part covering foreign events, is often much more vivid. This footage is usually more dynamic, as a rule it is not accompanied by text. These short frames show great and often dramatic events in different corners of the world. Many, many people,” he continued, “contrast the somewhat anemic, sluggish [vialyi] development of events that takes place on screen when we’re talking about the Soviet Union with the fast, rhythmic, energetic coverage of international life that follows.”11 The situation, he concluded, was urgent and could not be tolerated long term; what was needed was an analysis of why this was happening. There are multiple answers to Mamedov’s question: news, as the most politically important television genre, was subject to ideological and practical constraints that did not apply in other programming genres, constraints that proved fatal to their vision of a dynamic, fast-paced newscast. But the reasons why it was impossible to make Time’s domestic news coverage exciting went far beyond censorship. They included both tensions in the Soviet documentary tradition and the fundamental challenges the Soviet state faced from the late 1960s onward: the decline of belief in the near-term fulfillment of the Party’s promises, and thus an increasingly obvious gap between how TV producers believed viewers should respond to news items and how they actually responded. From the late 1960s through the 1970s, Central Television journalists retraced the path set in documentary debates of the 1920s and early ’30s, from showing a transformed Soviet landscape to an emphasis on portraiture, the transformation of single individuals.12 As they did so, the very solutions to the 118

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problem of boredom that television workers in the News and Propaganda Desks proposed, based on creating a profound, festive connection between viewers and featured persons on screen, worsened the problems of slowness and timelessness in the domestic news.

The Distinctiveness of Soviet News One of the most fundamental obstacles Central Television’s News Desk faced in its search for dynamism were the underlying assumptions and objectives of news in the Soviet Union.13 Soviet news was set in a different historical framework than news in postwar Europe and the United States. On Western news broadcasts of the same period, conflict, unpredictability, and an unknown future often provided the lens through which individual events became newsworthy. The express task of Soviet journalism, by contrast, was the enlightenment and mobilization of the population toward the construction of communism and the transformation of the Soviet individual into a new kind of socialist person.14 In the years after Stalin’s death, the main pathway for this process of enlightenment and mobilization increasingly took a particular form: Soviet domestic news would focus on the achievements of Soviet society and the people who accomplished them, and the society’s continuing progress toward communism. While these kinds of stories had been central in the Stalin era as well, they became more significant in a context where stories about the destructive actions of internal and external enemies were receding or absent. Exposed to positive stories about Soviet successes, readers or viewers, in turn, would recognize evidence of fulfillment of the Party’s promises in the events and people portrayed, and, it was hoped, then in their own surroundings. Enlightenment and mobilization thus became closely linked: inspired by evidence of the fulfillment of the Party’s promises and the scale of their collective achievement, Soviet people would redouble their work on themselves and in production. The emergence of this particular account of how news narratives would influence viewers reflected a key aspect of postStalin culture, the turn from coercion to persuasion as the key mode for mobilizing Soviet citizens.15 This emphasis on persuasion made the press’s longstanding role in documenting the immanental quality of everyday Soviet life and the existence of new Soviet men all the more crucial.16 119

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There were other sources of this marked search, during the Khrushchev era, for evidence of progress toward communism. These included the raising of popular expectations of greater comfort after the enormous sacrifices during Stalin’s industrialization and World War II; the ticking of the millenarian clock almost five decades after 1917; and, perhaps most important, Khrushchev’s charismatic approach to Cold War competition with the United States, culminating in his 1961 declaration that Soviet people would see communism in their lifetimes. In this environment, journalists sought to document the existence of a socialism that was already being realized in everyday life, by regular Soviet people, if not precisely in the terms set forth by the Party. Their articles focused on regular people who were practicing a noncoerced belief in socialism, a belief journalists themselves in turn demonstrated via this immanental approach to Soviet reality.17 These ideas in Thaw-era journalism were uniquely pronounced and enduring on television. Brezhnev’s assumption of power brought a swift rejection of Khrushchev’s charismatic approach to economic reform and the timeline of Soviet eschatology. The role of television news in representing the realization of the future in the present, however, remained constant. There were important changes—the role of critical pieces describing a gap between journalists’ and the Party’s understanding of socialism and socialist persons was dramatically circumscribed, and the present realization of “developed socialism” replaced the arrival of communism “in our lifetimes.” Still, throughout the 1970s, television journalists were exhorted to find evidence in everyday life, among ordinary people, of the true nature and direction of Soviet history. This understanding of the nature and purpose of “news” had several specific effects on Soviet domestic news stories. The first was in the understanding of what qualified as an “event.” What defined an event for Soviet domestic news was its status as evidence of the fulfillment of the Party’s promises and demonstration of the direction of Soviet history.18 Examples of this kind of story were profiles of model workers and farmers that stressed their inspiring moral and spiritual qualities or their advances in production, or showed evidence of material improvements in their working or living conditions. These kinds of stories suffered, however, from an extremely weak connection to the particular day or even the year in which they were broadcast. 120

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In U.S. news stories from the same period, that connection was supplied by a definition of eventfulness or newsworthiness that focused on conflict. Although American evening news broadcasts did include stories without a direct link to the day on which they were broadcast, including what are known as “human interest stories,” these were a tiny percentage of evening news stories in the late 1960s and ’70s.19 Only one-fifth of American evening news programs featured people who were not leading national politicians or famous criminals. Of that fifth, the most frequent “unknowns” to make it on to the news were “protesters,” “rioters,” and “strikers” (40 percent of stories in 1967), “victims” (33 percent), and “alleged and actual violators of the law” (8 percent).20 Unpredictability was another central theme that underlay most newscasts. Would student protests end in violence? How many lives would be lost if rescue efforts failed after a natural disaster? Even when the events reported were not violent or dramatic, or more than tenuously tied to the events of the particular day on which they were broadcast, they were presented as installments in a story of ongoing conflict between political factions (Congress versus the president, Democrats versus Republicans), between old and new societal norms, or between good guys and bad guys. Soviet domestic news could not reflect such fundamental elements of everyday life as uncertainty and conflict.21 The second characteristic of Soviet domestic news stories—the one that most contributed to the gap between foreign and domestic news programs—was a particular understanding of how portraying model people on screen would affect viewers, based in the socialist realist documentary tradition of the ocherk, or portrait.22 In the early 1960s, both intelligentsia television “enthusiasts” and the Central Committee understood the new medium as a site for transcendent connections between viewers and model socialist persons. They disagreed chiefly about whom the camera should feature—members of the intelligentsia or collective farmers and workers? For both groups, however, the encounter with a model person on screen was supposed to suspend time, transporting the viewer in an intense experience of recognition, emotional connection, even rapture. As a holiday of sorts, this kind of “news” was not expected to fit in the time constraints of other kinds of “news,” and was thus typically substantially longer than a short newswire item. 121

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Festive News in the Khrushchev Era: News Relay We can get a sense of the kind of news programs these ideas engendered from the premier television news program of the Khrushchev era, and a key predecessor to Time, News Relay [Estafeta novostei]. First broadcast in December 1961, News Relay was shaped by a very different Cold War moment than the one that led to the creation of Time seven years later. Its musical sign-on, written for the show by the composer Liudmila Liadova and set to a poem by the poet Boris Dvornyi, linked the new program to a peak moment for Soviet technology and Cold War hopes, Gagarin’s return from space, which had been broadcast live across Europe (to the immense chagrin of U.S. government officials, who had not yet established direct transatlantic broadcasting).23 “People of five continents,” the song began, “we call on you / to help friendship, freedom, and peace flourish on our planet / Over our planet communism dawns / and like a rocket to the stars / flies the [relay] baton / of the country of October!” Like its theme song, News Relay had a festive, triumphal air—it was a celebration of Soviet achievements that had genuinely earned world recognition, and an announcement of the rebirth of the intelligentsia as the new heroes of Soviet culture. The program’s creators, including the program’s first and most famous host, Yuri Fokin, the writer Yuri Teplov, and the ballet dancer Anna Lepeshinskaia, saw the program not only as a weekly news review but as a “club, where very interesting, very brilliant, very unusual people will go.”24 The essential qualities of television news, as they saw it, were liveness and a prominent role on screen for a charismatic and authoritative journalist, speaking in his own voice directly to viewers, engaging viewers in one-on-one conversation. As a live, spontaneous encounter between journalist or artist and viewer, therefore, News Relay could not be bound by scheduling constraints. A weekly review of the news, it was always broadcast on Friday nights as the last program of the evening so that its end time could be flexible, allowing Fokin to include appearances by guests who might drop by the studio unexpectedly.25 Fokin’s role on screen was far more prominent than that of, for example, Walter Cronkite in the United States, whose reputation as an authoritative figure far exceeded his actual editorial interventions during the

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average newscast. Indeed, despite its great length, News Relay contained very little actual news—only ten or twelve items in a show that routinely exceeded its planned hour and a half length.26 By 1965, as concern about competition from foreign radio broadcasts grew, the program, like its ecstatic musical sign-on, came to seem out of step with a more threatening international environment. Leonid Zolotarevsky, a young journalist who worked on the show, remembered how the show came to seem inappropriately festive by the mid-1960s. “We listened to the familiar song over and over,” he recalled, “and observed that it sounded too jubilant [slishkom prazdnichno] for a weekly review of the news.”27 The beginning of the show’s end, as its producers saw it, was the decision, in 1965, to confine it to an hour-long slot in the Friday night schedule.28 If producers saw this as a fatal blow to the show’s power, it also suggests how Central Television’s most powerful audience, members of the Party elite, were not convinced by the show’s festive style, nor enthralled by its intelligentsia stars.29

Defining “Counter-News” By 1965–66, Central Television executives were regularly voicing their concerns about the inability of television news, as it was currently produced, to compete with foreign radio broadcasts.30 Lengthy, boring stories were a central area of concern. In November 1966, Nikolai Biriukov, the chief editor of the Central Television News Desk [Glavnaia redaktsiia informatsii], addressed a group of television producers, executives, and critics who had gathered in Moscow for a conference on the “problems of television and radio news.” “It seems to me,” he told the assembled audience, “that we need to introduce the concept of ‘counter-news [kontrinformatsiia].’ After all,” he continued, “our ideological opponents build their programs primarily on news—very short, concise reports, selected in such a way as to seem at first glance entirely objective.” With its visual nature, mass distribution, and ability to draw the viewer in, Biriukov stressed, television news was the best medium for this new form of counterpropaganda.31 In order to compete with short and succinct foreign news broadcasts, however, Soviet broadcast news first had to be sped up. Biriukov and his colleagues in Central Television’s leadership in 1966 did not intend to change the content of Soviet domestic news. Although 123

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brevity might help make Soviet news appear more dynamic, kontrinformatsiia could not simply imitate Western broadcast news—the latter was directly critical of the Soviet Union and demanded a response as well. As Cold War counterpropaganda, Soviet news needed to emphasize the superiority of the Soviet way of life.32 After Khrushchev’s rash promises that the USSR would catch up with the United States in the area of consumer goods and living standards, Soviet ideologists in the mid-1960s began to try to shift the focus of the rivalry away from material considerations and toward ethical and spiritual ones—specifically, the transformation of the human individual and Soviet society. Biriukov proposed that it was precisely this moral and affective content that distinguished Soviet domestic news from its capitalist competitors. The content of Soviet news, he began, “is the revelation, in the most diverse cases and in everyday events, of the greatness of the Soviet people’s achievement, the reflection of life in the world’s first socialist state.” In this sense, he continued “its ideological-political direction and its methods are fundamentally different from the principles and content of news in bourgeois countries, although, he noted, Western news was often “more professionally produced” than Soviet news. What would more “professionally produced” Soviet news look like? Biriukov proposed that it too would feature “the Soviet person,” but portray him “not statically, but dynamically, in his work which is directed . . . toward the realization of our highest goal, the building of communism.” This work could be of any kind, Biriukov added. The most important thing was that the final product be “not a chain of frozen portraits, but a living reflection of our accomplishments and the people who achieved them.”33 At the Conference on Problems of Television and Radio News, Biriukov envisioned a new Soviet newscast that would bring together these various news genres in an organic and hierarchically organized whole, beginning with the reading of brief, concise news items and building toward longer reports from outside the studio. “In the beginning [of the report] we include the most general items, then we reinforce them visually,” Biriukov explained.34 “That way, we prepare viewers to receive longer reportazh-form pieces as the culmination of the entire news broadcast.”35 In order to maintain viewer interest up to this point, and ensure that what resulted was a “living reflection” and not a “chain of frozen 124

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portraits,” what was needed were changes to the pacing, organization, and camera work of Soviet TV news.

The Speed and Dynamism of BBC Television News There was a contradiction, however, between the more explicit narrative form and careful preparation within each news broadcast that Biriukov imagined and Central Television’s other objectives for Soviet news, including competing with Western broadcasting styles. One of the highlights of the conference at which Biriukov spoke was a screening of Soviet television news programs followed by two news programs from the BBC, Newsroom and 24 Hours. After the screening, a graduate student of psychology from Leningrad State University, V. V. Boiko, delivered a speech comparing the Soviet and British newscasts, and stressing how the speed and lack of lengthy transitions made the BBC’s program more dynamic. Its Newsroom opened, Boiko observed, with a “kaleidoscopic,” rapid-fire overview of the stories to come later in the broadcast. This helped entice viewers to watch the program—a quick mention of something that interested them would help draw them into viewing; moreover the fast-paced summaries of each story allowed the viewer “to adjust to the pace of the program . . . be drawn into the businesslike atmosphere of the program,” and sense “that watching the program won’t take up a lot of time, even if you’re in a hurry to get up from the television.”36 Contrast that, Boiko continued, with the typical opening of a broadcast of Television News, Central Television’s daily news program. “Program logo—music—the lights dim—the anchorman on camera. V. Balashov pauses as if to wait for someone ducking into the last row of the immense audience to which he, a popular Central Television diktor, is going to read the news. [He waits] as if he had not a care in the world. Now he can say ‘Good evening . . . dear comrades!’ Now let’s place our left hand more comfortably on our right, adjust our head position over the sheet of paper with the script and: ‘Today in the USSR . . .’ ” In the time that took, Boiko wryly observed, the BBC had already “delivered ten photoillustrated previews, already conveyed the contents of the newscast, already won the attention of viewers.”37 Soviet television news also suffered from an excessively filmic approach, Boiko noted—Soviet cameramen demonstrated their professional merit 125

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with lengthy panning and transition shots, which were simply eliminated on the BBC’s news shows in favor of rapid cuts. The Soviet approach was intended to convey a “certain logic” relating different segments, Boiko noted, and the use of rapid cuts had been criticized in the Soviet Union as a “psychological strategy” used “calculatingly” by foreign television. This was nonsense, Boiko asserted—the point of editing film on the BBC newscast was to pack the maximum amount of information into the minimum amount of time.38 A typical BBC newscast was delivered at something like 180 words per minute, Boiko reported. Leningrad radio, by contrast, was read at only 82 words per minute.39 The speed difference had an impact on effectiveness, Boiko claimed—the BBC news commentators’ reading was more emotional, conveyed more meaning, than that of the Soviet diktory. At a pace of only 82 words a minute, Boiko argued, it became difficult to pay attention, or even follow the meaning. Boiko’s speech suggested that creating dynamism was simply a matter of applying a set of technical strategies—fast cuts, a rapid-fire overview of the stories ahead at the beginning of the broadcast, journalists or diktory who simply talked faster. Other conference participants, however, directed their criticism toward particular kinds of content, particularly newsreel coverage of Party officials and events [ofitsial’naia khronika or “official newsreel”], which, they felt, was especially responsible for the troubling monotony of Soviet domestic coverage on Television News. The question was naturally a sensitive one, since these news items included reports on the activities of the country’s highest leadership, and for these officials appearance on television was a carefully regulated privilege.40 The outcome of these rules, however, was footage that was lengthy, slow, boring, and overly focused on ceremonial activities, which naturally lacked visual drama.

The Call for Authoritative Journalists on Screen In an essay in Zhurnalist, Sergei Muratov proposed a solution—replacing ofitsial’naia khronika with reporting by qualified journalists, appearing on screen and commenting on events. For Muratov, the boringness of ofitsial’naia khronika was directly linked to the “anonymity” and affectlessness of the diktory. The era of diktory, Muratov argued, belonged in the Stalinist past, when “the geography of life around us was limited to 126

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official newsreels and officious ceremonies,” and “events outside screamed and roared [bushevali], but on air they became quiet, paralyzed by the even voice of the unflappable informant [nevozmutimyi informator].” What was needed, Muratov believed, were television commentators, hosts, and journalists who were experts in their fields and therefore able to comment on the events and people featured on television news, helping viewers to understand their meaning. The models for such journalists were a group of prominent television performers in the 1960s who led Central Television programs on a variety of topics—film, war heroism, medicine. The popularity of these shows, Muratov argued, revealed that viewers preferred an “independently thinking interlocutor” over a newsreader.41 The attack on diktory saw them as lacking both intellectual and ideological substance—unlike a journalist with expertise in a given field, they did not have special knowledge of what they were reading about. More seriously, however, television producers and directors, as well as journalists, began to charge that most of them also lacked the depth of political knowledge and commitment that, they argued, were essential to engaging and influencing viewers, conveying the full import of political events. These claims were based on gendered assumptions about the capacity of female diktory to convey serious political messages, since a majority of the newsreader corps were women.42 As V. S. Turbin, chief director of Literary and Dramatic Programs at Central Television, announced at a Party meeting in 1969, “a newsreader can be charming, and very beautiful, and have a stylish hairstyle, and a nice smile, it’s all very nice, and the words are nice.” But, he continued, like an actor who brings the baggage of his whole life on stage, “we’re talking about there being, behind these words, behind these charming smiles a deep conviction and consciousness,” something most newsreaders, he argued, could not provide. This underlying belief, Turbin concluded, “should be present in all of our broadcasting, constantly letting our ideas shine forth.”43 The late 1960s were not, however, a particularly auspicious time to propose that members of the intelligentsia be given enormously important roles as intermediaries between the Party and the population. The trial of Siniavsky and Daniel in 1965–66, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and countless smaller crackdowns on individual journalists made 127

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clear that the Party would no longer tolerate a journalism whose definition of socialism challenged the Party’s renewed emphasis on authority and hierarchy.44 This is perhaps why Soviet journalists seeking to preserve their prominent role in defining and interpreting socialism during the Thaw began in the late 1960s to argue that, far from threatening the Party’s control of ideological discourse, their individualized, educated voices could authenticate the Party’s claims and be its most convincing messengers. The committed journalist that Turbin and others imagined at the helm of a program like Time would not simply make the news more personal and engaging for viewers. As the TV enthusiast and critic Muratov put it, the vivid individual on screen would make possible “a new approach to reality.”45 This understanding of the journalist was built upon what might seem like a contradiction: the qualities that separated him from the diktory —his experience, knowledge, and ability to “think independently”—were precisely the qualities that enabled him to convey to viewers the Party’s preferred interpretation of the events or people featured in a news broadcast, since a fully realized individual was one whose views were naturally in harmony with the Party.46 What was effective about an authoritative journalist, in other words, was his seeming free choice of Soviet ideology —there they were, qualified experts, capable of independent thinking, conveying a profoundly felt Party-mindedness to viewers. As one television enthusiast and Central Television producer, Georgii Kuznetsov, wrote in 1969, “social psychology long ago uncovered a fundamental principle [zakonomernost’]: the more vivid, unique, and inimitable the individual on screen, the better that person can convey socially significant [facts] to the viewer and the greater his influence on the audience.”47 This individuality did not, however, have to include the freedom to articulate a position that corrected the Party line. “The journalist working on screen simply does not have the right to make an error,” Kuznetsov wrote. “He must be able to orient himself correctly in a given situation, not relying on guiding orders [rukovodiashchie ukazaniia]. The right to one’s own opinion” on television, Kuznetsov wrote, “is determined by the journalist’s competence, that is, by the extent of his conviction in the rightness of the Party [partiinaia ubezhdennost’]. In a word, the journalist on screen is a senior [otvetstvennyi] Party propaganda worker.”48 128

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Improving Television Portraiture Television journalists and producers calling for an enhanced role for themselves on Soviet news programs faced an important obstacle—since the early 1960s, but with greater force after 1964, the Central Committee had made it clear that it expected television, including television news, to feature model persons drawn from the working classes, not just journalists and their cultural celebrity friends.49 A journalist’s place on camera could not be justified without reference to his ability to create effective portraits of model citizens and avoid overshadowing them with his own charismatic presence. The result was a series of proposals for improving Soviet news that emphasized the centrality of journalists in creating effective portraits of working people. Portraiture had been an unusually prominent genre in the Soviet press since the First Five-Year Plan, but the genre had undergone a particular renaissance during the Thaw.50 Yet these portraits were one of the most problematic parts of the news broadcast, not least because, unlike film, painting, or literature, television had to represent the Soviet man of the future using actual workers, few of whom were comfortable appearing on television. For this reason, television portraits of workers suffered, far more than appearances by artistic celebrities and polar explorers, from a troubling monotony. “Why are so many news broadcasts surprisingly similar to one another,” Central Television’s chief editor of programming asked in a 1967 article in Zhurnalist. “Why does a piece about leading workers in a factory in Gorkii resemble one about a Moscow factory? The same equipment, with the same workers standing around it. Everything’s from life, everything’s fairly represented. It’s just boring.”51 One possible locus for blame was the journalist producing the piece—he or she had failed to bring out the subject’s inner qualities, or lacked a sufficiently committed viewpoint to infuse the piece with meaning. A piece “without its own unique view of the world cannot attract the viewer,” Bogomolov added, and he went on argue that only journalists with such a viewpoint should be allowed to lead reports on model laborers.52 Yet the process by which this transferring of meaning from the journalist’s Party-minded commitment to the subject of the interview-portrait should occur remained unclear.

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In 1967, L. Dmitriev, one of Central Television’s journalist “commentators,” described the kind of program that he and others envisioned. The program Dmitriev imagined would combine a journalist and a hero on screen to move viewers very deeply.53 “Why,” he began, “do we invite people onto the television screen alone or in groups? . . . at present, the person on screen is mostly used in order to give the viewer firsthand information about a new advance in production, a new invention, a new movie.” Although news would remain television’s “number one task,” what was needed was to “go a step further and . . . not bring the viewer news via a person, but news about that person himself [ne informatsiia cherez cheloveka, a samogo cheloveka].” “Why,” Dmitriev asked, “does it always move us when we see a dynamic individual on the screen, speaking not for someone else, but for himself, laying out his views and expressing his feelings? Why do we, as in art photography, see the transformation of a specific person into a generalized artistic image?” The reason, he explained, is that when we watch television we dream of finding “our moral ideals, those ‘positive heroes’ . . . that were not invented by anyone.” When television viewers, Dmitriev wrote, “see a person on screen in a moment of complete moral self-revelation [samoraskrytiie], we experience aesthetic pleasure like that of the best films or plays.” What is more, Dmitriev argued, television could draw viewers into the process, training them to experience their own lives aesthetically, as at least partial realizations of an ideal. By “comparing the facts of life seen on screen with one’s own experience of life, we seek in them a grain of the typical, and from there lies a direct road to a moving encounter [trepetnaia vstrecha] with art.”54 Dmitriev argued that this moving encounter, moreover, made it possible for television to have a profound influence over viewers. Dmitriev described his own viewing experience, when the process he had described was successful, as one of total conquest. “He is completely true [on ves’— sploshnaia pravda]. In how he lives, how he thinks, how he speaks to me from the screen.” [Remarkably, Dmitriev referred thus far to the journalist on screen, not the model worker]. “He tells me about the fates of those people with whom life has brought him together, and I see them too. The television camera looks into their lives, without changing anything. . . . And here begins that secretive thing, which I always try to capture and 130

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which always slips away. Suddenly the narrator disappears, and the heroes, and I just see a piece of life, concentrated, but at the same time entirely factual . . . Their voices, thoughts, the music, the emotional mood of the program all combine,” Dmitriev continued, until “I am no longer able to judge how they are doing it, the critic in me dies, I become a naïve viewer, glued to the screen as if transfixed and only a little later, when the program is over, can I return to the question: how did they do that, anyway?”55 Dmitriev’s account is descriptive—he had no clear proposals for how, precisely, to ensure that all worker portraits in a news program could have a similar effect on viewers. His account posed obvious problems, however, for a news program that sought to be rapid, concise, and actionpacked. Like the intimate, but extremely lengthy, conversations between journalist and viewer on News Relay, the kind of viewing experience Dmitriev described could not be realized in a thirty-second news item. The long-awaited arrival of a new Soviet news program that sought to realize at least some of these ideas did not, of course, bring an end to these debates. Criticism of the new program began almost as soon as it aired, for the positions it took in relation to these often conflicting desiderata for Soviet news: speed and dynamism, clear presentation of evidence that the Party’s view of the world was the true one, and compelling images of Soviet man.

Program Time The launch of a new Soviet evening news program on January 1, 1968, was accompanied by fanfare befitting the central place that Central Television executives hoped it would find in Soviet audiences’ evenings at home. Much longer than Television News and much shorter than News Relay, Time was Central Television’s new premier program, intended to attract the broadest possible audience—its forty-five-minute broadcast on Mondays through Thursdays and half an hour on Saturdays began, in this first year, at 8:30 p.m., a prime spot in the new schedule day (figure 11). In some ways, the program was familiar. Like Television News, Time began each broadcast with news of the comings, goings, and other doings of the country’s highest Party and State officials. Unlike either Television News or News Relay, however, Time was initially packed with very short news items. 131

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figure 11. “Central Television diktory Aza Likhitchenko and Igor Kirillov during a broadcast of Time.” V. Akhlomov, 1979. (GBU “TsGA Moskvy,” no. 0-114385; used with permission)

To take one example, the broadcast of Time from February 21, 1968, was made up of forty-two items, organized into the following groups: One-minute report on Brezhnev’s departure for Czechoslovakia. One-minute report on preparations for a meeting in Bucharest. Block of mostly very brief items (twenty–thirty seconds) of “important domestic news,” all related to preparations for and celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Armed Forces. This section also included a two-minute live report from Leningrad, broken into three intertwined mini-reports on a meeting of former soldiers, the awarding of medals to them, and the placing of wreaths on monuments to the fallen. Block of important foreign news, all related to “the fighting in Southern Vietnam and the protest of world civil society against American aggression.” 132

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Another block of very brief items of domestic news (including a two-minute live report from Donetsk on agricultural work and a one-minute report from Gomel’ about the discovery of oil near the city). Brief foreign news items. News from the world of culture. Sports news. Weather forecast.56 Thus, in its first months, Time represented a radical change to the aesthetics of Soviet television news, one that followed Boiko’s advice regarding speed and brevity. The most notable difference was the length of most reports—in the show’s early months most information was delivered in extremely terse segments, between fifteen and thirty seconds in length, with much of the time taken up by silent film, video, or photographic illustrations, accompanied by music. Not only was information delivered rapid-fire and primarily visually, but the unifying presence of the onscreen newsreader was gone, replaced by a voiceover narrating news items illustrated by photographs and video material. Time featured much more video material than its predecessors—as much as three-quarters of its reports were illustrated by video, according to one reviewer. One item in February 1968 consisted of a voiceover announcing “The Moscow Polar Bears Club has opened its season,” followed by ten seconds of video of the swimmers set to music.57 Journalists were not absent from the new program, but they did not play the prominent, unifying role held by Fokin on News Relay. Instead, they appeared only in conjunction with recurring rubrics. These rubrics and their hosts sought to engage viewers directly, via letters read on air (Our Mail); investigations of local corruption, often reported by viewers (TV Investigation and Warning Siren); the personal perspective of a journalist returning from events at home or abroad (A Correspondent Returns to the Studio); or popular topics, like health news (Five Minutes with Hippocrates).58 Gone too were the careful and explicit transitions between different kinds of visual material. Like its predecessors, but with much greater frequency, Time featured segments broadcast live from studios elsewhere in the Soviet Union, a significant technological feat, and one that was highly valued by aficionados

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of television’s immediacy and power to virtually transport viewers. For the first time, however, these segments were simply prefaced by an image of the city with its name, rather than an explanatory announcement by the diktor. They were also far more frequent than those featured in Television News had been: Central Television’s network in 1968 included fifty cities, and each broadcast included one- to two-minute live reports from four or five different cities.59 All of these changes were meant to capitalize on television’s advantages over radio, exploit its compelling visual form, and present a reflection of Soviet life that was “dynamic” and “saturated.”60 The visual saturation, and minimal narration, reflected the influence of Vertov’s thought as much as that of the BBC.61 The effect for many viewers, however, was disorientation. People wrote in to complain that the program was incomprehensible at its current speed, using the word “kaleidoscopic” negatively, rather than positively. One N. Glagolev from Yaroslavl’ observed: “The general approach isn’t bad. But it’s important to avoid the current incredible kaleidoscope of reports, which prevents [the viewer from] concentrating—you need less, but better-delivered news.”62 Even more numerous were complaints about Time’s sign-on. Designed to convey the immediacy with which news was passed from the wire services to Soviet viewers, the opening sequence in 1968 featured the sound of the teletype machines in the background and a jazzy musical sign-on, which viewers complained drowned out the voices of the newsreaders.63 Critics agreed that the experience of watching Time was too chaotic.64 Like the Soviet radio news and music channel Maiak before it, Time was intended to remedy the problem of boredom, and of falling behind the foreign radio news broadcasts, by packing a large amount of factual information into a short broadcast. Yet these objectives were not supposed to supersede the larger objective of ensuring that Soviet news clearly reflected an underlying narrative about the superiority of the Soviet system. Moreover, in its early months the program also departed from the prescribed hierarchy of news categories. One early broadcast came under immediate criticism from the Central Committee for failing to place items in the broadcast in an order that conveyed their relative importance. The head of the Central Committee section on radio and television, Pavel Moskovskii, attended a Television and Radio Committee 134

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Party conference in January 1968 in order to reprimand Time’s producers. “On January 8,” he charged “you reported on the arrival of the French [Foreign] Minister Debré, on dried strawberries, on an incubator for fish, and on a trip to Cairo by a delegation led by Comrade Mazurov. Reported on them, that is, in exactly that order.”65 Writing in Soviet Radio and Television, another critic observed that the arrangement of news items within a given broadcast “often appears chaotic, undisciplined [nestroinyi],” resulting in both boredom and the absence of a clear story about Soviet superiority. “For the moment,” she continued, “it seems that Time does not live up to its founding principles: its dynamism sometimes turns into superficiality, covering many themes becomes irreconcilable with depth, and as for interest, it’s hard to find in the mass of similar news items.” Many news stories, she pointed out, seemed to have been included only “to fill a vacuum,” not for their larger contribution to the meaning of the broadcast as a whole.66 Speeding up the delivery of news, in imitation of Western radio and television news programs, had not succeeded in overcoming the problem of slow and boring domestic news; instead, extreme brevity had sacrificed depth of impact, and produced news stories that were not only confusing but also indistinguishable from one another. The program’s response to these criticisms was put off by a major item of national and international news, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The year and a half after the invasion were a time of upheaval at Central Television. However, the transformations in Soviet politics and media after 1968 only increased the importance of television news, raising the stakes in the debate about how to improve Time’s domestic news.

The Ministry of Television: The Rise of Television News After 1968 August 1968 led to a sharp change in Time’s format and content, one that is most evident in documents recording the efforts, just half a year later, to restore the positive features that had been lost. The implementation of rigid controls after the invasion stripped Time of the internal diversity of its content—gone were the program’s original “rubrics” that 135

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had focused on particular kinds of content for specific audiences.67 Gone too were the journalists who had hosted these rubrics. The crackdown replayed the attack, at the beginning of the 1930s, on the radiogazety, which had likewise featured rubrics aimed at specific sub-audiences.68 For almost a year after the crisis, producers in the News Desk complained, Time resembled its much-maligned predecessor and subordinate, Television News.69 As had been the case with musical variety programs, however, after the short-term crackdown had passed, the worsening of Cold War tensions only increased Time’s importance to the state and within the Soviet media. And when the arrival of the new Nixon administration in 1969 brought the beginnings of a thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations, this too served to enhance Time’s importance as a soft medium for propaganda in an era of relatively greater openness and greater exposure of Soviet audiences to news and images from abroad. Already in October 1968 Central Television had revised the Channel 1 schedule to include more news programming, adding a new Sunday broadcast of Time.70 By 1970, the editors of Zhurnalist (who included high-ranking Party officials and members of the State Committee on Television and Radio Broadcasting) and Central Television executives had reaffirmed the program’s preeminent place not only on Central Television, but also, for the first time, among all Soviet media. This was new—in the spring of 1968 in an article on Time, N. Ivanovskaia had identified the program’s goal as introducing viewers to facts solely in order to spur their interest and motivate them to learn more from other sources, particularly newspapers or the radio. These media, she explained, were better equipped to deliver more details or commentary about an event, “not only to report facts, but to explain their meaning.”71 Ivanovskaia reiterated the longstanding view among Party officials and even executives at Central Television that too much television watching was undesirable, and that television was best used to attract viewer interest and draw them toward print journalism and radio.72 By contrast, in 1970, Central Television’s leadership, under the direction of a powerful new chairman of the State Committee, Sergei Lapin, began to assert that Time should become a self-sufficient news source, one that would deliver news before the newspapers—a dramatic change of 136

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policy—and contain both facts and interpretation. In a June Party meeting for the News Desk, the chief editor for news, N. Biriukov, set out the new agenda. “Time should contain all of the most important news of today, using all of the sources available to us. A person listening to our program should not experience ‘information deprivation’ and have to turn on Maiak, or read the newspaper the next day.” In November of the same year, Biriukov, though he had already been replaced as chief of the News Desk, published an article in Televidenie i radioveshchanie [formerly Sovetskoe radio i televidenie] that made public Time’s new position among other news media: Time, he announced, “must contain a summary of all political information of the day, including material that the papers publish only the following day.”73 Time could now openly aspire to eclipse Pravda as the state’s premier medium for informing the Soviet public. Time’s rise was buoyed by the ascendance of television as a whole in 1968– 70, mirroring the rise of television as a news medium across Europe. Just months after Time’s first broadcast, a draft proposal calling for the promotion of Gosteleradio to the level of an all-Union ministry was put forward for signature by the heads of the two divisions of the Central Committee apparat with responsibility for television, V. Stepakov (Propaganda Division) and K. Simonov (Communications and Transportation Division).74 The proposal to create a Ministry of Television and Radio was not carried forward after the August invasion of Czechoslovakia, perhaps partly because both Stepakov and Moskovskii lost their positions in the Central Committee apparat in the firings of high-ranking ideological workers that followed the crisis.75 Television and radio remained a State Committee, but it became one that was “of ” (genitive case) rather than “subordinate to” (pri) the Soviet of Ministers.76 This apparently subtle change of bureaucratic grammar is described by former television workers as highly significant, a change that brought the State Committee to a status directly equivalent to an all-Union ministry.77 Finally, although he did not hold the title of minister, the new chairman, Sergei Lapin, was an enormously powerful figure, a member of the Central Committee and ally of post-1964 chief ideologist and Politburo member Mikhail Suslov. Lapin’s long reign at Central Television, from 1970 to 1985, has not been remembered as a time of innovation or active search for improvement in the quality of news programming.78 Nevertheless the Lapin era 137

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did not result in the straightforward reassertion of ideological “truth” over timely dynamism. Instead, under Lapin Time became even more visibly bifurcated between foreign news, which remained dynamic because it was unpredictable, and domestic news, where excitement and dynamism were to be generated via an entirely different pathway: lengthy, emotionally rich portraits of model Soviet citizens.

News in the Lapin Era: Portraiture Ascendant Among Lapin’s first acts on arriving at Central Television in April of 1970 was to concentrate the News Desk’s resources on Time and send a message to critics who had grown more vocal during the two years of administrative tumult within Central Television. News Relay and Seven Days, another commentary-driven week-in-review program, were canceled; News Relay’s prominent host, Yuri Fokin, was banned from appearing on television.79 Lapin made clear that under his leadership journalists would not be the camera’s primary subjects—that role belonged to model workers and other featured individuals.80 In 1972, Lapin published an article in Zhurnalist criticizing journalists who appeared on air for asking banal, formulaic questions, not exploring the workers’ other interests and emotional life: for seeming to believe they had nothing to learn from the workers they interviewed.81 The article also made threatening reference to Fokin’s removal from the air. “At Central Television,” Lapin warned, “we are forced to exclude from programs one very eminent and popular commentator, who, in any circumstances, presents himself on camera with so much aplomb, such self-confidence, as if he himself were the chief hero of our times, while the worker, who is present for all this, is supposed to just cast this person in higher relief.”82 Instead, as Lapin had stressed at internal Party meetings from June 1970, what were needed were fewer flattering portraits of actors and musicians aping Western modes, and more portraits of the Soviet Union’s “real heroes,” meaning those who work in production and agriculture.83 “We can and must,” Lapin urged, “create countrywide fame for leaders of agriculture, machinists, milkmaids, brigade-leaders, collective farm chairmen. Of course, we already cover accomplished people of the village, 138

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and that makes them better known, but we do it fairly rarely and superficially.”84 Other changes made clear that Lapin intended to bring Time’s domestic news into very close coordination with the domestic priorities of the Central Committee. Although Central Television had long coordinated its content with Central Committee initiatives following the Committee’s plenary sessions, or in support of official campaigns on one topic or another, Lapin took this coordination further, directly tying Time’s contents to Central Committee documents. In a meeting of Central Television and All-Union Radio’s Party activists, called to discuss the Central Committee’s July Plenary meeting, Lapin praised Central Television and local television and radio stations for immediately responding to the Central Committee’s resolutions on improving agriculture. “Now in every broadcast of [radio’s] Latest News, Television News, and in every broadcast of Time,” Lapin told the audience, “you can hear information and see footage devoted to agriculture, especially to the harvest.”85 Yet many of the changes that took place during Lapin’s first years as the head of Soviet Television and Radio were strikingly familiar. Faced by the same dilemma as his predecessors—boring and static Soviet domestic news—Lapin adopted two familiar strategies: speeding up the pace of news delivery and attempting to deepen the impact of domestic news defined as a form of portraiture. In internal meetings in June and July, 1970, Biriukov announced that the program needed to return to its original fast pace. First off, production staff needed to start making sure that the clock prominently displayed on the set was set to the right time.86 The program’s length was cut from forty-five minutes to half an hour; the length of individual pieces was again cut to one to two minutes or less for most news items. Still, two kinds of domestic news items of highest political importance were an exception to the rule of brevity—now even more so than they had been in 1968. One producer, Biriukov observed, was taping long speeches by ministers—even these esteemed officials, he insisted, should not be allowed to talk for more than four or five minutes at a time.87 The same generous time slots were extended to worker portraits. As one internal review of Time put it, “the fate of a worthy person should not be recounted in a hurry.”88 Indeed, the chief shortcoming of these portraits 139

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was their lack of in-depth presentation of their subjects. Leading workers and collective farmers were featured on the news, Lapin told one meeting of television staff, but “in a significant part of these programs,” Lapin said, “we just show machines and people around machines, or we show women with milk pails or what have you.” Often, he noted, “we don’t even find it necessary to give the names and patronymics of the people on screen.” This was a failure of both protocol and strategy—such footage was boring. “These shots appear just as illustrations,” Lapin warned, “and the danger of this kind of program is that they can just go in one ear and out the other [oni mogut primel’kat’sia] and lose any kind of meaning.”89 What was needed instead were portraits of leading workers that propagandized their innovative production techniques—not in a “narrowly technical” way, but in a way that would lead others to imitate them. More broadly, these portraits should “show the image of the Soviet person, his fully formed ideas, actively and consciously building communism.”90 As with the other changes he proposed, Lapin’s emphasis on improving worker portraits fell well within the range of solutions already articulated in the late 1960s. Attempts to improve worker portraiture on television only raised further questions, however, about devoting so much of domestic news coverage to a genre that was, by definition, neither eventful nor dynamic.

The Purpose of Domestic News When Central Television staff and Party officials proposed improvements to Time’s domestic content, they focused on different ways of reaching viewers from those they saw as important for foreign news. Rather than swift delivery of information (to keep pace with foreign radio broadcasts), what was important for domestic news, they felt, was the creation of a profound emotional or spiritual connection between the viewer and the person on screen. This postulated viewer experience was supposed to serve a quite specific purpose: mobilizing the population, individual by individual, to recommit themselves, in a kind of conversion process, to the Soviet project, and especially to economic production. This was true for other media as well, but television’s role was uniquely focused on transforming viewers via a personal, emotional, even spiritual 140

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revelation, something that television enthusiasts and their Party supervisors alike felt television’s visual and intimate form made possible. Figuring out how to convey these emotional states in a television portrait was the subject of much discussion in Zhurnalist and Sovetskoe radio i televidenie in the early 1970s, including articles on how to bring out reticent subjects so that they would “reveal themselves,” proposals about the uses of hidden cameras (another return to documentary film techniques of the 1920s), and reports on local television staff who succeeded in creating programs that conveyed their subjects’ inner, emotional lives.91 Transcripts of some shows recorded the facial expressions of their subjects—an episode of the Leningrad Television Studio’s program Horizon [Gorizont] (which was broadcast on Channel 1 in the 1970s) described the look in the eyes of a tractor driver, Vasilii Timakin: his eyes were “attentive, and yet, at the same time, as if directed inward. This,” the stage directions continued, “is Vasilii Timakin. Hushed music plays. The voice of the diktor, as if it were Timakin’s thoughts [begins].”92 These intimate, emotional portraits were meant, moreover, to help the viewer move from the specific to the general, from one model worker to all of Soviet society, in its ethical and aesthetic superiority to life in the West. The ideal television portrait, another article stressed, would be “perceived as a portrait of [our] epoch.”93 These “portraits of society” were intended to engage viewers, especially young viewers, in practical steps by which they could signal their sincere loyalty to the state and commit to greater economic productivity. As Lapin announced in a 1972 article in Zhurnalist, “when we invite workers into the studio or film them in other surroundings . . . we try to show their work, their background, their authority in their factory and as model citizens in a way that encourages young people to follow in their footsteps, to choose a profession because it is prestigious, respectable, and exciting.”94 Young viewers were a high-stakes audience for many reasons, not least of which was their greater interest in foreign radio broadcasts. They were supposed to (and sometimes did) respond to these programs by writing, individually, to Central Television or other state organs to discuss their own conversion from disaffection to commitment, or ask how they could be transferred to a model factory or construction site that had been featured on television.95 Portraits of model workers were often 141

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occasioned by the subject’s technical innovation, which, it was hoped, would be spread nationwide by the television broadcast. Not all of the programs described above were technically news programs. Although they took the form of journalistic “essays [ocherki]” and employed interviews and other generic features of “news,” within Central Television such programs were produced by the Propaganda Desk. Yet this is precisely the point—in the case of domestic news, there was no clear distinction between content that was produced as “propaganda” and that which was produced as “news.” Vladimir Turbin, the chief editor of literary and dramatic programs, freely combined domestic news with all other genres of portraiture in his comments at an internal Central Television Party conference in 1974. Turbin began by noting another reason for the importance of creating programs that appealed to viewers’ emotions. “Our viewers are now surrounded by such a powerful stream of information,” he observed, “that it is commonly said that ‘the airwaves above them are wide open.’ In order to move [the viewer’s] thinking in the necessary direction,” Turbin continued, “we need to capture his heart. And in order to capture his heart, every program needs to be emotionally engaging [emotsional’no zarazitel’na] . . . Take the news. The simplest news program is a person on screen or an interview . . . How can it engage us? If there’s a living person on camera, if we see his thinking processes . . . when we start to think along with him, then we make contact, that is, emotional engagement.” From this description of how a news program, with its simple format, could engage viewers emotionally, Turbin moved on to consider the entire content of Soviet television as part of the same genre—portraiture—as this simple news program. “What if we were to count,” Turbin declared, “how many people appear before our viewers on all of our programs in a day, or a week? It is a colossal, moving portrait gallery. It is a collective portrait of our contemporaries, our people.”96 Lapin made clear that he too viewed Central Television’s production as part of one singular project, to which news and other genres of programming were all subordinate, in a 1977 discussion of the problem of fitting all the material produced for Time into the show’s allotted time. Some of the extra reports, Lapin mused, might form the basis for future episodes of a documentary film series released in 1977 for the sixtieth anniversary 142

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of 1917, which covered each year of Soviet history in a separate, one hour episode. Fittingly, the series was titled Our Biography [Nasha biografiia].97 The problem was, of course, that programs focused on creating spiritual portraits of workers provided viewers with very little of what they claimed to be looking for from news, including foreign radio broadcasts— information about current events at home and abroad. These portraits were also far from laconic, and they bore no clear connection to the particular day or even year in which they appeared. They depended, moreover, on an imagined viewer response, the existence of which was demonstrated only by the personal viewing experiences and beliefs of television news producers themselves. Furthermore, the treatment of Soviet domestic news as part of a single, artistic project profoundly shaped the way that news was produced within Central Television, further limiting the possibilities of creating news that was eventful or dynamic in the same way as foreign news.

The Challenges of Producing Domestic News Like much of Soviet “authoritative discourse,” the production of Soviet domestic news scripts in the 1970s had undergone what Alexei Yurchak describes as a “performative shift.”98 Judging from the number of reprimands in Lapin’s speeches, what was important to most of the lowerlevel journalists, consultants, and cameramen responsible for writing and producing Soviet news scripts was producing something that would meet all the parameters for a Soviet news story and thus result in the payment of the honorarium due to journalists whose news piece was produced and aired.99 More committed to practices like illegally dividing honoraria among a team of co-workers than they were to revitalizing Soviet domestic news, many journalists produced scripts in much the same way as Yurchak’s Komsomol secretaries did, relying on the use of meaningless statistics and formulaic language.100 Yet even when they were engaged, for reasons of personal belief or professional pride, with the task of creating dynamic news and effective portraits, Soviet television journalists encountered two major kinds of problems—those having to do with timeliness and those related to verisimilitude in representations of Soviet life. 143

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First, Soviet journalists asked to represent Soviet life via heroic situations could almost never be present with their cameras to capture those situations as they unfolded. Despite its journalistic organization into content desks, like a newspaper, Central Television was organized more like a film studio. It was also chronically short of mobile television equipment, and in the 1970s such equipment had to be requested months in advance, which was a constant source of exasperation for TV journalists. For events outside the capital, the situation was even worse. In the late 1960s, as the network of radio relay and satellite towers brought Central Television to the majority of Soviet territory, the State Television and Radio Committee drastically cut the hours during which regional television stations could broadcast their own content. Although this was a dramatic centralizing change for Soviet broadcasting, the local stations were also asked to produce more content for broadcast on Central Television, and particularly for Time.101 However, as we have seen, the understanding of what constituted an “event” in Soviet news tended to exclude most of the things that would be considered newsworthy elsewhere—disasters, political conflicts, accidents—and to focus instead on ceremonies and feats of production that were themselves the outcome of careful planning and staging. Even if a local station managed to cover an event in a timely way, there was no guarantee it would air promptly on Central Television: reports from particular cities for broadcast on Time were also scheduled far in advance, and limited to a certain number of hours per month.102 The belatedness of reports from Soviet factories and farms also pushed news producers up against the limits of a strictly documentary genre: given the frequency of calls for news that would merge documentary and fiction forms, what would be the harm in a little restaging of events that had already taken place? This practice was the focus of a critical article in Zhurnalist, which charged the Omsk television studio with reattaching sprigs of grapes to the vine in order to videotape Pioneer scouts harvesting them, an event that had taken place before the crew arrived.103 Staging events risked undermining television’s credibility—if not necessarily for viewers, then at the very least for the people who witnessed these falsifying practices at their own farm or factory.

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Other issues revolved around the extent to which the featured people or places fit the journalists’ (and perhaps censors’) understanding of how someone or someplace “typical,” yet exceptional, should look. Journalists in local TV studios wrote in to Zhurnalist with questions about how accurately they could represent life at their factories and farms. Was it appropriate, for example, to show manual labor, or should work appear only “attractive and beautiful”? The article’s author, a prominent producer in the Central Television Propaganda desk, responded that what mattered most were the “moral values” that a worker could convey, whether he worked with a pitchfork or a tractor.104 Certain kinds of accurate reflection of Soviet life were clearly off limits, however, during Lapin’s first years at Central Television. From the early 1970s, the prohibition on negative portrayals of Soviet life extended to exposés of local corruption and mismanagement as well, something that had been an intermittent feature of Time prior to Lapin’s arrival. Previously the critical pieces had been justified partly in terms of verisimilitude—viewers would see reflected on screen their own problems and concerns.105 Critical news pieces would also help resolve such situations, by exposing the perpetrators.106 In 1970, Lapin made clear that no negative representations of Soviet life were acceptable, given Central Television’s national reach (and international audience). “There is no reason for radio and television to get carried away with critical statements, criticisms of particular factories or even branches of industry, [before an audience of] . . . millions of people,” Lapin told a Party meeting in June 1970. Of course they should not hide problems or embellish the truth, he insisted, but “our fundamental task is, after all, to promote positive facts, spread new ways of life and labor to the masses, glorify the work of Soviet people.”107 Local conflicts, Lapin’s deputy Enver Mamedov explained later, could be resolved locally, without national publicity.108 As Lapin’s and Mamedov’s statements in the early 1970s made clear, conflict and unpredictability did not belong on Soviet domestic news. Yet these were the two elements essential to most foreign news, a category of programming that was expanding rapidly in the Soviet television schedule of the 1970s and ’80s.

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The Rise of Foreign News Lapin’s cancellation of News Relay in 1970 had left Central Television’s News Desk with only a handful of foreign news programs, which appeared only rarely and functioned less as news than as overt counterpropaganda. They had tendentious titles: one program on the United States was called Overlords Unmasked [Vladyki bez masok]. From the mid-1970s on, however, coverage of foreign news expanded dramatically—by 1976 there were four new programs that dealt exclusively with foreign news.109 In addition to these four new programs, as many as four additional slots in the monthly television schedule were set aside for news programs responding to international events as they developed.110 In November 1978, in a speech to a Plenum of the Central Committee, Brezhnev directly addressed the problem of Western radio broadcasting and called for a dramatic increase in coverage of international news on Soviet television and radio.111 Central Television responded, beginning the following month, with a rapid and marked expansion of foreign news programming. The extremely popular and lively program International Panorama [Mezhdunarodnaia panorama] was expanded from thirty to forty-five minutes with a likely expansion to an hour; on Time the length of the foreign news segment was increased, as was the frequency of appearances on the show by foreign affairs experts and journalists as commentators on international news topics. Most remarkably, for the first time the two evening broadcasts of Television News (now called simply News) on weekdays were replaced entirely by a new foreign news program, Today in the World [Segodnia v mire].112 News had framed the peak evening viewing hours, with broadcasts at 6 p.m. and after the last program of the evening. The new foreign news program would now occupy this prime spot every weekday evening, and with International Panorama in a prime spot on Sundays and an episode of one of two foreign affairs shows or a topical film on foreign news on Saturdays, Soviet television would now feature a substantial amount of foreign news during a peak viewing time every day of the week. In an internal Party meeting briefing his staff, Lapin linked these changes directly to the threat of Western radio broadcasting. The late-night broadcast of Today in the World was intended, he explained, to counteract the enemy

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radio broadcasts “that are most active during that time, and [to] put forward our own summary of the political events of the day.”113 Lapin also referred to another remarkable feature of these expanded foreign news programs: they were exclusively led by expert commentators, not diktory. Central Television in 1978 had ten such commentators on their payroll, nearly all of whom were journalists, mainly foreign correspondents, for Soviet newspapers or wire services.114 Newspapers stressed the essential role played by authoritative journalists on these shows. In an article on the new program Today in the World, one of the six foreign affairs observers who hosted the show, Farid Seiful’-Muliukov, described the “danger,” when hosting a news program, of being turned into “just a reader” of information. He remarked, however, that the program’s six commentator-hosts had “noticed and overcome” this risk. They tried, he continued, to deliver all news in an “emotionally vivid way, revealing our relationship to the event, commenting on it from our positions as specialists and citizens, who are moved by the event we are talking about.” Indeed, Seiful’-Muliukov went on to describe in great detail his personal role in assembling the news for the programs he hosted, deciding both which stories to cover and in what order. Giving an hour-by-hour account of the twenty-four hours before a broadcast, Seiful’-Muliukov also stressed the diversity of approaches taken by the program’s six different hosts, who took turns assembling and leading the program and each had different backgrounds.115 This, he thought, was one element in the show’s popularity; another was the fact that “everyone likes a commentator who has a deep understanding” of the underlying questions about a news story. In effect, the ambitions of Central Television’s “enthusiasts” for a prominent role for themselves as journalist-commentators on news programs had been realized, but only in the case of foreign news. On all of Central Television’s news programming, foreign news was overwhelmingly presented by expert journalists, with first-hand experience of foreign life and educational backgrounds that prepared them to add their own perspective, within the bounds of the Party’s position. As such, Soviet foreign news in many ways resembled Cold War television journalism in the West—in a nuclear world, complex diplomatic events took on new significance for audiences at home, and led to the emergence of the “expert” commentator, able to explain their meaning.116 147

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American news programs, however, also featured experts on domestic politics. On Soviet television the position of the domestic news journalistcommentator was far more tenuous. In 1974, Central Television got authorization from the Central Committee to establish a small group of domestic television news commentators, but they were the object of frequent criticism for the dullness of their presentations and their failure to attract the kinds of young audiences that flocked to a program like International Panorama.117 These domestic news commentators were also of markedly lower status within Central Television; one former editor in the Youth and News Desks remembers a clear hierarchy at Central Television’s News Desk, in which foreign news was the most prestigious assignment, then news of science and culture, with domestic news and its cousins, direct propaganda programs, at the bottom.118 Their job was also more difficult. When reporting domestic news, Soviet reporters continued to be vulnerable to attack for appearing to condescend to or overshadow the people they were reporting about.119 Providing commentary on domestic news in a one-party state was also uniquely difficult. One frequent role of news “commentators” in the West is to provide insight into or evaluate the behind-the-scenes motives and likely outcomes of a particular political conflict. That role was, naturally, not possible for Soviet domestic news commentators. Even when it was delivered on Time by diktory, reading an official statement in their famously slow, even diction, international news remained far more dramatic than Soviet domestic news, for one reason: every event outside the Soviet bloc—no matter how formal or ceremonial—was embedded, one way or another, in a history that was nonteleological, where outcomes were unknown. The impossibility of uncertainty, the absence of conflict, on Time’s domestic news limited journalists’ attempts to create innovative, exciting domestic news. The solution that many critics proposed—to move all the action, all the dynamism and excitement, inward, into the thoughts and emotions of the model persons on screen and the reacting viewer—led to lengthy, eventless television portraits, which only compounded the problem. That solution also depended too heavily on the political and emotional engagement of both the viewers and the featured subjects, as well on the ability of television 148

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cameras to reveal the subjects’ belief in the rightness of the Soviet project. By the early 1970s, none of these things—belief, enthusiasm, the penetrating eye of the camera—could be taken for granted. At the same time, however, foreign news provided a field for experimentation with exactly the strategies that were politically unacceptable for domestic news, including a faster tempo and the authenticating role of expert journalist commentators. Central Television’s successful experimentation on dedicated foreign news shows laid the groundwork for the innovative news programs of the second half of the 1980s, when it suddenly became possible to cover domestic news using the same experimental formats that had been nurtured on Central Television’s foreign news shows throughout the 1970s. In many ways, the abandonment of socialist realism has freed the post-Soviet iteration of Time to finally realize Central Television journalists’ longstanding aesthetic objectives for the show. As recently as 2009, the website of Russia’s Channel 1 described the difference between the Soviet and post-Soviet Time in language that echoed that of Time’s early years. “While preserving the best traditions of news production,” the site noted, “the program has become much more dynamic, and timely, more vivid and saturated.”120

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CHAPTER FIVE

“SPIRITUAL COAUTHORSHIP” Seventeen Moments of Spring and the Soviet TV Miniseries

Growing frustration with the failure of domestic news programs to create compelling portraits of model people led television enthusiasts, like their predecessors in film and literature of the early 1930s, to turn away from documentary and toward fiction. This turn coincided with the rise, beginning in the second half of the 1960s, of a new television genre: the fictional miniseries. Like other Soviet fiction art forms—the novel, film, theater—that had long sought to portray the nature of Soviet people and reality, the fiction miniseries offered far more artistic resources than a brief segment on Time for portraying the Soviet person in a complex postwar world. Produced in Soviet film studios by experienced directors and actors, the television miniseries could develop fictional characters in depth, drawing heavily on Soviet film and literature, where acknowledging moral complexity in Soviet life had been the norm since Stalin’s death. By the early 1970s, critics and Central Television staff had begun to argue that the fiction television miniseries might displace news as the chief genre for addressing the related aesthetic and political problems of documentary television: the apparent failure of the television camera’s

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X-ray vision to instantaneously and effortlessly convey Soviet superiority in a morally complex international landscape. These conversations centered on the most iconic Soviet television miniseries of all time, Tatiana Lioznova’s twelve-episode, nearly fourteenhour Seventeen Moments of Spring (Gorky Studio for Children’s and Youth Films, 1973).1 As critics observed, the intertwined problems of moral complexity and the camera’s inability to convey hidden inner states were among the main themes of Seventeen Moments. Based on a spy novel by the popular and politically connected author Iulian Semenov, the film tells the story of a Soviet spy, Maksim Isaev (played by the ’60s intelligentsia heartthrob Viacheslav Tikhonov), who is embedded in the top leadership of Nazi Germany as a Standartenführer in the SS named Otto von Stirlitz. The plot traces Stirlitz’s efforts, between February and March 1945, to stop secret talks between Heinrich Himmler’s representatives and the United States seeking to conclude a separate peace behind the backs of the Americans’ Soviet allies.2 In addition to a thrilling spy story and a handsome lead actor, however, Seventeen Moments of Spring also offered a new account of television’s power to help viewers see the true nature of Soviet people and their society, one that emphasized the enormous difficulty of achieving this kind of vision, and the ability of long, serial fiction forms to train viewers to do it. During the late 1960s and 1970s, television critics and journalists engaged in extensive public discussions about the television miniseries in general and about Seventeen Moments specifically, reimagining the genre as something closely related to Soviet documentary and news programs and quite distinct from capitalist television’s proliferation of ostensibly addictive serial forms. These genuinely Soviet, beneficial serial films, the argument went, would create active viewers, able to take up the high-stakes task shared by Soviet news and fiction television alike: recognizing the hidden, largely invisible moral superiority of Soviet heroes.3 Seventeen Moments, critics at the time argued, engaged viewers in an arduous process of ethical evaluation in a morally complex historical and international landscape—what one critic called “spiritual coauthorship.”4 Lioznova’s film insisted that this task would be extraordinarily difficult, but surmountable if viewers learned both how to see and when to trust. Should viewers agree to cooperate in this way, the film offered what was effectively a new 151

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deal between the state and the educated public, providing a new, postThaw foundation for Soviet political life.5 Like the Czechoslovakian serials by Jaroslav Dietl that Paulina Bren has described, Seventeen Moments engaged viewers in a collaborative project that aimed to reforge the relationship between state authority and the public after 1968. However, Seventeen Moments of Spring offered a quite different bargain than the normalizing, privatizing one Bren finds reflected in Czechoslovakian serials of the 1970s. Rather than emphasizing private relationships, Seventeen Moments proposed to viewers a new entente between state and citizens based on the acceptance of police authority in public life and the embrace of an imperial identity for the Soviet Union.6 This is, of course, only one possible reading of Seventeen Moments of Spring, albeit one supported by evidence from the film itself and also by the arguments of critics and the film’s producers in the internal conversations that preceded its release and the press coverage that followed. The triumph of Seventeen Moments, Stephen Lovell has written, was its ability to be many things to many viewers—for some a patriotic tale about war heroism, for others a fantasy about the mobility and luxury consumer goods of Western life. And there were some for whom the film offered an Aesopian parable about Soviet life, since, as many at the time (and subsequently) noticed, the offices and hallways where Stirlitz worked resembled life in the late Soviet bureaucracy much more than life in Nazi Berlin, 1945.7 For still others, the series’ political and historical setting was merely the frame for moral and personal struggles that were universal and human, rather than political.8 Nonetheless, the significance of Seventeen Moments of Spring was and is much greater than the sum of the many separate, diverse audience responses.9 As perhaps the single most iconic cultural product of the Brezhnev era, Seventeen Moments is most interesting as a shared experience, one that was discussed and debated at great length in public and semipublic settings, from the pages of Pravda to apartment kitchens. It was something to talk about, and frequently to laugh about, to dissect and question, in public and among friends. I try here to trace those themes that emerge from both the film and the conversations it generated, and that connect the film to the linked aesthetic and political problems that preoccupied Central Television’s staff and leadership in the 1970s. 152

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The Soviet TV Miniseries in Its International Context Seventeen Moments of Spring was only the most prominent of a diverse set of television miniseries broadcast by Central Television beginning in the second half of the 1960s. This proliferation of miniseries on Central Television was part of a broader flourishing of serial fiction genres among Eastern European socialist state television services, as Paulina Bren, Anikó Imre, Sabina Mihelj, and others have demonstrated.10 In the wake of the crushing of reform movements in the late 1960s, state socialist television systems turned, like their Western counterparts, to a politicized private sphere, where political ideas were expressed within the bounds of various nuclear and ersatz workplace families, often led by women.11 But on Soviet Central Television, ambivalence about the serial form remained strong. For the first socialist revolutionary state, the embattled leader of the socialist world, a “normalization” based on the privatization of politics was not an acceptable solution. Serial fiction television was, after all, the genre that most powerfully evoked the specter of Western mass culture, that “special pseudoculture, designed to bamboozle the masses, to dull their social consciousness,” as Leonid Brezhnev put it in 1969.12 As one Soviet scholar of capitalist world television noted, the majority of U.S. television programming consisted of serial formats, cheap to produce and enormously popular with viewers and advertisers alike, that were the “fulfillment” and the “chief vehicle” of mass culture.13 They were especially suited, in other words, for the production of “the mass bourgeois man, who lacks internal criteria in his reasoning, who borrows “his” thoughts from radio and television programs and ads, and whose personality [lichnost’] is atrophied, reduced.”14 The production and enormous popular success of Seventeen Moments was thus preceded and accompanied by a long and incomplete process whereby the television miniseries was made artistically and ideologically acceptable to Soviet cultural authorities. Given this understanding of the television serial format, why did Central Television adopt serials at all? One chief reason may have been the predominance of serials in the global exchange of television programs, both within the socialist bloc and with the capitalist world. In June 1964, six months before the broadcast of the first Central Television serial

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film (Drawing Fire onto Ourselves [Vyzyvaem ogon’ na sebia], directed by Sergei Kolosov), one member of the State Committee for Television and Radio, Nikolai Sakontikov, told Central Television Party activists about his recent trip to Japan. “I had discussions with various companies in Japan that could buy our television programs,” he told the group. “All these various organizations said the same thing—if you have thirteen-episode series we will buy them right away. The miniseries in thirteen episodes has become the law of the international market,” he continued. “If we want to join the international market, we need serial formats in our musical and other programs.”15 As Sudha Rajagopalan has shown in the case of feature films, Soviet cultural producers were often quite willing to compromise their espoused principles at home if it meant gaining access to foreign markets.16 Given the constraints of transnational program exchanges, Soviet television may have been willing to embrace serials in order to reach audiences across the socialist bloc and beyond.17 Central Television executives and producers also quickly noticed the popularity—and thus potential influence—of miniseries with domestic audiences. Drawing Fire onto Ourselves evoked an outpouring of almost twelve hundred letters in the days following its broadcast.18 The film, which tells the story of Soviet resistance fighters during the Second World War who collaborate with Polish prisoners to destroy Nazi aircraft, generated emotional and patriotic responses.19 A schoolgirl, Liuda Gordeeva, wrote that she could not “believe that Anya, Yan, and Kostia died. I am not ashamed,” she wrote, “of the tears that covered the film’s final frames in a hazy veil. No! They live, they will always be beside us, and I feel responsibility for my every step, for my entire life.”20 A veteran declared the film “the next triumph after Chapaev,” the celebrated 1934 film set during the Civil War. These emotional responses stressed the centrality of historical memory in shaping loyal norms and beliefs in the present, and emphasized the continuity between past and present political battles. “We, young mothers,” wrote an employee of the city hospital in Lipetsk after the broadcast of Drawing Fire, “will remain anxious about the fate of our children while undefeated fascists still walk the earth . . . the film instilled pride in our victorious people and contempt for the enemies of mankind.”21 These emotional, patriotic reactions were desirable in themselves, but the TV series, ordered by Central Television from Soviet film studios, also 154

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offered a solution to the problem of obtaining films for TV broadcast. In the early 1960s, as Kristin Roth-Ey has shown, Central Television lacked the cultural status and political and economic clout to broadcast feature films.22 In the month of Drawing Fire’s broadcast, Central Television was still receiving complaints from viewers about the absence of feature films in its lineup. As one viewer put it in February 1965, “films on television are a rare event, one could say a luxury, and if there are any, then it’s the same ones over and over. Obviously,” he continued, “the people who make the television schedule don’t worry themselves about whether the schedule is interesting. Clearly, reports or summaries of achievements are easier to produce.”23 As Central Television’s audience and budgets grew, it was still largely unable to command recent feature films from the studios, but it could order the production of new, made-for-TV movies. Yet the growing acceptance of fiction serials as a popular, influential, and internationally marketable genre in the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s took place alongside significant resistance to serials among Soviet cultural authorities in the Party leadership and in the press. Substantial anxiety surrounded domestic-themed serials, including those being produced in great numbers elsewhere in Eastern Europe. While Soviet television serials did include a number of popular apartment-block miniseries, not unlike the socialist soap operas made elsewhere in the Eastern European nations, ambivalence about the genre was stronger inside Central Television.24 The Central Television representative who attended a 1976 festival of Czechoslovakian television serial films reported that the serials he saw were “not of interest” for Central Television. The most frequent subjects for these television series were “the problems of the young family and the relationship between generations within the family”—important topics for Soviet propaganda as well. “But, unfortunately,” he continued, “family was shown in isolation from social life, from the productive work of the people, as if the walls of the home were the outer limits of the characters’ contacts and interests.” The show’s conflicts revolved around questions of standard of living, “a private car, an apartment,” and so on. Despite the fact that the actors were talented, he concluded, “this limited sphere of interests deprives the film’s heroes of their individuality, makes them indistinguishable from one another.”25 These flaws, the representative concluded, made these films unsuitable 155

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for acquisition by Central Television. Additional evidence for the relative underrepresentation of both open-ended serials and serials focusing on domestic, everyday topics on Central Television were the occasional calls, in professional journals, for such soap-like, long-running family serials on Central Television. One writer suggested that Central Television create serials modeled on similar shows elsewhere in the socialist bloc and even in the Soviet Baltic republics, where local television stations were allowed greater scope for experimentation because of the reception of foreign radio and television signals in border areas.26 Alongside a handful of domestic serials, Central Television’s serials of the 1960s and ’70s focused on public, often historical topics, such as the Civil War or Great Patriotic War, and the work of the police and the KGB. These historical, military, and espionage films made up the genre most often known as the detektiv (although the protagonist might be an intelligence agent or wartime partisan rather than a detective) or, somewhat less often, the “adventure film [prikliuchencheskii fil’m].”27 These serials were predominantly structured as miniseries, divided into a finite set of episodes with a clear end point, rather than open-ended serial forms, like soap opera or situation comedy. Their finite duration and focus on particular, often historical episodes sought to strengthen the sharp distinction between the engrossing miniseries and the real time and routines of everyday life. Meant to break routines, rather than entrench them, Central Television’s serials were even broadcast in a festive, disruptive way: rather than releasing a new episode once a week, Central Television broadcast an episode every evening, requiring, paradoxically, much greater commitment from viewers, who simply had to clear their evening schedules for two weeks at a stretch in order to avoid missing an episode. They were also frequently aired during Central Television’s multiweek festive periods close to major holiday dates.28 Yet the uniqueness of Soviet television serials relative to their Eastern and Western European counterparts should not be overstated. Soviet TV movies like Seventeen Moments of Spring were part of the broader, 1970s golden age of the TV movie, which addressed serious political and social topics via a fictionalized story. By the mid-1960s, facing resistance from Hollywood to television’s demands for the best new feature films, the American networks began filming their own feature-length movies, many 156

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of which were devoted to the most serious social issues.29 Some of these movies became “media events” and sparked serious discussions in the press in much the same way as Seventeen Moments of Spring and other highly publicized Soviet TV serial films.30 If American TV films (and, as Paulina Bren has shown, their Czechoslovakian counterparts) avoided direct political discussion by shifting political life to the private sphere, Seventeen Moments removed contemporary political problems abroad and back in time—to Nazi Berlin in the spring of 1945. At the same time, despite the film’s obvious engagement with public masculinity, Stirlitz’s actions are also partly driven by personal concerns for a kind of alternative family— primarily his radio operator Kathe/Katia and her baby. Regardless of how we assess the exceptionalism of Soviet television serials, their proponents saw the distinction between Soviet, socialist serials and their capitalist counterparts as an essential feature of their defense of the genre. The expansion of Soviet television serial production was thus accompanied by a vigorous effort, in the press and in scholarly books and journals, to defend and reinterpret Soviet television seriality as a public, masculine cultural form, one that could successfully undertake the tasks set for more “serious” television genres, such as news and documentary film. The distinction hinged not simply on the different intentions underlying socialist cultural production, although those were generally mentioned too, but on entirely renarrating the artistic origins of the genre, as a continuation, albeit with revisions, of the documentary experimentation of the early Central Television enthusiasts. Here, journalists and television critics saw serial films as further developing the artistic goals and principles of early television, exemplified by Vladimir Sappak’s writings, while moving beyond what was seen, by the end of the 1960s, as Sappak’s excessive optimism. What was needed, as the journalist and critic Vladimir Derevitskii argued in a 1970 article, was a turn away from Sappak’s unmediated encounters between person and everyday reality [povsednevnost’iu] and toward actors and artifice as the best way to reveal ideological truth. “For a variety of reasons,” Derevitskii explained, “the direction that Sappak advocated so [strongly] has not been widely adapted on our television, although to some extent it is present in [the Lithuanian family-themed serial] The Petraitisov Family. But overall,” the Lithuanian serial “approaches the artistic and journalistic understanding 157

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of reality from the opposite side: via the encounter of the actor and everyday reality.”31 The redefinition of television’s artistic strengths away from unmediated reality and live broadcasting and toward actors, artifice, and serial forms continued unabated in the 1970s, as television serials began to receive more serious critical consideration, particularly in the wake of the broadcast of Seventeen Moments of Spring. In 1974, a conference on serial television film was held in Tallinn, organized by the Artistic Problems of Mass Communications Media sector of the Ministry of Culture’s Institute of History.32 There, the critic Yuri Bogomolov argued that serials represented the return of Vladimir Sappak’s “effect of immediacy” [effekt siiuminutnosti], moving viewers by bringing them into live contact with events (although without either liveness or actual events).33 The nature of this interaction between viewers and events on screen was likewise changed. Rejecting Sappak’s vision of instantaneous revelation, critics described a much lengthier and more laborious process. As Valentin Mikhalkovich argued, the television serial created active viewers by immersing them in historical narratives that were presented as incomplete, forcing the viewer to overcome the excess of detail and put together a meaningful narrative him or herself.34

Seventeen Moments as a Political Film The initial critical reception of Seventeen Moments of Spring suggested that cultural elites recognized the miniseries as an enormously successful example of a serious, significant television serial, nourished by its social context, embodying popular ethical values, and, most importantly, engaging viewers actively in politicized interpretive work or “spiritual coauthorship.”35 Seventeen Moments of Spring’s first audience was the artistic council [khudsovet] of the Gorky Central Film Studio for Children’s and Youth Films, which viewed and discussed the film’s episodes in three sessions during the months before they were broadcast on Central Television in August 1973.36 In the discussions that followed those screening sessions, speakers described the film in precisely these terms—not solely as popular entertainment, but as a “genuine political film,” a genre that was being promoted “from above.”37 Seventeen Moments was based on a spy novel, 158

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but many members of the khudsovet were quick to describe the film as something more than a detektiv. “It’s either a psychological detektiv, or a political detektiv, or maybe not a detektiv at all,” the director Veniamin Dorman commented. “Probably,” he continued, “it is an account of that time [rasskaz o vremeni] done seriously and in depth.”38 Describing Seventeen Moments of Spring, the Gorky Studio’s artistic council borrowed the clichés used to describe Time and other documentary television programs. Echoing ambitious television journalists justifying their own roles on screen, the cinematographer Igor Klebanov praised the way that the film presented Stirlitz as an unusually talented, rational individual. “In every frame where our hero appears,” he noted, “we see a sharp, analytical mind. That is the [film’s] main victory.” Klebanov saw Stirlitz’s value as a subject for the camera’s gaze not only in his “devotion and loyalty to the Motherland”—that was “only the foundation.” Most important was the fact that Moscow had “sent this interesting, talented person, who was capable of carrying out the important task set for him by our political leaders.”39 The studio members were not the only ones to notice this connection between a film like Seventeen Moments and the formal features and objectives of documentary, political television programming: the scholar Anri Vartanov, writing in 1976, compared Seventeen Moments to Central Television documentary programs like With All My Heart [Ot vsei dushi], and the miniseries’ very prominent narrator, voiced by Efim Kopelian, to a news reporter or commentator.40 Yet those features of the series that made it a “political film” and a “history of a soul” created the same problems as they did on Soviet television news: they slowed the film’s pace and risked boring viewers. As many critics have noted at the time and since, Seventeen Moments was astonishingly slow and ponderous, much more so than the novel it was based on.41 Some of those present at the Gorky Studio council meetings defended this deliberate pacing. Too often, Dorman argued, spy films had “chased after what we call tempo,” leading to a loss of “details, some nuances of character.”42 Another studio representative allowed that in the first episodes “there had been too much slowness, too many lingering looks at details. But considering that there are so many episodes ahead and dynamism is developing,” she continued, “this is appropriate.”43 Others, however, worried that the film’s lengthy shots of the protagonist 159

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were often “a bit long” and could be “briefer.” The hero’s inner world— the central focus of the film—was sometimes “monotonous” and “like cardboard” [kartonen].44 Many shared the concern that the significance of Stirlitz’s looks and actions might not be clear to viewers. “I’m not against the fact that the film is slow,” commented the film critic and editor Alla Gerber; “it needs to be shown how [Stirlitz] stands up, how he starts walking. The viewer will pay attention to that if it conveys some kind of information about his [inner] state. But here,” she objected, “he just stands up, starts to walk.”45 Action itself was in short supply in the film— despite its ostensible focus on particularly significant “moments” in an extraordinary time, the film consists mainly of conversations, people pouring drinks, smoking, getting in and out of cars, feeding the fish, and taking naps. As the director Mark Donskoi put it, “what does Stirlitz do? He kills a provocateur at one point, and otherwise he just thinks. He paces for a while, slowly takes a glass, fills it. They show us his thoughts in close-up.”46 “I didn’t care about this person’s fate,” the director Il’ia Frez told the group—“I wanted something to happen.”47 Moreover, rather like Time’s news items that seemed to bear no clear relationship to the particular day or even year in which they were broadcast, the “moments” in Seventeen Moments of Spring—the film’s periodic interruption by a ticking clock sound and a black screen giving a very specific date and time, often without a clear connection to the action that followed—seemed entirely random.48 “This isn’t moments,” Frez argued, “but a most detailed story with an entirely different rhythm.”49 A. Z. Afinogenov complained that he couldn’t figure out which were the promised “moments,” and, moreover, “it was not interesting trying to follow them.” As with news programming, however, assertions about how viewers would react were based solely on individual critical opinion; there was simply no way to predict whether viewers would be engaged, and opinions varied widely on that score. Ultimately, the Gorky Studio council members could only rely on their own tastes as predictors of viewer response. One member of the council described the long “psychological duels” between Stirlitz and the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller, as better than anything she had seen “even in the films the Americans make so masterfully.”50 The children’s author and critic Mark Bremener, however, disagreed, comparing Stirlitz unfavorably to other mediators and tricksters 160

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drawn from Soviet literature.51 “I am reminded,” he said, “of how Babel described [the legendary Odessan Jewish gangster] Benia Krik. Benia speaks rarely, but deliciously [smachno], when he is quiet, you wish he would say a little more. Here,” Bremener continued, describing the dialogue between Stirlitz and Müller, “when they are quiet, you do not want them to say anything more.”52 Despite these disagreements and criticisms for Lioznova, however, by the second and third post-screening sessions the majority of those present emphasized Seventeen Moments’ significance as a “political film,” a piece of “serious social research” built upon “many experiments.”53

Moral Ambiguity and Visual Collaboration in Seventeen Moments of Spring Interpretive ambiguity regarding the miniseries’ likely reception did not, however, stop the Gorky Studio artistic council members and other critics from highlighting and praising the film’s approach to viewers. Central to Seventeen Moments’ success as a “political film,” many critics argued, was the assumptions the film made about the viewers’ ability to make their own judgments in a morally complex and deceptive landscape. Summarizing this viewpoint in the Gorky Studio meetings, Alla Gerber praised the film’s authors for having refrained from directing viewers explicitly, and described the film as “very democratic,” a “laboratory” into which all viewers were permitted to go, and “where far from every question is answered.”54 For Anri Vartanov, Seventeen Moments’ success in this regard made it the fulfillment of early dreams about television’s powers to immerse viewers in an experience of immediacy and unpredictability. “We follow the film’s events like eyewitnesses,” Vartanov wrote, “as if we don’t yet know the outcome. A miracle, completely televisual in essence, takes place during the film.” “Every viewer,” Vartanov continued, over the course of the film and “without any suggestion from the authors, passes his own ruthless sentence on the enemies.”55 Central to Seventeen Moments’ value as a political film, therefore, was its engagement of viewers in a collaborative process of moral investigation and judgment. The film presents this process, however, as lengthy, laborious, and even dangerous, rather than instantaneous or miraculous—an act of 161

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collaboration, with attendant ethical and personal risks. All this is made apparent in a strange, three-way scene in the film’s fourth episode, which offers the film’s most explicit instructions to the viewer. The scene takes place between Stirlitz and his reluctant agent, a pacifist Catholic priest named Pastor Schlag (Rostislav Platt). Stirlitz is interrogating Schlag, who has been in jail for antigovernment activities, in order to obtain his release and recruit him as an agent. A third character, a Gestapo officer, Eismann (Leonid Kuravlev), listens in; Eismann is investigating Stirlitz because of Stirlitz’s involvement in a series of operations that, as his superiors have noticed, were strangely unsuccessful, including the repression of a scientist who might otherwise have helped Germany develop the atom bomb. This setup and these three characters reflect the film’s extreme moral complexity. Eismann, a loyal Nazi officer whose evil ought to be self-evident, is presented in an earlier scene as a loyal comrade, who bravely risks his own career by writing a report vouching for Stirlitz because he “cannot believe that Stirlitz could be dishonest.” The ostensible protagonist, Stirlitz, by contrast, appears here in the role of aggressive Nazi police interrogator. The pastor, usually presented as an admirable, though flawed, character, behaves cagily under interrogation. The scene begins with Eismann requesting a recording of Stirlitz’s past interrogation of Schlag. We see him begin listening, and then the action cuts, in a flashback, to the interrogation itself. The camera continually cuts back to Eismann listening, linking the viewer’s appraisal of Schlag and Stirlitz to Eismann’s act of surveillance, which shares, after all, the objective of uncovering Stirlitz’s inner nature. After working Schlag over in a seemingly conventional way—subtly threatening him with a return to jail, assuring him that he wants to have good relations with him on a “purely human level”—Stirlitz asks Schlag to perform a particular job for him in exchange for his release from prison. That job, however, is quite vague. Stirlitz tells Schlag that he has friends, “men of science, party functionaries, journalists, military men” who are not members of the opposition; indeed, they are “fanatically devoted to the regime.” Stirlitz does not want Schlag to entrap and denounce them. He assures Schlag that he has many other informants, and he does not need Shchlag to report on his conversations with these people. On the contrary, he suggests that Schlag speak with them only in 162

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“the forest [or] the hall,” where they cannot be recorded. Instead, what he wants from Schlag is something seemingly innocuous—Schlag’s “opinion about what level of evil, or what measure of good, you observe in these people.” These lines—delivered almost four and a half hours into a film whose action consists primarily of conversations in the forest and the hallway, between party functionaries, military men, and assorted members of the scientific and cultural elite, all ostensibly “fanatically devoted” to the Nazi regime—may as well be directly addressed to the viewer, whose representatives on screen are now not only Eismann, listening in, but also Pastor Schlag, the reluctant collaborator. Stirlitz’s assignment for Schlag in fact bears a striking resemblance to the work that viewers were expected to do, that is, assess the inner qualities of a group of complex characters and deliver a judgment. Schlag, however, requires further persuasion before he agrees to take on this task. He responds to Stirlitz’s proposal not by agreeing or refusing to participate, but by offering two interpretations of Stirlitz’s motives. “Either you trust me too much,” he says, “and are asking for my support for something for which you cannot ask anyone else’s support, or you are deceiving me [vy menia provotsiruite].” And, he continues, “if you are deceiving me, then our conversation is going in circles—you remain a functionary [funktsioner] and I remain a person who chooses the hard path in order to avoid becoming a functionary.” At stake, therefore, is whether Schlag can trust and work with someone in a position of state authority. Schlag’s interpretation of Stirlitz’s nebulous assignment leaves two principles unchallenged, however—first, that this work of telling good from evil is very important, and second, that it requires enormous trust to be established between them. Stirlitz responds: “What would convince you that I am not deceiving you?” And Schlag answers: “Look me in the eye.” Stirlitz, who has indeed been avoiding Schlag’s gaze, turns and looks at him (figure 12). Strikingly, despite the large amount of time the film devotes to close-ups of Stirlitz’s face, the camera shows not Stirlitz’s face but Schlag’s, reacting to Stirlitz’s gaze—it is Schlag’s inner thoughts, his acceptance of this deal, that are important. The experience of exchanging this revealing look causes both men to smile mysterious, knowing smiles, registering the mutual receipt of information that cannot be conveyed with words. Stirlitz then stands and says, “We will consider that we have exchanged 163

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figure 12. Stirlitz and Schlag gaze at each other in Seventeen Moments of Spring

verifying certificates [my obmenialis’ veritel’nymi gramotami] and our agreement is almost finalized” (figure 13). What exactly has transpired here? First, a “functionary” has persuaded a dissenting intellectual (Schlag is linked in the film with the word inakomyslie— “other-thinking” or nonconformism) to trust and cooperate with him. The basis of that trust is not verbal assurances but visual interaction, the exchange of penetrating gazes. This foundation of visual interaction and mutual evaluation is also the task that Stirlitz convinces Schlag to accept: the careful assessment of the good and bad moral qualities of individual members of the Nazi elite. If we understand Stirlitz’s assignment to Schlag as being primarily addressed to the television audience, to watch the film is to agree to become a collaborator on Stirlitz’s terms—to become involved in a nuanced moral investigation of people whom one ought to automatically find morally repulsive. Television technology facilitates the audience’s collaboration in the film’s project by making the film’s characters visible and available for their inspection. 164

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figure 13. Smiles following the exchange of visual “certificates”

At the same time, however, Lioznova seems to question the reliability of seeing as a way of knowing. Early in the film, Walter Schellenberg (Oleg Tabakov) screens the latest foreign newsreel for Himmler (Nikolai Prokopovich). When Stalin appears, Himmler remarks that Stalin looks older; Schellenberg demurs; Himmler insists. The disagreement is not resolved—the question of whether or not Stalin has aged remains without an objective answer, despite the presentation of his image on screen. The film’s presentation of “information for reflection” about each major character—another feature of the film that made viewers into investigators—likewise raised the question of whether the camera could expose a person’s inner qualities reliably. In a profile of Martin Bormann, an extreme close-up of Bormann’s eyes cannot stand alone—it is accompanied by the presentation of historical evidence, including damning quotations read by Kopelian and newsreel footage of Nazi atrocities. Lioznova even inserts a minor joke about the efficacy of “certifying gazes” like those exchanged by Schlag and Stirlitz. Later in the film, 165

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Stirlitz awaits Bormann in one of his favorite conspiratorial hangouts, the natural history museum. In a shot that echoes his earlier shared gaze with Schlag, Stirlitz exchanges a penetrating look with a stuffed chimpanzee (figure 14). Regardless of the troubling unreliability of visual evidence, Lioznova presents the stakes of Stirlitz’s task for Schlag—the assessment of individuals’ inner natures—as extremely high. In the fifth episode, Runge, a nuclear physicist, is being beaten by a Nazi officer; another officer, whom we have seen listening in on the interrogation from another room, rushes in and stops him, explaining to Runge that “you have to understand, yesterday in the bomb attacks he lost his wife and two children.” Runge, one of the film’s several intelligentsia characters who suffer from intertwined physical and moral weakness, falls for this classic good cop, bad cop routine, and exposes Stirlitz as the person who authorized his release to the prison hospital under false pretenses. Seventeen Moments thus presents the process of moral investigation of its characters as both extremely difficult and terribly important.

figure 14. Stirlitz gazes at a stuffed chimpanzee 166

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Whether or not most viewers felt themselves to be collaborating as they entered the film’s morally ambiguous universe, popular and critical responses to the film revolved around the same questions the film posed: how much good or evil was there in these ostensible enemies? Many viewers puzzled over the film’s charming and attractive Nazis, played by beloved Soviet stage and screen actors associated with 1960s intelligentnost’.56 Some viewers responded enthusiastically to the idea that Nazi leaders were people too, since this conveyed the full strength of the enemy and thus the full heroism of Soviet spies and soldiers.57 As the director Il’ia Gurin put it in the Gorky Studio meeting, “I really liked Himmler. We’ve seen so many films in which all the work of our counterintelligence looks laughable, because the enemies always turned out to be fools.” Moreover, a fuller presentation of enemy personalities was psychologically interesting. “Here,” Gurin continued, “you observe with interest—what is going on in the souls of these people? You see that they are also people, worthy foes, an environment in which it is very hard for the hero to work.” Others were far less comfortable with the film’s portrayal of Nazi criminals as likeable. Central Television received many letters protesting the positive presentation of Nazi characters, and particularly the decision to cast popular actors in these roles.58 Another member of the artistic council commented: “There is something in them [the Nazi characters] that forces you to sympathize with them, even though that should not happen, because they are cursed fascists. . . . But after watching,” he continued, “I had the feeling that I was starting to sympathize with one or the other of them in their little intrigues.”59 For many other viewers and critics, however, the film’s engaging and complex Nazi leaders were neither wonderful nor offensive; rather, they presented a challenge, the same one Stirlitz posed to Schlag. How did the film reveal, and how could viewers tell, “what measure of good” or “level of evil” was to be found among the film’s alluring and complicated Nazis? The difficulty, as explained by Evgenii Evstigneev, one of the actors in Seventeen Moments, in an article in Literaturnaia gazeta, was that genuine evil was never obvious. “No person thinks of himself as a scoundrel,” said Evstigneev, responding to criticism that Oleg Tabakov’s Schellenberg was too charming. “If a character appears on the surface to be an educated person, then that is how he should be played.” This left the viewer, 167

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however, entirely without any hints about his real character—there was, in effect, no way to tell, from their appearance and behavior, that the film’s Nazis were meant to be abhorrent, not admirable. “Not the hero’s charm, but his actions allow the viewer to draw an objective conclusion about his personality. The unmasking [razoblachenie] of Schellenberg,” Evstigneev explained, “was not in his external appearance, or in his soft smile.” Instead, what unmasked Schellenberg and the “other Hitlerite high priests [bonz],” according to Evstigneev, was “fascism itself as a state policy and ideology.”60 This was a frequent argument in the press discussions that followed Seventeen Moments’ broadcast in August 1973: many critics stressed that what ultimately defined the Nazi characters was their place in an immoral system, rather than their individual characteristics; exposure of Nazi criminality could be accomplished only by inanimate documentary facts. “The newsreel clips accuse and unmask,” wrote one critic.61 The critic and scholar Vasilii Kisun’ko argued that one of the film’s oddest features—the presentation and reading aloud of Gestapo “personnel files” for various major and minor characters—were what exposed the evil of the Nazi system. The files’ creators “turned all of the fascist leaders’ individuality into total facelessness . . . expressing the real state of affairs.”62 As Gorky Studio editor Anatolii Balikhin suggested to his fellow members of the Gorky Studio council, “we shouldn’t attempt to expose [the Nazi characters’] spiritual world. The spiritual world of these people is exposed by the personnel files and [documentary] images.”63 However, the admission that the appearance and behavior of the film’s Gestapo men could not reveal their ethical corruption directly contradicted another central theme of the film and its public discussion: the supposed power of television to grant viewers penetrating vision into the souls of the film’s characters. Shortly before he argued that the Nazi characters behavior could reveal nothing about their morality, Evstigneev had stressed the power of television to penetrate souls and thoughts. TV, he wrote, using language that was repeated from article to article, was able to “look more closely into heroes, more carefully analyze their relationships,” offering viewers the ability “to observe the progress of thoughts, the movement of the soul.”64 Both Seventeen Moments and the public conversations it inspired thus reflected a profound uncertainty about whether television really offered 168

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viewers any meaningful view into thoughts and souls, or whether good could be discerned from evil only either via the accumulation of historical facts and evidence or via the acceptance, on faith, of the good and evil of the “systems” that had produced Stirlitz and his Gestapo colleagues, respectively. What applied to the Gestapo men applied equally to Stirlitz; while some in the Gorky Studio and the press described their delight in watching Stirlitz’s face in lengthy close-ups, others questioned whether there was really anything there to see.65 The film’s prevarication about whether seeing is believing was also, however, a question of authority: could viewers be trusted to see and understand the intended message—would each, individually, condemn the film’s antiheroes? Or did they need other, more authoritative voices to persuade them? Near the end of the film, Stalin appears and declares Stirlitz to be “honest and humble.” Criticizing the scene, Alla Gerber told the Gorky Studio group, “I wouldn’t want to return to those principles: ‘oh, well if he said so . . .’ ” Arguably, however, the most important aspect of Stirlitz’s agreement with Schlag was not the ends, but the means: not the uncovering of good or evil in the film’s loyal Nazis, but the agreement that one could find both good and evil in the halls of power, the acceptance that “they too are people [tam liudi],” as several critics put it.66 There was, of course, little uncertainty, in the postwar USSR, about the moral status of the Third Reich. However, a few years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and more than a decade after the incomplete revelations of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the moral status of the Soviet Communist Party elite was, for some, less certain. Seventeen Moments’ crucial accommodation, therefore, was between the miniseries’ viewers and its police sponsors: it asked viewers to accept the moral complexity of Soviet power, and the humanity of those who wielded it.

After “Fanaticism,” Stirlitz This was, however, only one side of the bargain. What, after all, would viewers get in return for accepting the moral ambiguity—and the necessity—of state power and secret police? Seventeen Moments offered several possibilities. They included a new, experimental and more inclusive 169

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politics, which recognized the lasting damage done by Stalinism and the need for new heroes and a new style of leadership. The basis of this new political accommodation would be, first, recognition of the humanity and patriotism of people on both sides of the film’s social and political divides, and second, the shared desire to maintain Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. As Soviet viewers immediately noticed in Seventeen Moments, the Nazis not only spoke in “our words, our formulas”—their whole world strongly resembled the postwar Soviet Union.67 This included, but was not limited to, the cut of their clothes, which, as Mark Lipovetsky has noted, resembled the European style of the late 1960s, not the mid-1940s.68 Earlier Soviet films about the fall of Berlin, such as The Fall of Berlin (1949, directed by Chiaureli), had portrayed the final moments of Hitler’s rule as panicked, hysterical, and cruel. In Seventeen Moments, by contrast, as many viewers remarked with alarm, Berlin in 1945 appeared entirely calm, largely undestroyed, and dominated by the routines of bureaucratic hierarchy.69 The miniseries’ use of newsreel and flashbacks to describe Nazi crimes (when they were discussed at all) had the effect of removing the regime’s crimes either temporally, to the past, or geographically, to the front. Those main characters who have experienced Nazi prisons and concentration camps, notably Professor Pleishner, have all been freed by the time they appear on screen. Like Khrushchev’s Gulag returnees, they are marked by past trauma that has left lasting wounds; we learn multiple times that Pleishner has been morally and physically weakened by his time in a concentration camp.70 The most immediate crimes of these Nazi officers are of a variety far more relevant to late Soviet political life. Writing in the newspaper Sovetskaia kul’tura, one critic described the film’s Nazi crimes as one might criticize the intrigues and corruption of the Party elite of the 1970s. “In general,” he wrote, “the fascist leadership [verkhushka] of the Reich, rotten through and through in the struggle for power and influence of the political realm, steeped in money-making and legalized robbery, is shown in the film very impressively and clearly.”71 Along with a venal power structure, the film’s world shares with the post-Stalin USSR the problems of a demanding technocratic elite, whose desire for consumer goods and professional intellectual freedom raise continual problems. Stirlitz talks blithely about “different-thinking [inako170

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myslie]” and “reforging [perekovanie],” both keywords in Soviet debates about intellectuals and dissent.72 Here, as other scholars have noted, the film promises that these intellectual and consumer demands should, ideally, be accommodated. In the first episode, Stirlitz dismisses a subordinate’s concerns about a prisoner who has been listening to foreign (enemy) radio broadcasts—“people came up with radio in order to listen to it,” he demurs; “so what if this guy listened a little too much.” Moments later he muses that, if the prisoner is a real scholar, he should be put to work on military projects and given a “little house in the pine forest,” with “plenty of bread and butter”—a scenario quite reminiscent of Soviet scientific colonies and secret military cities.73 Under those circumstances this prisoner would, Stirlitz insisted, immediately stop “blabbing [boltat’].” The film did not offer, however, a simple, one-to-one Aesopian analogy for contemporary Soviet life: rather, it evoked multiple historical moments at the same time, creating an effect Elena Prokhorova calls “temporal collapse.”74 Alongside settings reminiscent of bureaucratic life under Brezhnev’s gerontocracy, Seventeen Moments included scenes that recall the tense atmosphere of Stalin’s final years. The series is set, after all, just months before the death of a dictator, who still elicits terror but whose impending defeat is evident to all. Machinations for control of the post-Hitler state form the basis of the film’s plot. In an early scene, Stalin himself diagnoses the problem, instructing Stirlitz’s handler to look for the source of the plot to conclude a separate peace among Hitler’s “closest associates.” Echoing his historical counterpart’s paranoia, Stalin in Seventeen Moments tells the NKVD chief that “the closest associates of a tyrant who is about to fall will betray him in order to save their own lives.” The film also hinted at the risks faced by Soviet agents abroad under Stalin. When the Russian radio operator Kathe (Katia) is caught and, with guidance from Stirlitz, pretends to agree to collaborate with her captors, she asks that they guarantee that she will not be allowed to fall back into her old masters’ hands—an on-screen acknowledgment of Stalin’s unforgiving stance toward anyone who had spent time behind enemy lines. Seventeen Moments’ multiple references, delivered in all seriousness, to killing people by arranging for them to be in an automobile accident likewise recall the death of legendary Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, who 171

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was killed in exactly this manner in 1948. Rather than presenting a mirror image of the contemporary USSR, therefore, Seventeen Moments’ Nazi Berlin suggested the centrality of the totalitarian past in the Soviet, posttotalitarian present. This was fitting, since the dilemmas of Stalinism and post-Stalinism addressed by the miniseries were equally uncontained, shaping contemporary Soviet political life and recurring in the Eastern European satellites. The film addressed the legacy of a totalitarian past most explicitly in a scene that Lioznova added to the screenplay, in which an unnamed Nazi general enters Stirlitz’s train cabin and begins speaking his mind. Cursing Hitler and the German diplomatic corps, the general explains the failure of the Nazi system in terms of a broader problem of “fanaticism.” This problem, however, was not fanaticism’s violence or intolerance. Instead, the problem is that fanaticism “cannot provide a lasting victory. Fanatics can triumph initially,” the general explained, “but they can’t sustain their victory. Because” people grow tired of fanaticism, and “they grow tired of themselves.” The general’s account of the evolution of a political system based on fanaticism hardly describes the Nazi system, which was defeated at the height of its ideological fervor. The problems of popular exhaustion and declining enthusiasm after decades of violence and upheaval did, however, preoccupy Stalin’s successors. The general then goes on to articulate one of the central concerns of post-Stalin Soviet culture: the lasting impact of the cult of personality on individual Soviet citizens and on political culture as a whole.75 Stirlitz asks the general whether he would obey an order from his commander, Albert Kesselring, to surrender; the general responds that Kesselring could never give such a command, because he trained under Hermann Göring, and “a person who worked under any kind of supreme leader [vozhd’] loses initiative . . . loses the ability to make independent decisions.” After “fanaticism,” the film suggests, comes a need for a new generation of authoritative leaders, able to act and think independently, and thus able to establish lasting rule on a new, post-fanatical basis. While this call for new heroes and a new style of leadership would have been familiar to educated viewers from discussions of domestic politics in the cultural press of the 1950s and ’60s, here it appears in a decidedly imperial context. As Lipovetsky has observed, the outcome of Stirlitz’s 172

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assignment—preventing separate peace talks limited to the Western Front—did not contribute to the overall outcome of the war, which was already clear by the spring of 1945. Instead, what Stirlitz enables is the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.76 In the wake of 1956 and 1968, the inadequacy of “fanaticism” as a lasting basis for rule was quite apparent in the Eastern European satellites as well. The “spring” in Seventeen Moments of Spring might very well be read as a reference to the Prague Spring, which took place just a year before Semenov’s novel was published.77 Seen in this light, Seventeen Moments combines a muscular defense of the righteousness of Soviet imperial dominance with gestures toward greater tolerance for intellectuals and limited public discussion of political life. It thus offers an alternative “spring” based on respect for the moral foundations of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe—the heroism of the Soviet people in the Second World War. As the director Grigorii Britikov pointed out during the Gorky Studio discussion, the film was intended not only for the “millions of viewers in our country, but for millions of viewers in other countries.” In light of this international audience, he continued, the film must “remind those millions of viewers” about the moral underpinnings of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, or, as Britikov put it, “about the way things were.”78 Seventeen Moments includes a number of rather heavy-handed messages about the nobility of the Soviet mission in wartime Eastern Europe and the fruit these efforts will soon bear in the postwar period. Stirlitz, apparently an ethnic Russian (unlike the real-life German agent on whom his character was ostensibly based), acts alone; his handful of German collaborators are all either under his command or, in the case of Pleishner’s brother, already dead. In the fifth episode, we hear Stirlitz, in a moment of bitterness, think [via Kopelian’s voiceover] to himself: “I am doing for them [the Germans] what they ought to be doing for themselves.” Indeed, the film’s total neglect of the German resistance led Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, to insist on the insertion of a scene in which Stirlitz fondly reminisces about the (likewise dead) German Communist Ernst Thälmann.79 Although, as critics at the time noted, Seventeen Moments entirely excludes everyday life, romantic love, and family dynamics—the essential 173

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subjects and viewpoint of TV movies in both the United States and Czechoslovakia, for example—the film does in fact revolve around a kind of sexless, imperial nuclear family.80 This family is completed as Stirlitz drives his Russian agent Kathe/Katia safely to Switzerland along with two babies—one hers with her (now dead) husband Ernst, and one belonging to Helmut, the good-hearted German soldier who has killed Kathe’s Gestapo guards and torturers only to die himself soon thereafter. With both fathers dead, Stirlitz steps into their role and helps Kathe/ Katia smuggle the two babies to safety. Lest viewers miss the significance, Kathe’s Soviet baby is a boy, Helmut’s German baby a girl, offering a gendered evocation of the hierarchical relationship between the two countries. From this adoptive Soviet family, we understand, will spring future families. Lengthy shots of the two babies bundled together in the back seat of Stirlitz’s car provided ample time to put two and two together. It is thus Stirlitz who secures the socialist future of Eastern Europe, his personality that offers a model of efficacy that answers the crisis of leadership in a post-fanatical political culture. As with many earlier heroes of Thaw journalism, Stirlitz’s inner thoughts and decisive actions were meant to provide a new, post-Stalin model personality. As many critics recognized, however, Stirlitz had a quite different relationship to ideology and power, one that required both artifice and persuasion, and that was always predicated on submission to authority. Lioznova’s decision to include an actor playing Stalin in the series provided many opportunities for revealing comparisons and intertextual allusions that position Stirlitz as a post-Stalin hero. In one seemingly unimportant shot, Lioznova draws a direct connection between her Stirlitz and the cinematic Stalin at the height of the personality cult. Seventeen Moments was, of course, not the first Soviet film to portray Berlin in the months before its fall—it was preceded by The Fall of Berlin. In that epic two-part film, scored by Dmitri Shostakovich, Stalin appears very frequently; the film’s central message, as one scholar has argued, is that the war was won primarily by Stalin’s genius.81 In the first shot of Stalin in The Fall of Berlin, the “Great Gardener” tends his rose bushes (figure 15). Lioznova recreates this scene early in Seventeen Moments, with Stirlitz as gardener in a darker, colder, post-Edenic scene—not full summer, but earliest spring; not full color, but black and white. Stalin uses a hoe to 174

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figure 15. Stalin gardening in The Fall of Berlin (directed by Chiaureli, 1949)

cultivate the soil around the base of a young tree; Stirlitz rakes away dead leaves (figure 16). The differences between these two films’ credits likewise suggest how Stirlitz was to displace Stalin at the top of artistic and political hierarchies. Both movies feature both a cinematic Stalin and another chief protagonist; in The Fall of Berlin that hero is a celebrated worker who enlists in the war effort and ends up helping deliver the Soviet flag to the top of the Reichstag. In the 1950 film, the titles first list the actor playing Stalin, then the group of actors portraying other government and military leaders, and only then the humble male lead. In those episodes of Seventeen Moments that include Stalin (played by Andro Koboladze), however, the titles name Tikhonov/Stirlitz first, followed by Koboladze/Stalin, followed by the rest of the cast. The discussions of these two dramatic characters in the Gorky Studio meetings suggest how Stirlitz was constructed in conscious opposition to Stalin. Perhaps thinking of the portrayal of Stalin in films like The Fall of Berlin, Lioznova told the group that she had been careful to avoid the implication that Stirlitz had played any implausibly central role in the war 175

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figure 16. Stirlitz rakes away dead leaves

effort. Responding to questions and objections from the Gorky Studio council about the film’s inclusion of newsreel footage of major battles presented as Stirlitz’s thoughts and memories—a set of “memories” so vast and inclusive that it was physically impossible for Stirlitz to have personally experienced them—Lioznova explained that the point of these scenes was to show that “however brilliant an intelligence agent he was, the fate of the war was decided not by Stirlitz, but by the enormous effort of the people.” We tried, she told the studio representatives, “to make Stirlitz not a superspy, but a person, who wholeheartedly, with every part of his being, does what he has been entrusted to do. He is assigned a task, and he does it as best as he can. He’s a talented person and he does things the way he is supposed to.”82 For Lioznova, one of Stirlitz’s most important qualities was exactly this obedience to those who give him orders. In the Gorky Studio comments quoted above, Lioznova repeated the fact that Stirlitz does what he is told three times in row; the characterization of Stirlitz as both talented and obedient was echoed by other Gorky Studio members as well.83 176

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In the Gorky Studio discussions, Koboladze’s Stalin served as a foil for this modest and obedient Stirlitz. There was nearly universal agreement that the scenes in which Koboladze/Stalin appeared were very stilted. Several studio members criticized Koboladze’s acting as far below the level of the rest of the film; one argued that Stalin’s appearance played only an “informational role” and could be represented by having Kopelian read the letter he dictates to Roosevelt and Churchill late in the film.84 Lioznova accepted this criticism, responding that she agreed wholeheartedly, and explaining the scenes’ weakness in terms of the burdensome bureaucratic strictures on the representation of Stalin. The production team was obliged to hire an actor who was already authorized to portray Stalin; they had even had to bring on a makeup artist from Mosfilm who had experience with the exigencies of Stalin’s makeup. To Lioznova, however, the greatest problem with Koboladze’s performance was not only its oversimplification of Stalin’s “complex” image, however, but his vanity and “selfsatisfaction.” In the final Stalin scene, Lioznova explained, they had added lengthy shots of the secretary taking dictation, in order to reduce the screen time devoted to “this overly inflated person.”85 These qualities of Koboladze’s Stalin contrasted sharply with the “honest and humble” Stirlitz, who “fulfills [his] responsibilities carefully and [doesn’t] intend to offend anyone.” Nonetheless, it is Stalin who, with those two adjectives, defines Stirlitz, not the other way around. Stirlitz’s honesty and humility, the characteristics that might serve, the film suggests, as a new, post-fanatical foundation for Soviet society and empire—were in fact in considerable tension with each other. “Honesty” was a keyword of the years after Stalin’s death, associated with greater truthfulness about (some of) Stalin’s crimes, the difficult circumstances of Soviet everyday life, and a search for authenticity and truthfulness in art and personal relationships in the wake of the fear and “varnishing of reality” of the Stalin era.86 This Thaw-era idea of “honesty” is thus linked, however tacitly, to the criticism of (the past role of) state and Party authority, while potentially remaining in support of original, revolutionary goals. Stirlitz, by contrast, is presented as having attained this form of honesty-asauthenticity without adopting any critical stance toward his Soviet handlers; even his criticism of the Nazi system remains mostly implicit; it is only evident via the authoritative voiceover’s narration of Stirlitz’s thoughts. The 177

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idea that Stirlitz is in any meaningful sense “honest” itself requires a certain amount of imagination, given that Stirlitz/Isaev is constantly wearing a mask and deceiving almost everyone he meets. Instead, Stirlitz’s “honesty” is an inner quality unrelated to his truthfulness at any given moment; this inner honesty is somehow transparent to people whom he is actively deceiving, such as Eismann, who “cannot believe that Stirlitz could be dishonest.” Stirlitz’s honesty springs, as he tells Schlag during the interrogation scene in episode 4, not from any aspect of his behavior, or from any critical relationship to power, but from the honesty of his “goals”—that is, the goals of Soviet foreign policy and, more immediately, the NKVD.87 Stirlitz’s honesty is thus directly produced by his subordination to the noble goals of the Soviet system and his “humbleness” before the authority of his political leaders. Paradoxically, it is this humility and certainty about the rightness of his mission that allows Stirlitz, as a post-Thaw cinematic hero, to overcome the political legacies of “fanaticism”—making him able to act independently and to establish trust with others.88 Stirlitz’s modesty and obedience are also not entirely straightforward. While his overall mission is set by his handler, “Alex,” the head of Soviet intelligence (and presumably Stalin above him), Stirlitz receives messages from what he most often calls, vaguely, “the center” only a handful of times. For the rest of the film, we see him both acting independently and following the orders of two Nazi superior officers, Müller and Walter Schellenberg. Stirlitz’s careful obedience to both, even as they compete with one another aggressively, offers little in the way of comforting moral certainty. The moral rightness of Stirlitz’s mission, based in the superiority of the Soviet system, is something that the viewer must accept on faith, encouraged by Kopelian’s authoritative voiceover, without direct evidence. The film thus allows another reading, one that emphasizes the need for compromise and tolerance, in an environment of both conflict and mutual respect. The term for this competitive, but rule-bound, behavior is one of the film’s keywords, “play,” a word that is frequently used by or otherwise linked to Stirlitz. This reading is furthered by the fact that Müller and Schellenberg represent, among other things, two poles of the Soviet Party elite. Schellenberg, whom we see in his ornate home in a silk dressing gown, surrounded by works of art, is the cynical cosmopolitan; Müller, who tells 178

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Stirlitz that he feels uncertain about how to eat an apple in polite company, is the former proletarian. Stirlitz, a scientist by training who combines a love for Paris and cognac with the habit of occasionally roasting potatoes in his fireplace, mediates between them. He also mediates between Müller and Schellenberg on the one hand, and the film’s intelligentsia characters on the other.89 His honesty, as we experience it in 90 percent of the film’s action, is not honesty in any literal sense, but in fidelity to shared rules of the game, which includes opponents in a world bounded by mutual respect. To an imagined intelligentsia audience the film offered many things— intellectual freedom to pursue their work, tolerance for minor infractions like listening to foreign radio broadcasts, the fantasy of security and consumer goods. Perhaps most important, the film recognized, however grudgingly, the Soviet intelligentsia’s loyalty and value to the state. When, in Bern, Stirlitz learns of Pleishner’s suicide, the Kopelian voiceover informs us that Stirlitz finally understood that Pleishner, whose trustworthiness Stirlitz had questioned earlier, “was not a traitor.” The cultural press likewise emphasized the ethical stature of the film’s intelligentsia characters, Pleishner and Schlag. Pleishner was a person “deformed [sognutyi] by the regime and by fear,” one critic wrote, “but still able to make a choice . . . [Schlag] also made a choice.”90 Thus Seventeen Moments offered recognition of the intelligentsia’s loyalty and service in exchange for acceptance of the Soviet project’s moral superiority, recognition of the humanity of their internal opponents, and collaboration with those opponents in a shared game. This aspect of the film, in turn, helps partially explain the film’s historical and geographical displacement to enemy territory. The film’s setting, and Nazi masks, make possible the open expression and mediation of conflicting viewpoints about the Soviet system—the testing of conflicting arguments about patriotism, freedom, obedience to authority, and other practical and interpretive problems of Soviet political life, including its life as an imperial power in Europe. Nearly all the characters in the film—from female stenographers without any lines of dialogue to Müller himself—encounter seditious speech directly, either in their capacity as members of the secret police listening in, or in conversations that are expressly not being recorded or can have no consequences, such as Stirlitz’s 179

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conversation with the general in a train or with Müller in his office. Sometimes they react, but sometimes, as with the female stenographers listening in to interrogations, we simply see a thoughtful expression, a tilted head. As Stephen Lovell has pointed out, the scene on the train in which Stirlitz and the general engage in an elaborate debate about the moral price of cynicism—the claim to simply be following orders, and one’s responsibility in a system led by a violent dictator—closely resembles the private “kitchen talk” of the late Soviet era.91 In a sense, the entire film is such a conversation, to which guests of very diverse views and stakes in the matter have been invited. V. D. Dorman praised this aspect of the film in the first Gorky Studio discussion. “I admire the fact that this is a film,” he said, “in which people of opposing camps, different kinds of people, allow themselves to think.”92 Viewers could evaluate these conflicting viewpoints in the safety of their homes, with family and friends around the television. As Stirlitz tells a young border guard, “it’s safe [to talk openly] with me, but I don’t recommend doing so with others.” The film, with its official sponsorship and explicitly patriotic plot, guaranteed viewers a safe environment in which to hear, explore, and discuss a variety of difficult, potentially seditious thoughts.

Laughing with Stirlitz Seventeen Moments was an extraordinarily serious film, an expensive and high-stakes experiment that explored, over nearly fourteen hours, the most important political, personal, and artistic problems of its time. Why, then, was it so funny, becoming the subject of tens of thousands of jokes and founding one of the most prominent subgenres of late Soviet jokes, the “Stirlitz joke”?93 Scholars have offered multiple explanations for the ubiquity of Stirlitz jokes, reading them as a response to both the miniseries’ inherent subversiveness and to its ideological purity and seriousness.94 I would like to add another explanation—that the film’s many contradictions were designed to invite viewer participation, including via these jokes, and that this participation complemented the film, rather than undermining it. At least two members of the Gorky Studio seem to have experienced the miniseries—before its broadcast launched a thousand jokes—as spe180

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cifically lacking humor. Bremener’s comment comparing Stirlitz unfavorably to an earlier Soviet literary trickster, Babel’s Benia Krik, suggested that Stirlitz would benefit from a bit more style and fun. Frez made a similarly prescient remark at the first Gorky Studio session. “What’s missing here,” he observed, “is a smile, which is really necessary. It needs a few phrases that would evoke a smile.”95 Jokes about Stirlitz stepped into this breach. It is possible to argue that the film in fact includes such moments of lightness, although they are visual rather than verbal. The shot of Stirlitz staring down a stuffed chimpanzee, a sudden cut to his face “concealed” behind an absurd fake mustache—both suggest that Lioznova was not entirely without a smile while making the film. Smiles, after all, suggest a recognition of shared experience or beliefs, openness to further social bonding, or the achievement of a common understanding—all of which the film sought to promote between “functionaries” and intelligentsia. The rare instances when Stirlitz cracks a smile come at the precise moments when he forges a connection with Schlag and then Pleishner—they correspond to the sealing of the deal laid out by the film. As Stirlitz jokes suggest, viewers laughed about Seventeen Moments of Spring’s most extreme artistic experiments, all the things that made this a Soviet TV movie and not a Western one—its astonishingly lengthy closeups, its extraordinarily slow pacing, its autumnal, nostalgic atmosphere, the creaking mechanics of the plot that held it all together. “Stirlitz opened a door,” one joke begins. “The lights went on. Stirlitz closed the door. The lights went out. Stirlitz opened the door again. The lights went on again. Stirlitz closed the door. The lights went out again. It’s a refrigerator, Stirlitz thought.”96 People laughed at the resemblances between the film’s Nazis and their own bureaucrats, and the similarities and differences between Stirlitz and previous iconic film characters, like Chapaev. All of this wrote Stirlitz and his colleagues into the cultural and social fabric of Soviet life, often on the terms the film suggested: greater, if grudging, mutual respect and tolerance, constrained by regard for a shared heroic past, commitment to empire and thus to the authorities, whom, as Lioznova put it, “we cannot live without.” Seventeen Moments of Spring, and the public conversations and negotiations it brought into being, exemplified all of the most important traits 181

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of “stagnation”-era culture—slowness, boredom, nostalgia, irony, and the aging of the regime. It was precisely these features, however, that facilitated and brought into being the other side of stagnation culture: experimentation, open-endedness, lively debate (dressed up in various disguises and displaced abroad), and the desire for inclusion and social unity. The basis of that unity, moreover, was not primarily consumer goods, although those were certainly present in everyone’s imagined good life. Instead, Seventeen Moments suggested that the Soviet way of life was about something more meaningful—shared values and shared belief in Soviet heroism in the war. The Soviet TV movie, of which Seventeen Moments of Spring was the most famous and most successful example, would teach viewers to see, to recognize the superiority of that way of life even in an environment of unprecedented uncertainty and moral complexity, after Prague and so near the beguiling, détente-era West.

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CHAPTER SIX

“KVN IS AN HONEST GAME” Game Shows and the Problem of Authority

Making the television miniseries acceptable for Soviet television had required a great deal of intellectual and artistic work, with careful emphasis on how the socialist miniseries could make viewers active participants in order to better instruct and transform them. Game shows, by contrast, required no such justification on Soviet Central Television. Although the game show—associated with lowbrow capitalist consumerism in the West—would seem to be a poor fit for a socialist television system, game shows in fact were one of the key genres of socialist television “edutainment” across the Eastern bloc.1 Although the first Soviet television game shows were adapted from Eastern European television formats of the 1950s (and from the precedent of Soviet radio quizzes [viktoriny]), they have been remembered as deeply sui generis: Central Television’s unique and most exciting contribution to world television. For the producers of Soviet television game shows, the key precedent for their work was not literature or film, but theater, and mass festivals in particular. As flexible, syncretic mass media ceremonies, game shows offered specific solutions to the problems faced by Soviet cultural producers in the 1960s and 1970s. They served as a controlled forum for the 183

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negotiation and promotion of new, post-Stalin identities for Soviet young people during the Cold War.2 With its prominent position in the Soviet home, television was a key medium for Khrushchev’s effort to direct and manage consumer demand; game shows offered a fun and lively way to engage viewers in defining modest and modern “socialist” forms of consumption.3 Audience quizzes originated in commercial newspapers and radio in the West as a way of increasing audience interest and demonstrating audience size to potential advertisers.4 In a socialist context, they played a similar role, providing Central Television’s directors, writers, and editors with a way to prove that they were successfully reaching a mass audience. For Soviet audiences, game shows offered a chance to see ordinary people on screen, play along at home, enjoy a lively contest whose outcome was not predetermined, and sometimes win desirable prizes. Yet Soviet television game shows also reflected a number of tensions, especially concerning judging, rules, and ensuring fair play. Television contests are almost always didactic and entertaining at the same time. They dramatize public, collective processes of decision-making, raising questions of fairness and transparency about the rules and judging, and about television, which is always suspected of rigging the game. They elevate certain skills or kinds of persons for admiration and material reward. They establish authorities and contest them by referring to the ruling of an expert jury, entertaining the objections of audiences to the jury’s rulings or allowing viewers to vote for their favorites. Many of these tensions were not unique to Soviet game shows, as the famous example of the quiz show scandals of the 1950s in the United States makes clear.5 These tensions were also far from unique to game shows within Soviet culture. Indeed, competitions of various kinds were ubiquitous in Soviet everyday life. There were sports, from soccer and hockey to figure skating and everything in between. There were local, regional, national, and international competitions in music, mathematics, and chess; “socialist competitions” pitting everyone from grade-schoolers to factory workers against their peers; examinations, dissertation defenses, and so much more. In a state that was antiliberal and antiprocedural democracy, questions about fair play, clear rules, and authority to judge could become pronounced in any of these settings. But they were especially pronounced on 184

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television game shows, because game shows were unusually theatrical. Unlike socialist competitions, they were set off from the institutions of everyday life (school, workplace) and, though they were intended to mobilize viewers in an indirect way, they had no coercive dimension to encourage viewers to take part. Unlike sports, math, and chess they were not part of a larger, international field or network with its own norms. Unlike classical music competitions, they focused primarily on general skills, not specialized talents that required experts to evaluate them. Game shows were also created from whole cloth by Central Television, and every element had to be decided upon and conveyed spatially on a stage. How should winners and losers be determined? How many judges should there be on the jury? Was a jury necessary at all? Should the jury sit on stage and talk to the contestants frequently, or sit in a balcony above them and remain silent? Several popular Soviet game shows became very successful off the air as well, staged as amateur productions by factories, schools, and local governments across the Soviet Union.6 Frequent requests for help in staging these matches led to the publication of manuals for local game show organizers, in which the tensions involved in judging and ensuring fair play were made extremely explicit. Game shows thus fostered public conversations about legitimacy, authority, and collective decision-making, in a state in which those issues were generally not up for discussion. In this context, each of the major elements of game shows—regular people as participants, prizes, juries, and rules for determining winners—was a significant problem in its own right. All of this was particularly evident on a show called Club of the Merry and Resourceful, known by the initials of its name in Russian, Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh, or KVN.7 Created in 1961 by Central Television’s Youth Programming Desk, KVN was the first long-running and wildly successful Central Television game show.8 The program featured teams of student youths competing in contests of humor, wit, and improvisation. KVN’s jury was modeled, as the show’s organizers made clear, on the Communist Party’s highest collective authority, the Politburo. The show’s competitive format, however, was modeled on spectator sport, soccer in particular, because of Central Television staff ’s admiration for the unpredictability and spontaneity of live sports broadcasting.9 This disconnect between how the game was played and how it was judged generated enormous 185

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dissatisfaction among viewers. Since the KVN jury was not the Politburo, moreover, it could become the subject of persistent and heated criticism, in the press, in viewer letters, and in published dialogues between viewers and the show’s producers. While KVN’s openly political satire was tamed over the course of the 1960s, its format—the actions of the jury in particular—remained hotly contested. The show thus became a stage for debates about corruption, influence, and authority in Soviet life. From the end of the 1960s onward, the show and the spirited public discussions it inspired laid the groundwork for the flourishing of the television game show as an experimental genre, which put the problems of fairness, rules of the game, and authority to judge at center stage.

Origins: The Youth Desk The memory of VVV’s dramatic cancellation in September 1957 led to a brief hiatus in Central Television’s production of game shows. By the spring of 1958, however, Central Television was in the process of creating a Youth Programming Desk [Glavnaia redaktsiia programm dlia molodezhi] to continue the vision of the short-lived Festival Programming Desk. Rudol’f Boretskii, a young TV editor trained as a philosopher who had worked on Central Television’s Youth Festival programming in 1957, led the new desk. From the beginning, the Youth Desk saw itself as having a special mission to seek out new genres and forms that best fit television’s unique qualities as a medium. Elena Gal’perina, a young philologist hired to work in the new Youth Desk that spring, remembers Boretskii instructing her that television was “not newspaper, not radio, not cinema,” that it had its own genres and forms and that their job was to discover them, and always to be original.10 The Youth Desk had another key principle, based on television’s intimate setting in the home: no direct [lobovoi] propaganda.11 This sense of a special mission, and a particular commitment to artistic and entertaining approaches to influencing viewers, was reflected in the Youth Desk’s relatively fluid and egalitarian relations among the various professional roles—author, director, and editor. Anatolii Lysenko, who began writing program scripts for the Youth Desk on a consultant basis in 1962 and was hired eight years later, remembered that “both the 186

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administrators and the young female assistants were our equals . . . the secret of our success was that our Desk was built on the principle of collective creative work [kollektivnoe tvorchestvo].”12 At the same time, there was a high degree of deference toward those authors and directors whose work was considered the most imaginative and successful. “We had an understanding,” Lysenko recalled, “that there were persons called ‘creatives [tvoriugi],’ ” whose work many of the Youth Desk’s administrators and assistants tried to facilitate.13 By the early 1970s, this deference included maintaining a revolving door for prominent “creatives” who were fired for “amoral actions.” These violations included, to give two examples, accepting payment off the books to write or perform in amateur productions of popular shows at factories and other institutions, or selecting excessively provocative pop singers to appear on game shows.14 In both of these cases and many others, as Gosteleradio chair Sergei Lapin, and other members of Gosteleradio’s Party leadership noted with chagrin, the offender was brought back to work on a consultant basis.15 Game shows were the preferred genre of these tvoriugi because their mass audience and participatory format best reflected the Youth Desk staff ’s beliefs about the nature of television as a medium. Despite the anxiety about the genre after VVV’s cancellation and the ensuing firings, Central Television personnel who had worked on the show or, like Gal’perina, admired it were eager to create a new program “in the spirit of VVV.”16 The new Youth Programming Desk’s first ongoing program, Journal “Youth,” first broadcast in April 1958, introduced a recurring rubric as its final segment, a quiz show called “2 × 2 = 4,” produced by Elem Klimov, who later became a well-known film director.17 New staff members were added in 1959, including several who would be involved with KVN, and the Youth Desk began to broadcast monthly “quizzes [viktoriny]” from Central Television’s theater. By the fall of 1961, Muratov, together with his friends from Moscow’s amateur theater scene, Aksel’rod and Iakovlev, had completed the first KVN script.18 The show was first broadcast on November 8 as part of the special programming for the Revolution Day holiday, although for its first year of regular broadcasts it was shown on Central Television’s Channel 2, which had a smaller range, limited to the Moscow region.19 187

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Although KVN has been remembered as a direct successor to VVV, it was a very different program, one that responded directly to the problems and criticism faced by VVV.20 The most obvious change was the addition of a clear set of contestants—initially students from Moscow’s technical institutes—who were distinct from both the studio and television audiences. A. A. Alexeev described KVN in terms quite similar to those used to describe VVV, but with the addition of a “protagonist [geroi]”: “the protagonist of this action [deistvo],” he wrote, “would be a young person, our contemporary, whom television would reveal so fully, so without mediation, and, most important, so convincingly, that it could not have been the work of any other medium.”21 As Kristin Roth-Ey has demonstrated, these new young protagonists were to provide models for emulation and a clear set of messages about the superiority of Soviet elite male student youth.22 With these new, politically meaningful contestants, KVN also took on directly political and civic themes, ranging from antibureaucratic satire to criticism of poor-quality Soviet products. The show’s format was far more structured than that of VVV. A contest of wit, knowledge, humor, improvisational skill, and artistic talent between two teams of students, before an audience of “fans” [bolel’shchiki], the show was closer to spectator sport than mass action. The show initially featured questions and tasks that tested factual knowledge, but immediately ran into the old problem of setting a level of difficulty that would not “discredit” Soviet students by being either too hard or too easy. The show subsequently eliminated contests that focused on factual knowledge exclusively, instead focusing on skills like wit, humor, and creativity.23 Moreover, the questions were delivered by one team to another, rather than by the program’s hosts. Initially the show was hosted by well-known actors, later by Aksel’rod himself along with the Central Television diktor Svetlana Zhil’tsova, and finally, by 1964, the pairing that would last until the show’s cancellation in 1972, Zhil’tsova and a student from the Moscow Institute for Railroad Transportation, Aleksandr Masliakov.24 Limiting the game’s action to a small group of contestants also made possible much greater advance scripting, rehearsal, and control. Parts of each KVN competition retained room for improvisation, especially early on, but teams were typically prepared in advance for the show’s major 188

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tasks. By the end of the 1960s, most of the show’s action was scripted in advance, often by successful former “captains” of KVN teams.25 A. Men’shikov, the former captain of the Moscow Construction Engineering Institute team, remembers sitting in his apartment’s kitchen with Matvei Levinton, the former captain of the First Moscow Medical Institute team, scripting the performances of rival teams together: “My team is going to come out and say thus-and-so. And yours?” “Well mine is going to cleverly answer this and that—and yours?”26 The need for such advance scripting and rehearsal was enhanced by KVN’s focus on civic and propagandistic themes. Student satire was a far riskier field for censors than fluffy but apolitical talk about which way a cat climbs down from a tree. At the same time, the process of scripting the show was mostly in the hands of the teams themselves or, by the late ’60s, of professional and semiprofessional humorists, not Central Television staff. Vetting took place during rehearsals, not in the shows’ efirnye papki, the advance scripts that were approved by censors before broadcast for all Central Television shows.27 KVN remained live and focused on improvisation and humor, and was thus never entirely predictable. Elena Gal’perina, KVN’s editor, recalled a speech she gave before the show’s first broadcast that revealed how much its producers relied on the self-censorship of the performers themselves. “Please don’t forget,” she remembers asking the teams, that millions of eyes are looking at you; don’t turn off your self-control [samokontrol’]. In the course of the broadcast there may be minor mishaps [nepoladki]—we are on live television, respond to them calmly. To the teams and the Captains a special request—observe the rules of conversational security [rechevoi bezopasnosti] and remember that we, those who produced this show, want to come to work again tomorrow. Good luck to you!28

Despite these exhortations to “self-control,” however, the show’s satire frequently resulted in its producers being called on the carpet by the Gosteleradio leadership and the Central Committee.29 In this regard, KVN was part of broader trends in Soviet media during the Thaw. Like the journalists working for Aleksei Adzhubei at the Soviet newspaper Izvestiia, with whom they were in close contact, Central Television’s Youth Programming staff sought to identify and celebrate new, post-Stalin Soviet heroes.30 In doing so, they articulated a vision of

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socialism that was intended to mobilize Soviet citizens toward the construction of communism and their own transformation into model persons. Their version of socialism and its heroes often diverged from that of some high-level Soviet authorities, but was licensed and encouraged by others.31 The show also reflected Thaw-era developments in the Soviet theater and comedy stage, including the very public return of satire, humor, and performers linked to the myth of criminal, Jewish Odessa before and after the 1917 revolution.32 KVN’s prominent Jewish team members and captains and its use of Odessa-inflected humor occupied a similar, semilicensed place in Soviet media culture.33 More broadly, the show’s skits and contests reflected the high expectations and enthusiasm for science of the 1960s. One contest, called BRIZ, for Biuro po ratsionalizatsii i izobretatel’stvu [Office for Rationalization and Inventiveness], asked the teams to imagine utopias or outline sweeping reforms.34 These contests asked the teams to imagine building a new form of transportation or a student city on the moon, taking over the portfolio of the Ministry of Higher Education for twenty-four hours to improve the work of Soviet universities, or just taking over the planet and telling the audience how they would transform it.35 In answering, the teams usually interpreted the tasks freely and lightly, as opportunities for satirical humor rather than the presentation of serious proposals.36 KVN’s humorous answers to these kinds of ambitious, utopian tasks helped defuse the show’s message about the political aspirations of the young Soviet technocracy. Yet it is reflective of the kind of energy the show unleashed, in its early years, that the BRIZ contest was often followed by “merry production gymnastics [veselaia proizvodstvennaia gimnastika]” for the studio audience, set to music and intended to relax the audience after the “excitement” [pod”em] of this particular peak of the competition.37 Although the content of KVN is unfailingly fascinating, I want to focus on another aspect of the show, the one that provided the frame in which this kind of satirical, utopian play could take place: its form. KVN continued to be presented as a media mass festival, and retained a direct connection to Soviet amateur theater, via its writers and performers and also through its enormous popularity as an activity in schools, camps, factory clubs, and other settings.38 But KVN’s most important innovations in form linked it to a different model: not mass action, but spectator sport. 190

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KVN as Sport The most dramatic differences between KVN and VVV were the introduction, in KVN, of the language and structures of sport. Each broadcast of the show was a match divided into individual “contests [konkursy],” rather than simply “questions.” The show was thus occasionally compared to the Olympics: like Olympic events, the show’s individual contests each focused on a different skill set—knowledge, wit, musical talent, improvisation.39 But it was the language and organization of another kind of sport—soccer—that most pervaded the contemporary and retrospective accounts of the show. This is not surprising given that KVN’s structure was closely modeled on soccer; Muratov in fact described it as “intellectual soccer.”40 Instead of a quiz show featuring contestants selected from the audience at random, KVN was a contest between two “teams” of players, before an audience divided into two groups, the “fans [bolel’shchiki]” of each team. KVN teams competed for points that were tallied, resulting in final scores that were posted and have been remembered, by former players at least, like sports scores.41 Like Soviet soccer after the mid-1930s, KVN was organized into a league, with early matches leading into playoffs, then an annual championship round.42 The teams represented groups or institutions that could or did field athletic teams—universities and institutes, places of work, or entire cities. KVN also faced many of the tensions underlying Soviet spectator sports, including accusations of unfair play and an amateurism that merely served as a fig leaf in a game in which powerful interests and their financial resources played an increasingly important role. The decision to model KVN on spectator sport may have resulted from the competitive impulses of the Youth Programming staff, who sought to surpass the popularity of other entertainments that were broadcast, but not produced, by television. “Ever since the television set colonized your homes,” a group of KVN editors wrote in 1966, “the magicians who light it up for you have dreamed of creating a program that could compete with the best sporting events, both in the quantity of viewers and the strength of emotional charge.”43 Spectator sport was also closely linked to all the qualities that Central Television’s staff personnel saw as essential to television’s nature as a medium during the Thaw years. It was spontaneous and

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unpredictable; its action unfolded live before the viewers’ eyes. Sport also offered a ready-made model for Soviet game shows, one that was enormously popular yet could be presented, whenever necessary, as beneficial to its audience’s character and self-development.44 But it also offered television a very compelling form of entertainment, one that reflected the unpredictability and conflicts of real life. It allowed for the rise of gifted heroes but also their fall, and reflected the role of both skill and luck. Still, there was one important difference between KVN and soccer: KVN had nothing quite so clear as two goalposts and a net to define how and when points were scored. Although soccer certainly has ambiguities that require the judgments of referees and league authorities above them, the rules of the game are clearly established and reasonably transparent to fans, players, and officials alike. KVN was more like gymnastics, figure skating, or boxing—all very popular sports in the Soviet Union—which are constantly plagued by accusations of unfair judging. As in these other sports where artistry is taken into account, determining the winner of a contest of humor and wit is largely a subjective matter; and KVN lacked even the relative clarity of double versus triple toe loops. In the course of its first few seasons, KVN developed a fairly regular structure of recurring contests—the ceremonial entrance of the teams and greetings to the jury, an opening warm-up of riddles and quiz questions, an improvisation contest like BRIZ, the “homework” contest, which always dealt with a social or political theme and was explicitly prepared in advance, a contest for the teams’ fans in the studio audience, and a contest between the two team captains. But the number of individual contests and the points they were worth varied greatly from show to show. What’s more, the point values assigned to each contest were not always announced beforehand, or necessarily clarified afterward. Each contest might include points for different qualities—humor, intellect, improvisational skill—each of which was weighted differently. Decisions about scoring were made by the KVN jury.45 The show’s hosts conversed with the jury regularly, and the jury itself was shown on camera, deliberating and delivering decisions. The jury was made up of leading members of the cultural and scientific elite, including a changing mix of journalists, TV hosts from other shows, actors, theater and film directors, scientists, the famous Soviet sports commentator Nikolai Ozerov, 192

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and KVN’s own writers and editors. They were introduced at the beginning of each match, and sometimes answered a few humorous questions to warm up the crowd—questions like “When did someone first say that KVN was becoming boring?”—and establish their authority as judges of a comedy show. The jury’s comments to the show’s hosts were sometimes audible to the television audience, but their discussions prior to making a decision usually were not. Often, while they debated a decision about scoring one contest, another contest would be conducted, and several scores would be announced together. It was nearly impossible, in other words, to tell who was ahead from moment to moment, and one’s own judgment might not correspond with that of the jury in the balcony.46 The program’s lack of clear and consistent rules and procedures became a significant source of complaint from viewers beginning in the mid-1960s. Because of the relative paucity of archival sources on KVN before the mid-1960s, it is difficult to say for certain whether the KVN jury’s decisions were very controversial in the show’s first four years. Reports on viewer letters to the Youth Programming Desk suggest that viewers did complain about jury decisions, but only rarely, as in the case of a 1963 match discussed below. Most letters in the first half of the 1960s seem to have contained praise and thanks for the show, requests for scripts and instructions for organizing local KVN performances, and requests that the show be broadcast in an earlier time slot, particularly from viewers in time zones that were ahead of Moscow time, where the show began at 10 p.m.47 Beginning in 1966, however, Central Television’s monthly reports on viewer letters noted very frequent complaints about the unfairness or incompetence of the jury.48 What had changed? In the second half of the 1960s, KVN was coming under much greater pressure from Gosteleradio’s leadership and a whole range of other financial and political interests to include new teams and to alter the rules. KVN’s audience had grown immensely as Central Television’s network expanded. In 1966, Central Television at last was reaching all thirteen of the non-Russian Soviet republics. Central Television’s audience surveys consistently reported that 75 percent of Soviet viewers were watching KVN, more than any other program. With this new audience that stretched far beyond Moscow, KVN’s producers came under pressure to feature teams drawn from groups other than Moscow students. In the 1964–65 and 193

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1965–66 seasons, all-city teams from Friazino and Gor’kii, respectively, won the KVN championship. Men’shikov remembers being informed, in the 1967–68 season, that his team would compete against a team of female workers from a textile factory for their next match. Party organizations from cities in non-Russian republics, such as Baku and Kishinev, also pushed for and received the opportunity to showcase their own teams on the show, following the precedent of Ukrainian student teams from Kiev and Odessa and city teams from Friazino and Gor’kii. These new teams were not, however, drawn from a single institute, nor were they necessarily the winners of any previous competitions. To include more teams, KVN also began to experiment with new formats and rules, including a special 1967 broadcast for the fiftieth anniversary of the October revolution that featured many teams, including factory teams, competing simultaneously, rather than a proper “match” between two teams.49 These new teams and formats exposed the increasing money and power operating behind the scenes of the game, raising questions, like those being raised in Soviet soccer, about fairness and the “amateur” nature of the competition. According to Gal’perina, one such incident took place in a 1963 match between the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute [Fiztekh] and the Kiev Institute of Airforce Engineers. The match was judged by a jury that included several judges from Kiev. After a robotbuilding competition took up most of the show’s allotted time, the score was tied in the show’s final minutes when the Kiev team presented their competitors and the jury with a special pin they had manufactured, showing the cartoon person in the KVN logo wearing a pilot’s cap. The jury awarded the match to the Kiev team, outraging viewers, since the pins had been manufactured at state expense, and such financial influences were not supposed to pollute the game’s “gentleman’s agreement.”50 One outraged viewer wrote to the Youth Desk, “How can I explain this to my children, who were watching the program with me and couldn’t understand why television had allowed this injustice?!”51 One of KVN’s core principles was its opposition to “mercantilism”—the amateur status of its players and the absence of prizes. In a 1967 book for organizers of local KVN matches, the show’s editor, Gal’perina, directly contrasted KVN with game shows in the capitalist world. “In countries

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where the spirit of profit [chistogan] rules,” one discussion of the difference between KVN and Western quiz shows began, [game shows] often become a kind of business, throwing unbelievable sums of prize money into the sweaty palms of their winners. . . . In the United States, for example, game show contestants admitted before a high court and members of Congress that they had been given the questions in advance, and had rehearsed the scenarios in which they were named winners and given significant prizes.

“We are disgusted by the mercantilism of which many Western game shows stink,” Gal’perina continued. “Pounds, dollars, pesetas . . . How much more pleasant it is to play just for the fun of it.”52 This official rhetoric about the show was belied by the experiences of everyone who was involved in producing the show or supporting a team in their local institute or city—KVN players were rewarded with stays in state sanatoria and other perks; teams hired past captains and professional humorists to write their performances and paid them well.53 In the same book for local KVN fans and organizers quoted just above, Gal’perina observed: “In KVN, as in soccer, ‘patrons’ have emerged . . . they contribute funds to the budget for gifts and costumes, get participants out of their coursework, accommodate them in vacation houses, creating an unhealthy, speculative excitement [azhiotazh] around this merry intellectual game. . . . You watch the competitions of these teams and you ask yourself: ‘who is competing—merry and resourceful teams or business executives [delovitie khozaistvenniki]?’ ”54 The fact that the show was almost completely scripted by this time was not a secret to the public either—in 1968 a former television worker turned scholar, Georgii Fere, organized a roundtable discussion for the journal Zhurnalist, and published an account in which the fact that the show was 95 percent scripted was openly discussed.55 Several manuals of advice for local KVN organizers published in 1966–67 similarly stressed the need for advance organization, rehearsal, and scripting (figure 17).56 By the late 1960s, KVN had become a stage on which most kinds of unfair play in Soviet life were visible. This was also true of other fields of Soviet culture, most notably sport, but it was a particular problem in a show (and a medium) that advertised itself as a model of transparency,

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figure 17. “During a broadcast of Club of the Merry and Resourceful at the Moscow Central Television Studio.” A. Makarov, 1965. (GBU “TsGA Moskvy,” no. 0-34203; used with permission)

participation, and fairness. “Under the microscope of the camera you cannot hide anything,” one manual for local organizers explained. “On KVN everything should happen in the open, and not backstage. KVN is an honest game.”57 The work of the jury, whose authority and ways of reaching decisions were far from transparent, thus became a particular focus for criticism, both from viewers and from cultural elites who felt the show had lost its social purpose and become simply entertainment. One participant in Fere’s 1968 roundtable quipped that “it is hard for satire to pass the exam, since its objects are often sitting on the jury.”58 Viewers objected to the jury’s decisions and challenged their authority. Fere quoted from a series of viewer letters at the Zhurnalist roundtable. “I cannot for the life of me understand what authority was guiding the judges when they awarded twelve points for a basically mediocre performance,” one viewer wrote. “It seems to me that [KVN’s] biggest problem is the incompetently designed jury,” declared another. The show’s participants, another wrote, “are 196

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more merry and inventive than those who judge them.”59 One viewer complained about the practice of including guest members on the jury who were drawn from particular working classes that the show was trying to include more actively. “If there is a competition of cooks—there is a cook [on the jury]; if it is salesmen, there is a salesman . . . but among [these judges] we do not always find people who are merry and resourceful.”60 Responding to these viewers’ letters, another roundtable participant, the writer and journalist El’rad Parkhomovskii, asked, “Is the jury necessary at all? Since all of these competitions take place in a packed hall and the audience reacts very actively, perhaps the next stage for KVN is to transfer of all the judges’ functions to the audience.”61 These viewer complaints were a problem especially because the show’s producers presented the jury as an idealized version of another collective decision-making body, the Politburo, and the smaller Party committees that administered Soviet power below it.62 “The KVN judges are a collective of equals,” one of the show’s manuals explained, “and the viewer is accustomed to respecting exactly this consensual [soglasovannoe], collective opinion.”63 How would decisions actually be made? This manual for local KVN producers explained that “among the jury’s members there is always one person whose line of work and life experience make him especially suited to this part of the show. His opinion is always asked first. And conflicts? A little bit of tact, the rejection of stubbornness [otkaz ot upriamstva]—and disagreements will disappear in seconds.” KVN’s collective leadership, however, aspired to be transparent and representative. Members of the jury, the show’s editors explained, were “representatives of the viewers. Not experts, not gourmands, not know-it-alls—just regular viewers, who have been trusted to say that which the majority of people sitting ‘on the other side of the screen’ feel.”64 According to this advice manual, the first among equals on KVN juries was also sometimes supposed to accede to the opinion of the majority when it differed from his own, “not because he feels [his view] was incorrect, but because it would be incomprehensible to the public, and the principle that ‘we are not experts [znatoki], but viewers’ would be violated.”65 The KVN jury was also drawn from different social and professional groups than was the real-life Politburo, groups that would be most inclined to this kind of relationship to the public, as the show’s producers saw it. They were “scholars, writers, directors, educators, 197

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journalists. The last predominate, probably because they are used to feeling themselves to be representatives of the public in the most varied circumstances.”66 Yet even as they articulated this vision of how the KVN jury would function, the show’s producers were simultaneously forced to defend it against critics who demanded a clear set of rules that would govern the show’s competition and ensure fairness in determining winners and losers. In 1966, Gal’perina and KVN’s director, Bella Sergeeva, published a volume, titled KVN Answers Letters, in which they set out to address some frequent questions and criticisms they received from viewers.67 In its first pages, Gal’perina and Sergeeva published a collective letter from the “Komsomol members and Youth” of the Institute of Petroleum Machinery Manufacturing [Giproneftemash], in which the authors summed up the show’s failure to follow transparent rules and offered suggestions for how it might do so. “We believe,” the letter’s authors began, “that the time when KVN was simply a merry improvisation without clear rules has long passed.” Like any game, they argued, “KVN competitions should be subject to clear rules. After all,” they explained, Chess, soccer, and other games have exactly these kinds of rules—without them any competition loses its interest as sport. But at the moment, KVN matches on television are ruled by spontaneity [stikhiinost’]. What are the basic features of this situation? [What is needed] first: a formula for KVN competitions . . . How many teams can participate simultaneously? In our opinion, only two. But sometimes large numbers of teams compete on television. How many people can be on a team? How many members should the judging committee have? Who should be on it? How long should a KVN match last? What kind of lottery system should be used to organize the KVN tournament? . . . Second, the structure of the competition. In our opinion, the competition should include a mandatory program, made up of traditional elements (the team’s entrance, greetings, warm-up, captains’ contest and others), and a free program, made up of amateur performances and original contests. Third: judging. Every KVN match held so far has been judged by different systems. It is essential to decide on one judging system and establish it in the rules.68

The students concluded by proposing a judging system based, like their “mandatory” and “free” programs, on figure skating, in which each judge 198

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would submit an individual score, with the final score determined by averaging the scores of all the judges.69 In response to the students’ criticism, Gal’perina and Sergeeva were obliged to defend the KVN jury on different grounds, not as an institution that perfectly represented viewers’ own opinions, but as something other than a real jury, just another player in the game. “We, the show’s creators,” they wrote, “are not inclined to be as categorical as the authors of this letter. Although the Club has left its babyhood, it is still developing.”70 Later in the book, in response to other letters calling for a clearer scoring system, they explained why they chose not to adopt a system like the one used for figure skating. “It is well known how delicate a thing humor is,” they began. Can you fit it into a standard scale? We have chosen the path of goodnatured trust toward those who have been given the honorable title of member of the jury. That is just the kind of game KVN is! The jury makes a mistake, well, today those guys lost, tomorrow they will win! . . . KVN is an intellectual game, and the team members, fans, and members of the jury all participate in it equally.71

This was the play of theater, not sport. “For me, the jury is the third partner in the show,” explained Victor Slavkin, a satirical writer and dramaturge who participated in the 1968 Zhurnalist roundtable. “The jury’s answers are just as interesting to me as the answers of the teams.”72 This defense emphasized KVN’s collective, not competitive, purpose. “I’m not sure,” the critic Ia. Varshavskii added, “that we should really be making a big deal about points. Surely that is not the objective here?”73 Everyone was playing on the same team—KVN was ideally, as a longstanding jury member put it, “a conflict between good and excellent.”74 Writing in one of the show’s advice manuals to local organizers, KVN jury member Aleksandr Svobodin offered a mocking cautionary tale about a KVN team captain who became outraged when a jury member awarded the wrong number of points for one contest, and the captain’s team lost as a result. This captain “forgot that KVN is a game. He went to the jury and complained,” Svobodin reported. “And he received an answer that was far from the norms of jurisprudence: ‘Oh, let it go, you will win next time—this is not the end of the world, or of KVN. And who’s to

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say that in all the confusion you didn’t get an extra point too?’ ”75 The captain kept taking his complaint to higher and higher Soviet authorities, always getting the same answer, until he finally submitted his complaint to the United Nations. He was still awaiting a response, Svobodin wrote, to his request that U.N. forces invade the jury’s balcony. The KVN captain in this story, Svobodin suggested, was wrong for taking his own feelings of injustice too seriously, but also for believing the KVN jury was bound by the “norms of jurisprudence.” Yet, as the viewer letters demonstrate, this captain was far from alone in seeking to hold KVN to a strict set of rules. Far from ridiculous, this demand closely resembles the arguments of Soviet dissidents who pressured the Soviet state by asking it to obey its own laws.76 By 1968 there were many competing versions of KVN being proposed and debated in print and viewer letters. For every account like Svobodin’s, there was one by someone like Matvei Levinton, the famous captain of the Moscow Medical Institute team. Levinton compared a KVN performance to the exhausting work of a surgeon, and KVN’s fans to the passionate partisans of the soccer stadium: You are definitely at work. You are exhausted after a broadcast as you are after a serious operation. And you don’t get satisfaction from your witticisms or those of your opponents, because their witticisms—that’s fewer points for you, for your team. . . . The dust of battle forces not only you, but the entire audience to forget themselves . . . the KVN audience is more like fans in a stadium than respectable, theater-going society. The pressure of each KVN match is like the most serious soccer game.77

Although hundreds of viewers wrote in complaining about KVN’s unfair judging and demanding clear rules, sometimes making up the majority of the show’s mail, others wrote in to complain that it was becoming too rushed in the new, shorter time slot it was confined to in 1968.78 Some of the complaints about the lack of established rules revealed other differences in how the show’s creators and its viewers understood the purpose of the program. Although some viewers complained that KVN had lost its improvisational spirit, others failed to understand why improvisational contests were worth more points than the rehearsed introductions and songs, which required so much talent and advance preparation: they

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saw the show as entertainment, not enlightenment, and were perfectly happy to enjoy it as a scripted comedy performance.79 Perhaps this is why KVN remained on the air for several more years—it was canceled only in 1972, having survived the serious crackdown at Central Television following the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the second one that followed the arrival of Sergei Lapin as chairman of Gosteleradio in April 1970.80 Sport or theatrical play, improvisation or scripted show: none of that was crucial, at least in the short term. The show’s popularity—including with Party officials—allowed it to survive numerous scandals as well as multiple changes to its basic parameters, including the move to a prerecorded and edited broadcast.81 By 1971, however, KVN’s chief editor, Marat Giul’bekian, and its director Sergeeva talked internally about the practical difficulties of producing the show. The greatest problem was finding and training suitable competitors: the old champions had become “ungovernable [neupravliaiemy]” but new teams required months or years of preparation to meet the show’s standards.82 The show’s staff members were, already in 1970, suggesting that KVN “take a break” so they could prepare new teams and so viewers would “start to miss” the show.83 In memoir accounts, some Central Television workers attribute the show’s demise to Lapin’s anti-Semitism; many of the most prominent players were Jewish.84 KVN’s reliance on civic-minded satire was also a poor fit for the first years of the Lapin era at Central Television, when its news programs were forbidden to include any critical stories. Most proximately, however, the show’s cancellation may have been prompted by a corruption scandal in the summer of 1972, when KVN’s host Aleksandr Masliakov was caught, along with another Youth Desk editor and writer, accepting payment under the table for staging private performances of another Youth Desk show, a talent contest called Hello! We’re Looking for Talents! while touring with the show in Astrakhan, Naberezhnye Chelny, and Tol’iatti. Giul’bekian, who was responsible for supervising Youth Desk staff, was fired, and Masliakov received an official reprimand.85 By 1971, however, the Youth Programming Desk had created several new programs. Together they suggest the fragmentation of KVN into several more targeted programs, focusing on audiences and subjects that 201

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better suited the political environment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when “ungovernable” intellectual youth could no longer be the chief protagonists of the air. Rather than showcasing Soviet intellectual youth, these new shows promoted working-class heroes or a fairly random assortment of “regular people.” KVN had occasionally focused on consumption, taste, and beauty as some of the several spheres in which its contestants could apply their superior powers of reason and satire to improve Soviet life. Several new shows, including Auction [Auktsion] (1969–70) and Let’s Go, Girls! [A nu-ka, devushki!] (1970–85), focused almost exclusively on these matters. KVN had been promoted as a form of intellectual sport for elite male students; Let’s Go, Guys! [A nu-ka, parni!] (1971–73) and several other shows that followed it focused on athletics and military preparedness for working-class male youth.86 Although elite students returned to the air as game show contestants only in 1977, on Vladimir Voroshilov’s game show What? Where? When?, the 1973 game show You Can Do It [Eto vy mozhete, a pun on the Russian acronym for “computer,” EVM, or elektronnaia vychislitel’naia mashina] featured technical college students and factory workers in contests that tested scientific knowledge and inventiveness.87 Most striking of all, however, was the approach many of these programs took to the problem of determining winners. Abandoning the model of spectator sport, with its limited role for fans in the game itself, these shows involved the audience much more actively, sometimes as participants, often as judges. The spheres in which their contestants competed shrank, but their form began to depart dramatically from the models familiar to Soviet audiences from sport and politics. If KVN’s jury had mirrored the Soviet political system in order to improve it, these shows began, tentatively, to step beyond that system entirely. These shows followed the writer and journalist E. Parkhomovskii’s suggestion, in the 1968 Zhurnalist roundtable on KVN, that, in the “next stage of KVN,” the functions of the jury be passed on to the viewing audience.88

Auction The first of these new game shows was created in 1969, during what Central Television staff members recall as a brief thaw following Nixon’s inauguration. Auction [Auktsion], the Taganka theater director Vladimir 202

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Voroshilov’s first television project, was created on the initiative of the Soviet Ministry of Trade. As Vladimir Makoveev, the show’s cameraman, recalled, the director of Central Television, P. I. Shabanov, announced at a planning meeting that he had received a request from the Ministry of Trade to “think about a form of advertising for some consumer goods” that had excess inventory in the state distribution system.89 The idea of using game shows in a planned economy to encourage the consumption of excess goods was neither original nor exclusive to Soviet television. The GDR had created game shows for this purpose in the 1950s.90 Directing consumption and teaching taste were also part of KVN’s broader objective of promoting elite Soviet youth as models of both cultured taste and active Soviet citizenship.91 However, in the hands of Voroshilov, and with a generous budget from the Ministry of Trade, the show that resulted was far more than a modest experiment in socialist advertising. Auction was broadcast live from the Wings of the Soviets sports stadium on Leningradskii Prospect. In the audience, Makoveev recalled, were a “random [sluchainaia]” assortment of people assembled by distributing tickets to various Moscow workplaces.92 The show’s main event, as its name suggested, was an “auction” in which members of the audience “bid” on featured items by answering quiz questions. The winner was the person who gave the last answer before the third blow of the hammer. These “auctions” were interspersed with other contests for the audience in the stadium, performances by a costumed corps de ballet, musical contests featuring Soviet pop groups, and contests for the audience at home. Each broadcast was organized around the demonstration and promotion of a particular Soviet product the Ministry of Trade hoped to move off the shelves. In its six broadcasts before it was canceled, Auction featured episodes on tea, books, black-and-white televisions, hiking and camping vacation tours [turizm], canned seafood, and life- and property-insurance policies.93 Auction embodied many of the ideals of Central Television enthusiasts of the late 1950s. Not only was it broadcast live and taped only for rebroadcast via the Orbita satellite system, but it was broadcast from outside the studio using a mobile broadcasting station and an unusually large number of cameras, sound operators, and thirteen microphones to capture audience answers. An article about the show in Soviet Radio and 203

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Television portrayed the show as a live report from the scene of the game’s unfolding action. The article’s author narrated the show’s action breathlessly: “A rapid zoom [rezkii naezd] captures the participant, ready to answer the host’s question . . . [another] camera follows the host, and a fourth “hunts” for interesting reactions among the viewers . . . it’s a chase, and no one knows where the broadcast will move, where the first answer will come from.”94 As with VVV, the show’s creators sought to make viewers into participants, on the model of a mass festival. “We wanted to find a form of broadcasting in which the field of action would not be the stage, not the arena, but out among the viewers,” Voroshilov explained, “so that each one of them had the chance to become the hero of the television screen, to participate in the broadcast as an individual, to use all of his or her knowledge correctly and at the right time.” These were, however, far simpler people than the highly-trained performing students on KVN; the show was part of an explicit effort at the Youth Desk to feature more working-class people.95 Voroshilov described the show as “an auction of knowledge,” focused particularly on regular people who “can’t find the right word right away, are shy, can’t improvise,” but who are nonetheless “wonderful people who know a lot and know how to think. . . . We wanted to show these people in close up.”96 Auction thus proposed a solution to a persistent problem for Soviet game shows—the difficulty of both featuring simpler folk and presenting Soviet people as highly educated and articulate: consumer knowledge should replace the kinds of technical and high culture knowledge valued on a program like KVN. As Voroshilov explained to an interviewer, “there is a certain sum of knowledge that everyone needs—an academic, a lathe operator, a student.” What kind of tea suits your taste, how to decorate an apartment, how to build a library for yourself and so forth . . . anyone who wishes can test his abilities on Auction—that’s where the democratic nature [demokratichnost’] of our show lies.97

This was a quite radical proposal, one that threatened to undermine the hierarchies on which Soviet culture was built.98 A less politically problematic solution was to suggest that the show could play a modest, rationalizing role in the Soviet economy. “Let’s take the example of the store

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‘One Thousand Small Things [Tysiacha melochei],’ ” explained one frequent guest of the show, Roman Sinitsyn, the director of the All-Union Trade Advertising Organization [Soiuztorgreklama], the Soviet state agency responsible for advertising Soviet products. “Do you know what even half of the goods sold there are for? Helping people make sense of these items, teaching them to use them correctly and rationally, improving the organization of everyday life—that’s our goal.”99 This focus on promoting consumer expertise took many of the forms familiar from Western marketing and game shows. Musical performances resembled ad jingles, and the show offered participants the chance to gamble the items they had won in exchange for a mystery prize. There was a whole cast of characters largely unfamiliar in official Soviet culture: the “auctioneer,” a corps de ballet dressed as uniformed assistants who both danced and demonstrated the products, and “sponsors [uchrediteli],” including representatives of Soiuztorgreklama and the featured manufacturers. These sponsors presented the featured products and described them; various “experts” then commented on the product’s qualities. The show’s tea broadcast, for example, invited audience members on stage for a blind taste test of the handful of tea varieties for sale in Soviet stores and asked them to identify the teas. The show also included quiz questions about the fragrance, flavor, and healing properties of Georgian tea.100 Not surprisingly for a show focused on advertising, Auction also tried to engage viewers at home. Each show concluded with a contest for television viewers, similar to those for the studio audience. A viewer whose letter or telegram answered the largest number of a series of questions correctly would be awarded a valuable prize, such as a television or a vacation package. Viewer responses had to be sent the next day and winners were announced on the following broadcast.101 Response to the show was overwhelming: each broadcast received twenty to forty thousand audience telegrams and letters.102 Viewers also suggested products to feature on future shows, sent in information about the history of the featured products, and submitted original poems and jingles.103 Among the show’s objectives was the sociological investigation of audience tastes and preferences. As the chief editor of the Youth Programming Desk explained in the journal Soviet Radio and Television, the show’s staff collaborated with the Academy of Social Sciences [Akademiia obshchestvennykh 205

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nauk pri TsK KPSS] to analyze the show’s mail.104 This interest in learning about viewer tastes was not, however, limited to off-air analysis: it was a prominent part of the show’s action as well. Each broadcast included at least one instance in which the studio audience was asked to “vote [golosovat’]” for its favorite among a group of related products, live on air.105 In the canned seafood broadcast, for example, samples of dishes made with canned prawns, calamari, shrimp, and even sea cucumber were distributed to the audience, who tasted them and then “voted” for their favorites via a special microphone that measured the loudness of their applause.106 The applause meter, in the Soviet Union as elsewhere, offered a relatively safe way for advertisers to measure audience preferences publicly— after all, every product on display receives applause. But the outcomes of these audience “votes” were unpredictable—Makoveev recounts how, during the black-and-white television episode, the audience applause meter registered the Horizon [Gorizont] television model, produced by a Minsk factory, as the winner.107 “The experts in the hallways,” Makoveev recalled, “called this victory completely undeserved . . . [since the factory’s previous model had been of famously low quality], but did not protest, in order to avoid disrupting the public procedure [publichnaia protsedura].”108 The parallels with democratic politics are rather striking— Soviet citizens often voted (and applauded) in public settings, but never with the objective of distinguishing a single winner from among competing candidates; the image of “experts in the halls” standing aside to allow the “public procedure” to unfold without interference also has a democratic ring to it. The show also gave viewers a very visible role in shaping the rules of the game. Unlike KVN, Auction did have clear rules, but they were changed frequently in response to viewer complaints about unfairness or about limits on their ability to participate. The show began to allow viewers to respond to the contest by letter after complaints from rural viewers that they did not have access to a working telegraph office. It was difficult to find a fair way to allocate tickets for the show. Studio audience members received a larger share of the prizes and giveaways, but viewers far from Moscow were not able to take time off from work to travel to the show, nor could the show pay for such travel on a mass scale. In response, the show’s producers mentioned in the press the possibility of inviting 206

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viewers to attend the show in Moscow in the future, but admitted that it was a serious problem that had not yet been solved.109 Contests for viewers at home, however, were often won by people in quite remote parts of the USSR, such as one viewer from Iuzhno-Sakhalinsk who won a vacation package after the wilderness camping broadcast.110 Viewers also objected to the simplicity of the questions relative to the high value of the prizes, and to the practice of awarding the auction’s prize to the last person to speak before the third blow of the gavel. Under these rules, the person who won was not necessarily the most knowledgeable, and his victory was the result of luck.111 In response, the show’s staff altered the rules by having audience members “bid” by agreeing to answer larger and larger numbers of questions, and the highest bidder would then come on stage and answer the number of questions he or she had bid; if enough correct answers were given, the audience member won the item, and if not, a consolation prize.112 Still, although the show remained wildly popular and many viewers praised it as an “honest” game that put them in a “fantastic mood,” others continued to object to the show’s commercial subject matter and very valuable prizes.113 This latter group of viewers sensed that there was something not entirely Soviet about Auction’s open celebration of consumption and expensive prizes. Accounts of what caused the show to be canceled vary widely.114 Nonetheless, as soon as the show came to the attention of the Central Committee, its fate was sealed; every aspect of the show, it seemed in retrospect, was inadmissible on Central Television. Both Sinitsyn, the Soiuztorgreklama director, and Voroshilov were fired, although with the Youth Programming Desk’s revolving door, Voroshilov was directing another game show on a consultant basis within two years.115 Although the use of prizes to elicit viewer responses did continue on other shows, the prizes themselves became much more modest.116 According to its producers, at least, Auction was enormously successful in achieving its central goal: the stimulation of demand for overstocked Soviet products. Makoveev boasted that the show created so much demand for tea that it not only liquidated tea overstocks, but made tea a deficit item for more than a decade; the mediocre Horizon television set transformed the Minsk factory that produced it into the largest television factory in the Soviet Union.117 Yet the show’s relatively narrow focus on 207

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consumer knowledge also limited its capacity to engage viewers in defining Soviet norms of taste and personal style. Auction only asked its participants to know what products were and what they were for, not how best to use them to transform oneself into a model Soviet person, worker, consumer, and family member.

Let’s Go, Girls! Another Central Television game show, Let’s Go, Girls! [A nu-ka, devushki!] (1970–85), did locate consumption within the larger context of Cold War youth identities. At the same time, Let’s Go, Girls! also ceded much more authority to viewers in determining the show’s winners and losers. Let’s Go, Girls! suggests how formal experimentation with audience participation, including voting, could accompany the most orthodox political messages on Central Television. Let’s Go, Girls!, created by KVN’s editor Marat Giul’bekian and the Youth Desk director A. Akopov, along with Auction’s editor I. Gavrilova, was first broadcast just before Lapin’s arrival in April 1970. The show proved a perfect fit for the new agenda Lapin set out for Central Television. In a series of speeches shortly after his arrival, Lapin criticized Central Television’s authors, directors, and editors for focusing too exclusively on Moscow intelligentsia elites.118 Instead, Lapin felt, programs should engage the rural and provincial television viewers that Central Television was now reaching with programs that would be relevant to their lives, and that would encourage them to greater efforts in their productive work. Lapin criticized Aleksei Kapler, the host of a popular 1960s show about the Soviet film industry called Cinepanorama, for offering a group of cinematography students to the television audience as positive role models.119 “In effect,” Lapin argued, “this was a call to young people to choose a profession in the film industry,” despite the fact that only a handful of Soviet people could enjoy such careers. We have a countless number of programs about actors, directors, singers, already famous ones or those just achieving fame,” Lapin began. Does this not influence young people’s imaginations, especially those who live far from the city? . . . Yes, comrades, there was a time when even the most famous actors in our country could only envy the fame of [model 208

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workers like] Pasha Angelina and Mariia Demchenko. Our press and radio have somehow forgotten how to create fame for the best people in the country, the real heroes, those who create material wealth, those who feed, dress, shoe, and arm the country.120

Reorienting Central Television’s content toward a provincial, nonelite audience did not mean abandoning the goal of entertaining television viewers, however; quite the contrary. What were needed, however, were shows that were suitable to the tastes and political views of this nonelite audience and able to guide them in the development of economically productive and politically loyal identities. Let’s Go, Girls! addressed precisely these tasks. It was entertaining and popular, but its contestants were working-class young women, not KVN’s elite male students whose place on television was so problematic after 1968. The show was designed to perform a function something like that of Auction for overstocked consumer goods—it was intended to attract young women to “unprestigious [neprestizhnye]” jobs for which workers were “urgently needed” in the Soviet economy.121 The show promoted these “essentially female” professions by stressing the mastery and diverse skills they required, presenting them as cultured work for fully developed people.122 On Let’s Go, Girls!, an internal report noted, “there is a special emphasis on the independent, creative nature of [the featured kind of] work, its importance and meaning, the necessity of being a literate and well-rounded person.”123 Let’s Go, Girls! took its name and musical sign-on from a song by Isaak Dunaevskii from the movie The Rich Bride [Bogataia nevesta], a 1938 musical comedy directed by Ivan Pyr’ev.124 The song’s chorus began with the words “Let’s go, girls! / Let’s go, beauties!” and, indeed, the show was created as a Soviet version of a beauty contest (figure 18). The Soviet femininity it promoted had very little in common, however, with that of the late 1930s collective farm musical.125 The contestants were to represent the modern Soviet woman of the 1970s, someone who was attractive, stylishly dressed, cheerful, enthusiastic, and a skilled housekeeper: the “image of the ideal bride,” as one Central Television staffer remembered. As a 1973 report on “questions of aesthetic education [vospitanie]” in the Youth Programming Desk’s programs explained,

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Viewers see representatives of the most common and widespread professions. The [Youth] Desk’s task is to show the attractive side of their everyday work. This is done not only via questions relating to their profession . . . [but also by showing] how the contestants are dressed, how they conduct themselves, how they love good songs; viewers see an example that they can imitate.126

The contestants’ images were thus carefully calibrated. Their clothing was provided by the show in at least one instance, in which the girls wore dresses designed by Mikhail Zaitsev, the leading Soviet fashion designer.127 This level of attention to detail was warranted because the contestants were intended to serve as role models for Soviet women whose decisions about consumption, taste, and personal style carried great political significance during the Cold War.128 As one internal report explained, the show may have been narrowly focused on helping young women choose a profession, “but in the best broadcasts of this [show], a much greater effect was attained.” “They told a story about the young generation,” the report explained, “its spiritual character, its moral yearnings. They served as models not in the sense of choosing a profession, but in the sense of choosing a style and a way of life.”129 Many of the show’s contests, which featured such tasks as matching accessories to a dress, were about the larger, political choices that such apparently minor questions of taste entailed. The choices facing young working-class Soviet women were not limited to their own profession and personal style, however. In a structure that mirrored the “double burden” faced by Soviet women in the 1970s, the show was divided into two parts, one focused on professional skill and the other on skills related to women’s roles in the home. Each show featured contestants from a single profession or a set of related ones (such as bakers and candy makers). In the first half of the show, contestants with particular specialties competed in professional contests specific to their fields for the right to represent their factory or brigade. These contests were filmed separately, on location in each factory, and the outcomes were determined by a jury of factory officials and Youth Desk staff in advance of the show; much preparatory work, nomination, and auditioning took place off camera as well.130 At the beginning of each broadcast, footage

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figure 18. “On the eve of International Women’s Day, March 8, Central Television announced the results of the professional contest Let’s Go, Girls!” A. Kon’kov (TASS) 1972. (GBU “TsGA Moskvy,” no. 0-9998; used with permission)

of the professional contests was shown—bakers shaping decorative loaves in three minutes or television technicians assembling a TV in five—and the outcomes were summarized, as a prelude to the arrival on stage of eight semifinalists selected during these preliminary, professional rounds. In the second half of the show, these semifinalists competed in contests that tested their knowledge and talent in a range of consumer and housekeeping roles. Some tested knowledge of household technology, as in a contest where confetti was released from the studio ceiling onto eight carpeted paths, and the contestants were given vacuum cleaners and told to clean their carpet as quickly and thoroughly as possible.131 The connection to the contestants’ roles in the home was obvious, but, in introducing the contest, the program’s host, the Youth Desk director Kira Proshutinskaia, made it explicit.132 “Dear girls,” she began, “many of you are already good housewives, and several of you will become them in the immediate future.” The contest, she continued, was intended to reveal “how ready 211

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future housewives are for their encounter with household technology.”133 Like Auction, the show focused on promoting consumer knowledge and good housekeeping. Sometimes the audience was engaged quite actively, as was the case in a salad-making contest in which the contestants presented recipes for a salad called “youth” that they had been asked to create. Viewers were urged to jot down the recipes and prepare them themselves in order to assess the women’s efforts.134 The show’s competitions also focused on taste, and offered contestants and viewers opportunities for consumer fantasy. In one show, contestants were asked to furnish an entire apartment in a tasteful modern style.135 The only contest that was known in advance by contestants was the dance contest, in which the women danced alone or with partners from the studio audience, using moves that were sometimes modern and bouncy, but stayed within the shifting boundaries set by the censors.136 As these contests suggest, the modern Soviet girl presented on Let’s Go, Girls! was obliged, like her counterparts elsewhere, to combine a number of conflicting identities. Were the contestants well-rounded career women, scientific housewives, or just pretty young things with good taste in clothes and furniture? The show was specifically aimed at lesseducated Soviet young women, and proposed a restricted sphere for their self-expression, one limited to lower status jobs, the home, and the family. At the same time, the show’s contestants were selected by their factories’ Komsomol committees, and some of the winners went on to rise quite high in the Party hierarchy.137 The importance of the young women as Cold War role models also raised the problem of the show’s lack of focus on their intellectual and cultural superiority. After the show’s first year, it began to receive complaints that it failed to emphasize the women’s intellectual capacities.138 In the show’s early seasons, these qualities were tested only in the context of being a fitting mother of Soviet children: in one contest, kindergartners were brought on stage to pepper each contestant with childish but scientific questions like “who turns on the moon,” and “why don’t you have to pour gasoline into a horse?” The women were judged on the clarity of their answers.139 As soon as the show began to feature contests that tested knowledge of science and high culture in more abstract settings, requiring them to recite a passage from Pushkin, for example, or identify musical 212

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passages from the works of famous Russian composers, viewers complained that it was painful to watch these less-educated young women struggle.140 At the same time, viewers criticized the show for undermining its propagandistic message with contests that were too silly and unserious. A group of viewers from the Tatar ASSR complained that a contest in which women from Soviet poultry farms had been asked to stuff and sew down pillows was “an example of how you shouldn’t work. Feathers and down were flying everywhere . . . and as for the pillows, feathers were coming out of the seams. . . . Although television contests are supposed to be entertaining, they should not have a disrespectful relationship to labor.”141 This was a pillow fight, not high-quality pillow production. Despite these tensions, Let’s Go, Girls! was a great success with the audience that mattered most, the Central Committee.142 Accustomed to criticism and repercussions from Central Television’s leadership and the Central Committee, the Youth Programming Desk enjoyed a very different response to this program, one that opened up greater resources for the show. The show began to feature elaborate costumes and sets and began broadcasting from remote locations in Moscow and eventually other cities and towns.143 Andrei Men’shikov, a KVN captain who came to work for the Youth Programming Desk in the 1970s, remembered an episode broadcast from a village that included the construction of a model village, rowboats, and aerial shots from a helicopter provided by local officials.144 Let’s Go, Girls! was also enthusiastically greeted by many television viewers, who wrote in to describe the pleasure it had given them, or in the case of younger viewers, to say that it had helped them choose a profession.145 Although viewer letters to the show dropped off after its first season, it continued to receive at least ten thousand letters a year through the mid-1970s, far more than any other show that did not offer viewers a chance to win prizes for writing in.146 Viewers had another reason to write in to Let’s Go, Girls!: the show was the first Soviet game show in which winners were directly determined by viewers, albeit after a tightly controlled selection process. The professional contests in the first half of the show, as mentioned above, were judged by a jury before the broadcast, which featured only the eight finalists who emerged from those preliminary rounds. The show’s second half, which featured nonprofessional contests in the studio, also had a jury that 213

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awarded points for each event; these points were tallied to select three finalists. These finalists, however, were presented to viewers at home, who were invited, at the end of the show, to write to the Youth Desk to vote for one of the contestants.147 At the beginning of the show’s next broadcast, the victorious young woman was announced, with quotes from viewer letters in support of each candidate and, in early scripts for the show at least, the number of votes received by each contestant.148 There was then an elaborate crowning ceremony, complete with a three-level “pedestal of honor” similar to the podium for an Olympic medal ceremony. The highest pedestal was in the shape of a “throne” for the winner, who was crowned with a tiara and given a moiré sash with her title, such as “Queen of the Communications Workers [koroleva sviazistov].”149 In the 1970 season there was a championship broadcast in which winners of previous broadcasts competed for the title “Queen of Youth [Koroleva molodosti].”150 Of course, as with other game shows and musical programs that incorporated studio audience or viewer voting, there were clear limits on the audience’s role in selecting a winner. The juries determined the finalists (and were subject to the familiar criticism from viewers for decisions perceived to be arbitrary or unfair). As in the New Year’s musical contest Song of the Year, the award ceremony on Let’s Go, Girls! made much of the wonderful performances of all of the finalists, suggesting that, really, there were no losers. It is unclear whether viewer votes actually determined the winner at all. An early script included fake names like “Dusia Musina” and fantastical vote totals that imagined the show receiving over a million letters for a single episode, suggesting that the show’s authors were awaiting the determination of victors until after letters were tallied.151 But Men’shikov recalled filming one coronation ceremony the day after the contest itself, suggesting that viewer votes were not actually taken into account, at least in later years.152 As on Song of the Year and other musical programs, the game shows’ democratic procedural play was always circumscribed and experimental. In some sense, however, it did not matter whether or not viewer votes were really counted on Let’s Go, Girls! or other contest programs in the 1970s. The basic forms of voting and vote counting, for multiple candidates with non-unanimous outcomes, were staged for all to see. Even the 214

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game show jury, with its opaque decision-making process and infrequent scoring updates, offered an alternative to the political model that reigned outside the television studio, simply because it could be criticized directly for its unfairness and lack of transparency, and the show’s producers felt they should respond. The game shows described here delighted fans and bored them, generated outrage and exemplified Soviet values. The shift from KVN to Auction and Let’s Go, Girls! can be read as a story of repression and decline, from Thaw-era intelligentsia optimism to consumer triviality. It can just as easily be read as a story of persistence, as a small group of producers in the Youth Programming Desk continued to make shows that were fun and innovative, to practice forms of live reporting and camera work after live broadcasting was abandoned, and to see themselves as “constructors of play,” experimenting with new ways to unite and transform the television audience. Both stories are true. If we focus on the forms these game shows took, and the ways they addressed the task of dramatizing play and authority, however, a third story emerges, the one this chapter has traced. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Soviet game shows sought to gather the largest possible audiences, to both entertain and enlighten viewers. Their central concerns were taste, consumption, and youth identities, whether intellectual youth, whose Cold War superiority was measured in intellect and wit, or working-class youth, whose loyal Soviet identities were assembled out of family and consumer choices and economic productivity. Yet despite these relatively stable objectives over the course of the post-Stalin period, these game shows, like the musical programs discussed earlier, suggest that, paradoxically, more formal innovation was possible after the late 1960s. The offscreen conversations about rules, judging, authority, and access to scarce opportunities that sprang up around Central Television game shows in the 1960s became, in the 1970s, experiments with viewer voting, audience contests, and other forms of on-air feedback that brought the conflicts within the television audience and between the audience, Central Television, and television’s censors onto center stage.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

A DRESS REHEARSAL FOR LIFE Artloto and What? Where? When?

Auction and Let’s Go, Girls! were able to experiment, more freely than KVN had, with voting, applause meters, and other direct references to the authority of the public as voters and judges because of their circumscribed subject matter—consumer knowledge and the modest public and private aspirations recommended for working-class young women. But there were also other, more radical experiments among Central Television game shows of the 1970s and ’80s. Where democratic proceduralism on Soviet musical and game show programs like Song of the Year and Let’s Go, Girls! conjured, in carefully limited spheres, a Soviet system that observed its own democratic laws, two other long-running game shows, Artloto (1971–78) and What? Where? When? (1975–present), brought into being a world governed by other rules entirely.1 These shows mirrored the late Soviet phenomenon that Alexei Yurchak has called “being vnye”—the “explosion of various styles of living that were simultaneously inside and outside the system.” These new ways of life, Yurchak argues, “generated multiple new temporalities, spatialities, social relations, and meanings” that occupied “the border zones between

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here and elsewhere.” The Soviet system enabled the proliferation of milieus where these new, liminal ways of life were especially visible, without intending to do so and without controlling them directly.2 On television, these milieus were linked to the implicitly Western, capitalist world of gambling and risk. Artloto was presented as a televised lottery. What? Where? When? was set around a roulette wheel and shot in a series of unconventional spaces, beginning with the bar of the Ostankino television center. These connections to a liminal world of gambling and the rule of chance made possible creative and open-ended play and the elaboration of new ways of life. But the play they enabled was also intimately connected to the central political and economic concerns of late Soviet life—an emerging individualism, the rise of corruption, the growing conflict between youth tastes and omnipresent censorship, and the serious concern, discussed among reform-oriented critics since the Khrushchev era, that censorship and rigid enforcement of hierarchy worsened governance and created an artificial divide between state and citizen.3 These shows were explicitly propagandistic in their aims, but at the same time proposed forms of politics that were marginal to or clearly outside Soviet political culture. These game shows of the 1970s and ’80s offer us a clearer picture of the origins of perestroika on Central Television: they sought to convey to viewers what television without censorship might look like and, in the case of What? Where? When?, created unconstrained, uncensored roundtable debates between elite students that could easily take up new, political subject matter once censorship really did lift in the second half of the 1980s.

Artloto and the Rule of Chance The symbolic connections between game shows and the Soviet system made the creation, in 1971, of a game show based on a lottery all the stranger. Gambling was, after all, ideologically antithetical to a socialist economy that planned production and rejected financial markets. Indeed, gambling held a prominent place in negative portrayals of the capitalist West. In 1974, Soviet Central Television produced a short film titled Imperiia azarta [Empire of Risk].4 Set primarily in London and narrated by the television journalist and international affairs commentator Vladimir 217

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Dunaev, the film presented gambling as both a symptom and a cause of capitalism’s inevitable decline, as well as a central metaphor for the unpredictability and riskiness of both capitalism and democratic politics. In fact, however, Soviet people never really stopped gambling after the 1917 revolution; the Soviet state also facilitated and permitted gambling in certain times and places.5 From the early 1920s through the early 1930s, during the Second World War, and again after 1958, various Soviet agencies and ministries held lotteries to raise money for specific causes, or in the case of the Ministry of Finance’s cash and prize lottery, for the Soviet state itself.6 Artloto borrowed its central conceit from one of these Soviet lotteries, Sportloto, created in 1970, and was itself a lottery that TV viewers could enter to win valuable or difficult-to-obtain prizes. Like other games of chance, Artloto offered its viewers and players a space apart from everyday life, one that operated by other rules and in which human activity was (or at least purported to be) regulated by chance, rather than by ideology, political authority, or historical necessity.7 However, the very impossibility of leaving the show’s high-stakes content—popular music—to the authority of chance threw into relief the real powers behind Soviet television—its censors in Glavlit and the Central Committee apparat. In its hour-long monthly broadcasts, Artloto openly played with these problems and created more and more new rules and structures to shore up the show’s claim to be, like KVN before it, an “honest game.” Like Sportloto, Artloto presented viewers with a seven-by-seven grid of squares, each with a number, 1 through 49. Each number corresponded to the name of an individual singer or a vocal-instrumental band. Rather than buying tickets to this television lottery, viewers would send in their choice of six numbers on a postcard to Central Television’s Musical Programming Desk by the fifteenth of the month. The program would broadcast on the twentieth, with the drawing conducted on air during the show, followed by (prerecorded) performances by the singers whose numbers had been drawn. Viewers who guessed three, four, five, or six of the numbers received prizes, which included record players, albums released by the Soviet state record label Melodiia, signed photos of stars, and, later, the opportunity to attend the filming of a future broadcast. Thanks to these scarce prizes, Artloto received the greatest volume of viewer mail of any show in the early 1970s.8 218

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In its earliest episodes, Artloto spent a great deal of time defending its claim that the show’s songs were truly selected by the lottery drawing, and not by censors or other authorities acting behind the scenes. The show’s scripts often included jokes emphasizing that the process of selection was truly random. Ol’ga Aroseva, the famous comedic actress, appeared on the show’s second broadcast as “Pani Monika,” her character on the wildly popular TV musical comedy show 13 Chairs. The characters on 13 Chairs were known for their petty corruption, and throughout the broadcast “Pani Monika”/Aroseva tried to find a person named “Lotto Machine,” who, she had heard, had the influence to ensure that the performer she wanted to hear would be selected.9 In later episodes, the program’s hosts chided viewers for writing in to complain that some artists in the lottery had not yet been drawn at all, while several had appeared multiple times. Players in lotteries often observe these strange patterns; their meaninglessness within the laws of probability are always hard for gamblers to accept, but this must have been particularly the case when the fairness of the game was very much in doubt.10 “We receive a lot of such letters,” the host observed. The reason, he explained was that “not all of our viewers have understood that Artloto is not a concert based on requests, but a game. No one puts the program together. The program is put together as the result of a drawing. Some performers are lucky, others are not.”11 At the same time, Artloto’s writers and editors insisted that the show was not simply a lottery, but rather a concert whose content—determined by a truly fair authority—would please everyone. Despite the consistent presence of the on-air lottery drawings and announcement of winners, the hosts’ witty repartee often included discussions of how one “won” on Artloto and whether it was possible to “lose,” given that the outcome of each show was an enjoyable concert.12 Indeed, the nature of viewer participation was highly unclear—were they entering a lottery, using a system for guessing the numbers based on probabilistic calculation or some other strategy, or carefully predicting the singers most likely to be featured because they were otherwise ubiquitous on Central Television’s musical programs? Or were they requesting their favorite singers and allowing chance to determine whose favorites would be selected? Letters from viewers that were read on air and compiled in Central Television’s internal letter analyses included claims that a particular viewer had come up with a system 219

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for guessing the numbers.13 Yet before Artloto’s first drawing, in 1971, another viewer’s letter was read aloud as a correct interpretation of how the show worked: “In essence,” he wrote, “your game is a concert based on requests [kontsert po zaiavkam]. After all, everyone sends you the names of his favorite performers, the ones he wants to see on the program. But the format of your program is very fair, since the lottery, and not you personally, chooses which requests to fulfill. [That way,] none of us is offended.”14 To bolster this claim, Artloto included, in lieu of a jury, an “all-powerful commission [vsia avtoritetnaia komissiia]” made up of a Central Television host, Anna Shilova, a representative of Sportloto’s propaganda division (the show was not only a lottery and a concert, but also an advertisement), and the writer and satirist Arkadii Arkanov. A kind of rump, festive politburo, the Artloto komissiia seemed designed to demonstrate its own superfluity. In a humorous routine on the first broadcast, the komissiia’s members swore to uphold their duties—ensuring that the rules were observed and resolving any conflicts with viewers. At the same time, they expressed the hope that the show’s mechanism would work without them and those duties would “wither away,” like the state itself with the arrival of communism.15 In Artloto’s first years on air, the komissiia kept itself busy with the formalized and useless affairs of a petty and somewhat corrupt Party organization. They referred to one another by mock bureaucratic titles like “First Vice Chair for Good Moods [pervyi zamestitel’ po khoroshemu nastroeniiu].”16 They held mock Party meetings for the “reporting period [otchetnyi period]” of the preceding year.17 They occasionally admitted new members in mock initiation ceremonies. In one case the inductees were the comedians Boris Vladimirov and Vadim Tankov, who then sent up the solemn oath of allegiance by swearing not, as Shilova asked them, “to work so that Artloto will always win” but to “work so that we will always win.”18 In one skit, the komissiia appeared “shrouded in tobacco smoke” (a cliché of backroom politics) and debated how to respond to an anonymous letter [anonimka] charging that the show was not an “honest game,” because it included prerecorded performances, rather than gathering all the featured stars on stage for each month’s concert.19 The komissiia then responded to and made light of this objection by setting off on a ninetyminute televised journey around the USSR to “find” some performers and “bring” them to Moscow for the show. 220

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As was the case with Central Television’s holiday musical contest, Song of the Year, the most fundamental viewer objection to Artloto concerned the selection of participating artists—on Artloto, the makeup of the show’s array [tablitsa] of forty-nine performers: within those forty-nine choices, pure chance might reign, but another authority had obviously determined whose names made it on to the chart in the first place. Complaints about the makeup of the chart were read on air starting with Artloto’s first broadcasts, and, over time, the show began to alter its format in response.20 The first response was the inclusion of concerts-within-theconcert, featuring performers, including foreign performers, who were not part of the tablitsa. In 1974, the tablitsa was revised to include fortynine different genres and other special categories (such as “Guest of Moscow”), rather than the names of single performers; the show then experimented with additional contests for viewers and the studio audience to guess which specific performers would appear each month. Another way to respond to audience objections to Artloto’s roster of artists was, once again, limited audience voting. Like other musical contest programs of the early 1970s, Artloto began to feature studio audience voting, initially by an audience of Moscow State University students who nominated new performers they felt should be included in the tablitsa.21 In the show’s second season, the producers began to experiment with audience voting as a way of updating the tablitsa. In the 1973 season, another contest to update the tablitsa was held, this time via a two-step procedure in which the studio audience selected three finalists out of seven contestants, and then the television audience wrote in to select a winner from among those finalists. The introduction of these multiple alternative forms of authority (pure chance, the audience vote) was accompanied by a corresponding emphasis on transparency and authentication of results. In a July 1973 broadcast, studio audience voting was conducted by having eight female assistants, each holding a number corresponding to one of the eight contestants, circulate through the studio audience and collect the votes for that contestant. These votes were presented as “tickets” to the finale, rather than votes, but the stage directions stressed the need for transparency in how these tickets were collected and passed on to the komissiia. “The girls with the collected invitations gather around the Artloto komissiia,” the script noted. “It is essential to show this up close and in detail, so that it doesn’t 221

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create doubts among the TV viewers.”22 This same concern with authentication extended to the lottery drawing, which began, also in 1973, to be conducted by an audience member called up on stage, and the sorting of lottery entries to determine lucky winners, which in 1974 was conducted live on stage by a team of postal workers.23 Of course, as on Let’s Go, Girls!, none of these explicit efforts at transparency and legitimation of the show’s procedures for determining winners and losers made the show truly transparent, or entirely subject to the neutral authority of chance. No matter how clearly the lottery drawings or in-studio voting procedures were shown on camera, they could easily be (and routinely were) falsified or otherwise determined in advance by the show’s producers and censors. Artloto and its lottery format suggest the specific meanings that gambling could take on in the Soviet context. The television scholar John Fiske has argued that, in “competitive and democratic” societies, television game shows based on luck serve a hegemonic function by helping mitigate the harshness of an ideology that blames nonelites for failing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Lotteries demonstrate that “the rewards of the system are, in fact, available to all, regardless of talent, class, gender, race, and so on.”24 Artloto and other Soviet game shows, with their promise of scarce and desirable prizes made available to Soviet citizens in remote and rural locations, likely served this function as well, although many viewers complained that prizes were, in fact, inaccessible to them, for reasons that went beyond bad luck. Yet the show, like other Soviet lotteries, also raised several problems for Soviet ideology, which ostensibly opposed nonproductive economic activity and outcomes determined by forces other than human agency or historical laws.25 Like Sportloto, Artloto often sought to conceal its status as a lottery by suggesting that players might just be expressing their cultured tastes for a variety of sport or a particular singer. Artloto’s host, Fedor Chekhankov, congratulated lottery winners on one 1974 broadcast by saying, “I know how hard it was for you, but you demonstrated a significant will to victory over the lottery machine, and you triumphed,” as if lotteries, like history, were subject to human agency. The lottery is also a form of gambling least clearly distinguishable from the routines and structures of normal life—unlike more intense forms of play, it is not clearly set apart from normal experience, temporally or spa222

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tially.26 The world of play is always governed by different rules than those of the workaday world. In the Soviet context, play was particularly closely linked with the work of imagining a new way of life, and avant-garde artists had sought to break down the boundaries between the play world and the real. On Artloto, where chance did the work of the vanguard Party (and claimed to do it better), this boundary was especially thin. There is one final way to assess the implications of Artloto’s little experiment with the rule of chance on Central Television: its music and humorous sketches. What stands out most vividly, when you consider the lists of performers that preceded every script, is, first, that Artloto had an overall stronger orientation toward Soviet and especially foreign pop music than other serial (recurring) programs on Central Television: in the early 1970s, a period when foreign musical performances were relatively rare on Central Television, Artloto routinely featured Czech, Yugoslavian, Bulgarian, East German, and even occasionally Western European performers. Artloto also featured frequent performances by the various Soviet VIA, or vocalinstrumental ensembles, and an early (for Central Television) appearance by Alla Pugacheva in 1972; the show also offered jazz music from Aleksandr Tsfasman and Yuri Saul’skii, and even modern dance. Artloto also featured a lot of humor, including performances by the show’s regulars Aroseva and Arkanov, as well as Mikhail Zhvanetskii, Vladimirov and Tonkov, and many others. The show’s musical content reflected its director’s tastes. Evgenii Ginzburg went on to produce an extremely famous series of concert programs under the name Benefis, dedicated to particular actors, that have been remembered as landmarks of experimental, artistic television.27 Yet it may also have reflected the show’s association with the rule of chance. The show’s repertoire was markedly less edgy during the broadcasts where selections were ostensibly made by viewer voters (rather than by chance), which featured far more performances by the kinds of stars who appeared on Song of the Year, a more closely censored program. This may be a coincidence, or it may be the result of minor fluctuations of personnel and censorship within Central Television. It might also, however, reflect the fact that the rule of chance offered a more radical departure from Soviet norms than the “managed democracy” of a show like Song of the Year.28 223

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Intellectual Casino: What? Where? When? Despite its playful experimentation and roster of foreign musicians and popular comedians, Artloto did not fill the serious gap in game show programming that Central Television’s Youth Desk staff felt had been created by the cancellation of KVN. Throughout the 1970s, Youth Desk staff bemoaned the absence of a program like KVN that focused on elite intellectual youth. They also received complaints from viewers “month after month” asking them to “bring back KVN,” since “not one of the Youth Desk’s entertaining-educational programs [razvlekatel’no-poznavatel’nye peredachi] contains the positive qualities that characterized the former Club of the Merry and Resourceful.”29 At a 1977 meeting for Party members in the Youth Desk, one staff member reminded his colleagues that when KVN was canceled “we abandoned an important form of work.” “Creating a program that would be the equivalent of KVN has not gone off the agenda,” he told them. “Viewers still mourn this program.” But he perceived a mood of hopelessness among his colleagues. “I sense a kind of inertia . . . a tired feeling that it is objectively impossible to create that kind of program. We have to overcome that,” he urged.30 At last, in 1977, the Youth Desk did debut a new game show that featured predominantly male intellectual youths. Titled What? Where? When? [Chto? Gde? Kogda?] (1975–present), the new show was also created by the irrepressible Voroshilov, who saw it in terms quite similar to those of KVN: as a place where elite students and television viewers alike could come to test their knowledge, wits, and wherewithal in a form of play that mirrored real life. Voroshilov’s return to Central Television after the cancellation of Let’s Go, Guys! in 1973 was part of a significant loosening of restrictions on the style and content of shows in the Musical and Youth Programming Desks that began in 1977–78, as part of an attempt to attract younger viewers. As Evgenii Shirokov, the chief editor of the Youth Desk in 1977, observed, “rarely can you find the conflict of opinions, the spark of heated argument and of temper, the uninhibitedness of thought, which are characteristic of youth.” What? Where? When?, Shirokov explained, was designed to “address that problem.”31 In an environment where actual youth audience tastes were measured only indirectly or not at all, the need to attract and address young viewers became

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the premise for a reform agenda, developed during the Thaw, that emphasized the need for immediacy, spontaneity, and authenticity. Yet What? Where? When? also reflected the significant changes in the ideological and political environment since KVN’s creation in the early 1960s. In addition to showcasing the talents of elite Soviet students, What? Where? When? involved both contestants and the television audience in a game that prepared them for battle in the increasingly corrupt and unpredictable world of Soviet life in the late 1970s and early 1980s.32 What? Where? When? began as a family quiz show similar to the American program Family Feud. After two years of experimentation and very irregular broadcasts, however, the show settled on what would remain its basic structure and protagonists.33 From 1977 onward, What? Where? When? pitted a team of six “whiz kids [znatoki],” young, educated people from various fields of expertise, against the “team” of television viewers, who submitted questions by mail and sought to stump the team of znatoki. The questions were drawn from the natural sciences, nonSoviet history, literature, and the arts. Each had a factual answer, but was posed in a riddle-like form, to throw the znatoki off track and leave room for “brainstorming” and debate.34 The game was divided into rounds, like a boxing match: at the beginning of each round a znatok spun a roulettelike wheel to determine which of the numbered viewer letters laid out around the wheel the team would answer during that round (figure 19). After Voroshilov, the show’s off-camera narrator, read the question aloud, the group of znatoki had one minute (the show’s famous “minute of reflection [minuta razmyshleniia]”) to decide on a collective answer (figure 20). These rules brilliantly resolved many of the problems Soviet game shows had faced in the past, including the difficulty of the questions, the authority of judges, and the obligation to identify losers as well as winners. The show’s carefully selected and highly educated participants, working in teams of six, could handle questions difficult enough to be a credit to Soviet youth, thereby avoiding the embarrassment that had plagued previous game shows, from VVV to Let’s Go, Girls! Even better, the fact that the znatoki were playing against television viewers meant that when they failed to answer a question correctly, there was no real blow to the image of the Soviet populace—after all, they had simply been stumped by Soviet citizens who were even smarter. As in the stilted “socialist competitions” between factories or towns, on 225

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figure 19. The What? Where? When? roulette wheel, with viewer letters in each sector, 1980 final

What? Where? When? the Soviet people always won. But on What? Where? When? there was also a loser, making the show both ideologically acceptable and dramatic, competitive, and exciting. The show’s questions, moreover, were difficult mainly as riddles—the factual knowledge they were based on could be quickly established as true by referring to popular journals or encyclopedias. As Voroshilov explained in a guide for amateur productions of the show in 1982, these rules made a jury unnecessary, established the fairness of the game among participants and viewers alike, and created conditions that maximized the freedom of the players to express themselves.35 Beyond the basic structure described above, however, Voroshilov saw the show’s rules as an arena for experimentation, a way to shape human behavior, and he frequently altered the way that correct or incorrect answers affected the individual players or the team as a whole.36 The show’s content, he explained, “was all in the rules, and only in them! Adjust the rules a little bit, and as if by the wave of a magic wand, a sense of daring, bravery, rudeness, even recklessness [appears]. Change them again . . . 226

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figure 20. What? Where? When?, 1980 final

and suddenly a collective united by a shared idea will be created. Now change them again and again,” Voroshilov urged. “Everything is in your power. You are a dramaturge, a constructor [konstruktor], an architect. You are more than a director, much more!”37 Voroshilov’s heightened rhetoric mirrored the show’s sweeping artistic and political ambitions. Internally, What? Where? When? was described as propagandizing not only the superior intellectual qualities of Soviet youth and self-development along those lines, but also teamwork and negotiation.38 In his writings about the show, however, Voroshilov stressed that the skill the game tested was not mere erudition—it was something much grander. Rather than focusing on narrow factual knowledge, in which a person with some specific education would have an advantage, the questions should be “designed for . . . a typical person ‘from the crowd.’ The questions . . . should help such a person believe in his or her strengths, convince him or her that, with a minimum of fundamental knowledge, he or she can . . . solve any problem that life might bring.”39 227

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Moreover, What? Where? When? would test all of a player’s capacities and talents simultaneously, rather than being a series of separate contests of particular abilities, as had been the case on Let’s Go, Girls!/Guys! For Voroshilov, this made the show a good fit for the circumstances of life in the early 1980s, when corruption and political intrigue were growing rapidly.40 Writing in 1982, Voroshilov observed that “professional games [delovye igry]” were gaining importance and life itself required the utmost skill and readiness for conflict. How can a person learn to react instantly to one or another unexpected situation that might arise? How can he learn to keep all of his senses and abilities ready for battle and immediately put them to work? How, after all, can he objectively evaluate himself, his abilities, his strong and weak sides, confirm what he’s really able to do? The process of developing, of opening up in a person these necessary life qualities is, in my opinion, the highest objective of any important game.41

For these reasons, Voroshilov argued, the show was to mirror real life as closely as possible, so that it might serve as a “dress rehearsal [general’naia repetitsiia]” for life itself.42 Conceived entirely from the perspective of the Soviet individual, pursuing personal goals in a hostile environment, the version of Soviet life that Voroshilov imagined on What? Where? When? looked very different from the one described on Time every evening.43 It was also set in a world that seemed apart from Soviet life, as that life was construed in Soviet ideology. The program was shot not in a theater or a stadium, like most other Soviet game shows, but in the bar of the Ostankino television center. In 1983, it moved to a crumbling former palace on Herzen Street.44 In each of these places, the set managed to evoke both a Western capitalist world and a prerevolutionary Russian one, not least because the show’s set resembled a casino more than anything else. The znatoki were gathered around a roulette wheel like players at a high-stakes table, with members of other teams, TV staff, and a small audience pushing closer to watch the action. The room was dim and, from the 1979 season onward, featured live jazz and musical interludes by popular groups, including the Soviet rock group Time Machine [Mashina vremeni] in 1982.45

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Voroshilov also did his best to glamorize the show’s modest prizes— books, usually attractive bound editions of prerevolutionary literature or science fiction that were difficult to obtain in stores but nonetheless fully in accordance with the norms of a Soviet game show.46 Unlike Let’s Go, Girls! or Auction, however, What? Where? When? featured no poorly motivated giveaways of large household items, and no consolation prizes for the losers; prizes were for winners only and their awarding was celebrated in great detail. Small non-book prizes, including memorabilia from the show, were introduced in 1985, but even before then Voroshilov did all he could to focus on the prizes and the process of awarding them—in the 1984 final match the winning znatok or television viewer was paraded by several festively costumed musicians down a long path to a glittering New Year’s tree hung with books, from which he or she carefully chose, captured by extended close-ups of both the books and the winner’s face as he or she made a selection. The show’s atmosphere and setting were, in fact, not entirely out of the ordinary on Soviet television in the late 1970s and early 1980s.47 Neither was its emphasis on conflict, open-ended narratives, and heroes whose fate was uncertain: those elements were familiar from foreign news coverage and sports, which occupied an increasing share of the Soviet television schedule in the years before the 1980 Olympic Games, as well as from the many other forms of competition and testing that made up a large part of Soviet everyday life. Yet, as with other game shows, the show’s theatricality and subject matter—in this case, not only knowledge but reason, argument, and decision making—made its parallels with the political world more vivid. The show’s central theme—the need for a new kind of teamwork and a flexible leadership that would allow for individual contributions and recognize merit—reflected a crucial tension in post-Stalin Soviet life between the collective obligations of Soviet society and the problematic and limited space for individual pursuits and self-development that had been recognized under Khrushchev.48 Like KVN before it, What? Where? When? drew very explicit parallels between its organization and that of the Soviet political world. Voroshilov’s instructions for creating teams of znatoki for local clubs indicate that the znatoki were meant to exemplify intellectual and ethical values that stood in implicit contrast to Party 229

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officialdom: anyone prone to self-indulgent speechifying or longwinded shows of factual erudition was to be eliminated immediately. Since the znatoki in this sense represented a sort of alternative elite, it is perhaps no coincidence that Voroshilov and his production team experimented with the use of psychological testing in selecting them and determining the captains of each team—mimicking the strategies of elite military and police forces.49 At the same time, the game constantly staged the vulnerability of its players. In this world where elite position was earned by merit, no leader was for life. In 1983 it became possible for teams to remove members who were not playing well, or simply to swap players in and out depending on the team’s needs. The team’s captain or an unofficial leader in the group could also rise and fall, and Voroshilov used his position as the game’s narrator to draw the viewers’ attention to the captain’s errors, such as the failure to listen to a quiet member who had given the correct answer but had been ignored. Voroshilov explained that although the questions were meant to level the playing field between individuals of different knowledge and experience, the game would naturally reveal a hierarchy among the players, identifying main characters and secondary ones, and, in effect, replicating the stratified social world of the whole audience within the small group of znatoki. Among the znatoki, Voroshilov wrote, “jokers and braggarts, hard workers and lazy people, their characters will begin to be revealed right before our eyes. And among them a main hero, a leader, will appear without fail—we don’t yet know exactly who he’ll be, but he will absolutely appear.” And as in life or any good tragedy (but unlike in a socialist realist novel), that hero might fall. “Now here he is,” Voroshilov wrote, “this main hero. Will he last forever? Or is a plot reversal possible, in which the hero is subjected to new challenges and doesn’t succeed? And what will then happen to the team? Will it find a new hero to replace him?”50 If individuals could rise and fall within a team of znatoki, there was also the larger risk that an entire team could be defeated by the television viewers, and one occasionally was. The implications were at once entirely orthodox—of course the Soviet people could develop itself and surpass the small club of znatoki—and potentially devastating, since the znatoki easily stood in for another tiny vanguard opposed to the Soviet popu230

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lace.51 Voroshilov, both in private and openly as the show’s invisible narrator, always rooted for the television viewers against the znatoki.52 When perestroika began to arrive on Soviet television, therefore, it seemed that What? Where? When? had been preparing for it all along. Voroshilov had always insisted that the show be shot all in one take to create the feeling of live broadcasting; from 1986 onward it was actually live.53 Musical guests, who began performing in the palace on Herzen Street in 1984, replacing the video clips of earlier years, were now performing live for the whole television audience.54 After it was out-intrigued in 1986 by a Komsomol group that wanted to turn the palace on Herzen Street into a cooperative restaurant, the show, which had always felt like it was not quite set in the Soviet Union, went abroad for three international matches in Bulgaria. When it returned to the Soviet Union in 1988, and began broadcasting from the Sovintsentr building, it brought international guests back with it—the 1988 and 1989 matches all featured teams from capitalist countries, including the United States and Sweden; matches in 1989 added teams from cities around the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Bulgaria. The internationalization of the game both fit with the change in Soviet relations with the West under Gorbachev and prefigured the globalization of What? Where? When? as a television format and an amateur club, along with millions of former Soviet citizens, after 1991. Finally, Voroshilov could now realize his ambition of playing for something more than books: the 1987 matches in Bulgaria saw the introduction of valuable prizes, ranging from a set of six Soviet watches to perfume sets to decorative objects by Bulgarian and Soviet artists, each paraded at great length before the audience and the cameras and set out for the znatoki to choose from each time they answered a question correctly.55 Perhaps the most dramatic change, however, was in the nature of the questions. Since the show had never been entirely about the trivia its name implied, its heated debates and “brainstorms” now easily expanded to include questions that went beyond What?, Where?, and When? to Who?, Why?, and How? The show began to feature questions about the legal and social changes of Gorbachev’s reforms, and the “minute of reflection” became the political roundtable it had always implicitly resembled. As a result, Voroshilov made substantial changes in the show’s format. In this new setting, the znatoki came primarily to represent a positive alternative leadership 231

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or way of thinking, rather than an elite that could be displaced by television viewers. Voroshilov began to make striking interventions to test the znatoki’s political courage. In one dramatic moment during the 1987 Bulgarian matches, Voroshilov pressured a Bulgarian player into reversing his team’s “correct” answer—that factories themselves should decide how many pairs of pants and how many buttons to create in response to demand—and then criticized the player for his failure to stand up for his ideas.56 The boundary between znatoki and viewers also blurred considerably, most notably with the 1988 inclusion of amateur teams from other Soviet cities and Eastern Europe in a format in which ten teams from different places played together as an expanded team of znatoki—fittingly, the motto of the 1988 season was “all for one and one for all.” In the much larger space the Sovintsentr offered, the game could now include not only formerly amateur teams that represented the participating audience, but an even larger viewer audience that crowded every passageway, and watched from the floor, on the same level, literally, as the znatoki. This continued Voroshilov’s practice, begun in 1984, of moving the television audience onto the stage, alongside the znatoki and subject to the same admiring treatment by the camera. Viewers who weren’t yet on stage were also encouraged to participate more directly, by calculating their “intellectual rating”—a number based on the number of questions correctly answered and those questions’ difficulty. The 1988 matches fully realized the game’s potential as a forum for political debate that was open and competitive. The show featured new rules, whereby all the teams of znatoki had the right to propose answers to the question after the answer given by the team at the main table, but only the final answer given by any team would stand as the answer for the entire club of znatoki. These rules both maximized the number of opinions and arguments viewers would hear and emphasized the importance of exchange, consensus, and courage of conscience. Yet there were several cases during these matches where a single reactionary answer—if given last—had the power to defeat the entire team, even when the majority of players had given versions of a “correct” answer, that is, one that supported reform. In this way, despite its exciting atmosphere of openness and discussion, the show exposed the limits of reasoned debate without a mechanism for resolving real conflicts. 232

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What? Where? When? remained on the air during the 1990s, of course, and continued to change to reflect the larger society it sought to mirror. As the rules binding players in Russia’s economic and political game broke down and risks increased, Voroshilov began to call the show an “intellectual casino”—one of many casinos in the new Moscow landscape. Right away in 1991 the znatoki began to play for money, reflecting the new stakes of the 1990s. The elite status of the znatoki became a new focus in a rapidly stratifying society: they began to dress in tuxedos in 1994, and the “crystal owl”—an audience prize for the best znatok of the year, initiated in 1985—was joined by the “diamond star” in 1995, and eventually, in 2002, became the “diamond owl,” which weighs in at more than eight kilograms of silver, crystals, and rubies.57 The festive play of Artloto and the transformations of What? Where? When? from the late 1970s to the late 1990s are indicative of the paradoxical place of television, and many other state-produced mass media and entertainments, in late Soviet life. At the height of “stagnation,” Artloto could imagine a world where the Party abandoned its control over the musical styles and fashions of pop stars. In the early 1980s, when the aging of the regime was made dramatically evident by a series of state funerals, What? Where? When? could put elite intellectual youths in a casino, engage them in vigorous roundtable debates, mirror a competitive and unpredictable real world, and emphasize the need for individuals to develop themselves in order to thrive in that world, all while fitting relatively comfortably inside the bounds of what was permissible on television, one of the most carefully censored media in the Soviet Union. The political intrigues taking place at the highest levels of the Soviet state, the abandonment of belief in the immediacy of the communist future, and the urgent need to engage young people with Soviet cultural products and values in light of the enormous popularity of Western popular culture all combined to create a significant space for cultural play. By the mid-1980s, this play and experimentation were both extraordinarily independent from the tenets of Marxism-Leninism and extraordinarily open to interpretation, yet also highly politicized. In a interview in 2007, Eduard Sagalaev made this connection explicit, explaining that his work on What? Where? When? with Voroshilov strongly 233

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influenced the creation of two highly influential news programs of the late 1980s, View and Twelfth Floor. What? Where? When?, he remembered, “carried that spirit of doubt, of conflict, of open discussions back then, but it of course did not concern politics. But nonetheless that spirit was there. And then, when a new epoch in the life of our country began,” Sagalaev continued, he and his collaborators knew what they wanted to create, how a new kind of political discussion show should look and feel.58

234

EPILOGUE The Origins of Central Television’s Perestroika

Mikhail Gorbachev’s election as general secretary of the Communist Party marked the beginning of a new era at Central Television. At first, changes were subtle—coverage of some natural disasters in the USSR appeared in 1985, for example.1 More significant changes were in the works, however. Beginning in 1985, but with growing intensity in the first months of 1986, Central Television’s Information and Youth Desks received instructions from the Central Committee to create new news and entertainment programs aimed at attracting young people.2 The objective of these new shows, like so many previous News and Youth Desk programs, was to combat the influence of foreign media, now including not only radio broadcasts but the illegally reproduced videotapes that were circulating among a population with growing access to VCRs.3 In the months and years that followed, confirmed in the urgency of their project by the Chernobyl disaster and the fatally slow Soviet media response, Central Television staffers in the Youth and News Desks created what became the iconic, groundbreaking shows of the Gorbachev era: Twelfth Floor [Dvenadtsatyi etazh], Before and After Midnight [Do i posle polunochi], View [Vzgliad], and Spotlight of Perestroika [Prozhektor perestroiki].4 These shows were 235

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lauded by Western scholars and journalists both at the time and in retrospect as something totally new for Soviet television—they were live and fast-paced, they included conflicting points of view, and they addressed previously unmentionable topics, such as the mass repressions under Stalin, the human and economic costs of the war in Afghanistan, living and working conditions of striking Soviet miners, and even the possibility of at last burying Lenin’s preserved body.5 The radical novelty of the content of these shows, however, has obscured their deep roots in Central Television’s past, and in the Brezhnev era in particular. In the spring of 1986, when Youth Desk staff members were asked on very short notice to create a news show that could attract younger viewers, they did not look to the example of Western news programs, although they were certainly well enough informed about those. Instead, they rifled through old proposals found stashed in the desk drawer of Eduard Sagalaev, the chief editor of the Youth Desk. What they pulled out was a rejected proposal from 1972 called In Your Kitchen After 11 [U vas na kukhne posle 11], a title that was meant to evoke the unconstrained conversations that took place among friends and families in private apartment kitchens across the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era.6 Originally proposed by Youth Desk authors and hosts Anatolii Lysenko and Kira Proshutinskaia, the show was to gather guests for informal, intimate, and spontaneous conversations in a set decorated to look like a kitchen. In 1986, over the course of a few months, Lysenko reworked the idea together with Grigorii Shevelev and a few others.7 According to Lysenko, they took so long that the News Desk decided to abandon the partnership and create their own show along the same lines. So the 1972 proposal ended up becoming two shows, Before and After Midnight, produced by the News Desk and hosted by the international affairs commentator Vladimir Molchanov, and View, created by Lysenko and his team in the Youth Desk.8 The continuities between the leading news and discussion programs of perestroika and Central Television’s programming before 1985 went far beyond the revival of one rejected proposal, however. These new news shows drew their most important formal and visual features—as well as their approach to attracting their audience—from the various genres with which Central Television staff had experimented most frequently and openly 236

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from the 1950s through the 1980s: game shows and musical contests, but also talk shows like With All My Heart [Ot vsei dushi] and a handful of earlier youth-oriented news programs, including International Panorama (1969–87) and Today in the World (1978–88). The basic task was a familiar one—make a show that will engage its audience—and the Central Television staff turned to longstanding strategies to make these new shows look and feel exciting, to engage audiences and make that engagement visible. These connections were natural, because the men and women at Central Television who created and directed View, Twelfth Floor, Before and After Midnight, and the other flagship programs of perestroika had begun their careers at Central Television in the 1960s and 1970s. The staff of the new shows trained under and collaborated with the most creative directors and editors in the Youth and Musical Programming Desks. Vladimir Voroshilov, a director at the Taganka theater and creator of Auction, Let’s Go, Guys!, and What? Where? When?, was an important mentor to both Lysenko and Sagalaev, who arrived at Central Television in 1968 and 1975, respectively. Proshutinskaia, the longtime hostess and producer of Let’s Go Girls!, Aleksandr Masliakov, the host of KVN and Hello! We’re Looking for Talents! and many other seasoned Youth Desk and Musical Programming Desk staff members of the 1970s were also influential in the creation of these news programs. The new news programs of perestroika had another historical precedent—Central Television’s celebrated era of (necessarily) live reporting during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The most famous and politically controversial programs of perestroika—View, Before and After Midnight, Twelfth Floor, and the revived KVN, which returned to the air in 1986—were intentionally broadcast live to underscore the absence of censorship and reiterate the claims about television’s nature as an inherently live medium that had first emerged during the Thaw. Perestroika’s premier political programs did indeed embrace liveness and a two-way, immediate, and participatory connection with viewers, which the Thawera television theorist Sappak called the “effect of presence [effekt prisutstviia].” Yet the visual and formal strategies that the Youth and News Desks used in the late 1980s to convey “liveness” to viewers were those that had been developed in the Brezhnev era, under conditions of both greater censorship and greater uncertainty about the ability of live broadcasting 237

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to actually make viewers participants and convey the excitement of live immediacy. Moreover, these strategies for communicating liveness, immediacy, and responsiveness to their audience were largely drawn from entertainment genres, where Thaw-era television values had been reimagined in the context of the Brezhnev era’s changed political circumstances and objectives. These circumstances—including the need to appear responsive to audience demands without ceding political control by one party, to acknowledge and mediate growing social and generational conflicts, to unify a diverse television audience without recourse to Marxist-Leninist ideology—characterized both the era of “stagnation” and the Gorbachev era. The formal strategies and understanding of the television audience developed by Central Television staff during the Brezhnev era have thus continued to prove extremely relevant in Russia’s long era of television, first to the groundbreaking news programs of the Gorbachev era and then to post-Soviet Russian television, where alumni of View and related shows have remained at the very center of media power since 1991.

Music Shows like View, Twelfth Floor, and Before and After Midnight quickly achieved prominence as innovative programs and attracted young audiences by including musical genres that were infrequently broadcast on television, including rock and electronic music, as well as dance numbers featuring styles of dance that were, or had once been, officially condemned. Using music and dance performances that were in short supply on Central Television was a quick way of signaling a new program’s appeal to viewers, and linking its political messages with especially alluring entertainments. View, Twelfth Floor, and Before and After Midnight all featured sign-ons with stylish electronic music, and, by 1987–88, computeranimated graphics. Another frequent strategy was to begin a program with a musical number, before the show’s hosts or sign-on had even appeared on screen.9 Despite the relative novelty of these specific performers and musical genres, the use of popular music to attract viewers and communicate the greater political significance of a particular show was far from a new 238

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strategy for Central Television. The inclusion of frequent musical numbers and foreign videos in these perestroika-era programs was also, of course, a continuation of the old “layer cake” strategy, developed in the mid-1960s in response to growing fears about competition from foreign broadcasting and Western cultural products more generally. Including rarely available popular music could accomplish a number of tasks: it signaled the high political significance or cutting-edge nature of a particular show, created festive moods at holiday time, drew viewers away from foreign media or religious holidays, and promoted a sanctioned Soviet alternative to Western popular culture more broadly. An earlier youth-oriented international news program, International Panorama, created in 1969, featured a surf-guitar sign-on and occasional reports on Western cultural life that included clips of rock performances and music videos. Even the very tightly controlled and formulaic Time underwent periodic musical and visual updates during the 1970s and ’80s, particularly to its sign-on, which added computer animation and a new, more modern-sounding musical theme in 1986.10 Not only the content but also the scheduling of these programs were intended to draw young viewers away from Western media, particularly foreign radio broadcasts. Both Before and After Midnight and its 1972 prototype, In Your Kitchen After 11, were intended for broadcast, as their titles suggested, late at night, when foreign radio consumption was highest; View’s Friday-night broadcast was timed to compete with a popular rock radio show on the BBC’s Russian service hosted by Seva Novgorodtsev, a Soviet émigré and former pop musician.11 The popularity and increasing availability of VCRs and videocassettes by the mid-1980s likewise motivated the Central Committee to call for the creation of these new programs.12 Before and After Midnight was subtitled “a video channel for night owls [videokanal dlia polunochnikov]” and included a variety of video footage, not only of musicians but also of foreign landscapes and cities.13 In this sense, the show had much in common with Central Television’s popular video-based programs devoted to foreign film and video clips acquired via bilateral exchange agreements, such as Club of Cine-Travelers and In the World of Animals, both created in the 1960s and on air throughout the Brezhnev era. Yet the inclusion of frequently censored Western musical genres on these programs did not necessarily mean the abandonment of hierarchical, 239

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didactic Soviet cultural values. Instead, by juxtaposing segments on related themes, the perestroika-era shows offered carefully constructed arguments about the compatibility of previously repressed musical genres with socialist culture. One March 1987 episode of Before and After Midnight, for example, framed a performance by Edda, a Hungarian rock band, with a carefully thought out series of videos and interviews that, taken together, offered a subtle argument in favor of acceptance of that genre—a strategy quite reminiscent of the way Aleksandr Tvardovskii, the editor of the literary journal Novyi Mir, strategically surrounded Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich with other stories and essays that subtly supported the editors’ decision to publish it.14 In the case of Edda, there were two segments preceding the Hungarian band: first, a music video of Chris de Burgh’s “Lady in Red,” a musically innocuous international hit; then Before and After’s host, Vladimir Molchanov, interviewed Igor Detkov, the secretary of the Writers’ Union, about his recent editorial in the journal Kommunist about the history of inappropriate Party interference [vmeshatel’stvo] in Soviet cultural life. The two discussed the “rudeness” and “tactlessness” of Stalin’s postwar cultural henchman, Andrei Zhdanov, then moved on to the publication of formerly banned works of literature in the late 1980s. Detkov emphasized that negative reactions to these new publications were normal and, indeed, that multiple points of view and diversity [mnogoobrazie] were essential and not unprecedented in Soviet history. This interview was immediately followed by the clip featuring Edda. After Edda’s performance came an excerpt of a concert by the Americanborn British violinist Yehudi Menuhin, followed by an interview with him. Menuhin remarked that improvisation is the true mark of greatness in a musical performance, and that he personally draws on improvisational traditions from jazz and other popular music in his classical performances. The implication was clear that even hard rock belonged to a larger, common musical culture that was valued under socialism. Just a few months later, in October 1987, View returned to the topic of rock and Soviet culture. This time focusing on heavy metal, a genre previously condemned by the KGB, View emphasized the genre’s masculinity and the symbolic importance of metal to Soviet culture.15 That broadcast featured a “social advertisement”/music video by the group Rock Atelier [rok atel’e] in which rockers in hard hats danced with policemen, who initially 240

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scolded them but soon yielded; the video closed with an interview with an actual steelworker who said that if the music is truly “heavy,” really “metal,” and “genuinely masculine” then they, Soviet steelworkers, could embrace it. The new news and discussion programs of perestroika thus continued the conversation about music, authority, and cultural conflict begun more than a decade and a half previously, in 1970, on Song of the Year and other musical programs that highlighted differences of taste among different social and generational groups. As on those shows of the 1970s, View and Before and After Midnight explicitly acknowledged conflicts of taste in order to mediate them, arguing for the compatibility of youth musical tastes with socialist culture. By the late 1980s, however, these shows also offered direct responses to those viewers who had been writing in to Central Television since at least the 1970s objecting to the inclusion of some popular genres in the socialist canon.

Liveness and Immediacy Not every musical number on View or Before and After Midnight was part of a carefully crafted argument, of course. More basically, music was one of several aspects of the shows designed to create what the shows’ producers felt was a key to the programs’ success: a particular atmosphere of liveness and immediacy. This was one important function of the “musical breaks” on Voroshilov’s game show What? Where? When?, a show that explicitly sought to endow a prerecorded show with an atmosphere of liveness, via the use of mobile cameras and filming in a single take (the show became live from 1986 onward). Thus, in the late 1980s, as throughout the 1970s, the audience experience of live immediacy could not be assumed to arise automatically, as Thaw-era visionaries like Sappak had imagined. Instead, it had to be created through formal elements such as music, pacing, setting, speech, and camera work. Liveness was defined not only by the technology of live broadcasting, but by the appearance of spontaneity and unscriptedness, resulting ideally for viewers in a festive experience of live presence [effekt prisutstviia]. The key tools for creating unmediated liveness were therefore theatrical and cinematographic, like Voroshilov’s use of a mobile camera that moved jerkily around the room, seeming to respond to the unfolding of unpredictable action, for example. Here, the 241

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creators of View turned specifically to game shows like What? Where? When?, which had developed strategies for creating an atmosphere of liveness in the absence of live broadcasting. The most obvious of these tactics was to select an unconventional setting. As with the earliest out-of-studio broadcasts of the 1950s, the purpose of this departure from the conventional spaces of television production was to break down the barrier between audience and screen by breaking out of the studio, creating the illusion of live presence and participation. The more striking examples of this strategy among perestroika-era news and discussion programs were Twelfth Floor and View.16 Twelfth Floor was, in fact, named for its unconventional setting—the twelfth floor of the Ostankino complex where the Youth Desk offices were located. In a 1986 broadcast, the show opened with a shot of KVN host Aleksandr Masliakov, in what appeared actually to be the Youth Desk’s work space—behind him were roughly ten or so colleagues apparently at work, audibly talking to one another or on the phone. Shortly thereafter, Masliakov invited the studio audience that was also gathered in this office space to move into “Studio 2”; the camera then followed them as they filed down a flight of stairs and into the studio, using point-of-view shots to create the impression among viewers that they too were descending the staircase along with the representative viewers in the “studio” audience.17 View’s setting was more elaborately theatrical, like the settings of Voroshilov’s game shows. According to Sergei Lomakin, the editor in charge of the new program, in May 1987, after the show had been approved by Aleksandr Yakovlev, then the Politburo official in charge of ideology, he, Lysenko, the show’s two production editors, Stas Polzikov and Andrei Shipilov, and the director Ivan Ivanov went out drinking in a Moscow park and began to “brainstorm” the show’s setting and premise.18 They came up with the idea that “the studio should be decorated like the rented apartment of four young men, where there is a kitchen, a living room, with furniture,” something much like, Lomakin suggested, the set of the American NBC situation comedy Friends (1994–2004) and, later still, the Russian program Spotlight of Paris Hilton [ProzhektorPerisKhilton] (2008–2012). “We decided,” he recalled, “that the four young men would have specific roles, for example “a quick-witted analyst,” and “a playboy with a smile from ear to ear.”19 This “quartet,” Lomakin explained, “was to entertain guests in their 242

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apartment-studio, comment on the news, and translate [foreign] news feeds live from the teletype machine.”20 For this, it was crucial that the four young journalists they selected were not from Central Television but from Gosteleradio’s foreign radio broadcasting division—they spoke several European languages but lacked formal training as news commentators or readers.21 As these two examples suggest, the choice of overtly unconventional sets was linked to a set of ideas about liveness, immediacy, and persuasion that were substantially different from the ideas of television enthusiasts in the late 1950s and early 1960s. View and Twelfth Floor reflected the fact that, since second half of the 1960s, Central Television staff had understood that creating the experience of live immediacy required much more than simply placing journalists with cameras in the street. What was needed, instead, were elaborate theatrical premises and cinematographic conceits designed to convince viewers that what they were viewing was genuinely spontaneous and unmediated. Thus View and Twelfth Floor selected spaces that not only fostered informal forms of speech, but also sought to convince viewers that Central Television’s established systems of control and censorship had, in their cases, been circumvented. As one episode of View in 1987 put it, the show aimed to bring viewers “that which is normally behind doors marked ‘Do Not Enter, Staff Only [postoronnym vkhod zapreshchen].’ ” Twelfth Floor purported to bring viewers into the closed spaces where television was really made, while View imagined a fantastical new setting for news making, in which teletype machines spilled their contents onto the sofa tables of young guys who were able to read the news to you straight from the (foreign) source. Both sought to convey immediacy and liveness not through the largely imperceptible technology of live broadcasting, but through a whole set of spatial and visual tactics that stressed to viewers that what they were watching was truly unmediated, and thus uncensored. The self-presentation, clothing, and speech of View’s and Twelfth Floor’s young hosts were also essential to the shows’ atmosphere of live immediacy. The hosts of View and the news reporting team on Six Hundred Seconds (the brief news section of Before and After Midnight) read straight from teletype machine printouts as if they had no television training at all, stumbling over their words, saying “um” and otherwise violating all the 243

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grammatical and stylistic conventions of Central Television news broadcasts.22 These conventions were still in force on Central Television’s premier news program, Time, so the stylistic contrast was strong and clearly intentional. What is more, the hosts of View also openly disagreed with one another on air, sparring, debating, and opening up questions to viewers.23 The new hosts’ clothing was likewise informal. In a radio interview for the program’s twentieth anniversary, Dima Zakharov of View remembered that “they tried to dress us like diktory.” He and the other young hosts were taken to “some state warehouse [zakroma rodiny], where suits like those worn by members of the Politburo were hanging. [They were] probably bullet-proof, made of that fabric that the Germans called ‘asbest’ during the war, that is, they were absolutely fireproof. We looked at all that horrifying stuff and decided we would work in the clothes we had.”24 Zakharov took to working in his “lucky” gray jacket and looking, like most of the show’s hosts, as if he had just walked in off the street and lacked any special access to or interest in expensive or well-cut clothing. Like the choice of settings—at once deep inside and yet outside the highly controlled production spaces of the Ostankino Television Center—the program hosts’ abrupt speech and casual dress were a radical departure for Central Television’s news programming.25 They were not, however, new to Central Television’s entertainment programming, and specifically to game shows. While it was indeed shocking to see young guys dressed in casual clothing, speaking informally and engaging in lively disputes with one another live on air on a Central Television news program, this was precisely the spectacle presented by What? Where? When?, which gathered groups of predominantly male Moscow students in their own clothes, brainstorming around a round table.

Audience as Participants Addressing the audience at home informally, was, of course, a longstanding tradition on Central Television, aimed at engaging viewers in dialogue and creating the feeling that they were participants in the conversation or other events on screen. Yet View and related shows did not seek to revive the format of News Relay (1961–70), in which an established journalist, Yuri Fokin, and his artistic society friends informally 244

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blathered on, live, for more or less as long as they liked. A show like Fokin’s simply assumed that audiences would be engaged and feel themselves to be participating, because of the charm and talents of the people on screen. View, Twelfth Floor, and Before and After Midnight’s producers might easily have made the same assumption, given their increasingly wide scope to discuss social and political problems that were not yet being discussed elsewhere in the Soviet media. Instead, however, these perestroika-era programs invited audience participation as explicitly as possible, using strategies that flourished across Central Television’s entertainment genres from the late 1960s onward. An early episode of View, for example, asked viewers to write in with suggestions for what to call the as-yet-unnamed “evening program.” The show’s hosts talked about their ideas, what “our bosses” wanted to call the show, and then said “the viewers themselves should debate this [pust’ sami obsuzhdaiut zriteli].”26 Asking viewers to name a new show was a well-known strategy for engaging those viewers as participants on Central Television; the famous sketch comedy program 13 Chairs had also opened up the question of its name to viewer input back in the mid-1960s. Another central strategy was the use of viewer letters on air. By the early 1970s, when the popularity of Central Television’s programming across a very large and politically and socially divided audience could no longer be assumed, the practice of displaying (in cascading piles), counting, and reading from viewer letters on air took place across entertainment genres, but was especially prevalent on musical and holiday programs of the 1970s such as Song of the Year, Hello! We’re Looking for Talents!, and Young Voices [Molodye golosa]. The new perestroika-era programs immediately embraced these same tactics for demonstrating their close contact with and accessibility to viewers, who were, in turn, presented as being actively engaged with the show. Indeed, one broadcast of Twelfth Floor in 1986 employed several of these strategies in a single program, updating them for the new technological possibilities of the late 1980s. As the audience entered the studio, camera shots from the ceiling revealed a set with three white desks arranged in a semicircle. This setup was not unlike that of Hello! We’re Looking for Talents! (also hosted, like this broadcast of Twelfth Floor, by Aleksandr Masliakov) or Song of the Year. On those shows, artistic elites—composers, poets, representatives 245

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of the Soviet record company Melodiia, and hosts of Central Television music shows—were seated behind desks and responded to viewer letters and questions from the studio audience. Now, however, these cultural elites were replaced by economic, political, and media representatives: an official from the Komsomol, a representative of the Oil and Gas Construction agency [Neftgazstroi], a journalist from the Komsomol newspaper Komsomol’skaia Pravda, and Eduard Sagalaev, the chief editor of the Youth Desk, among others. Together, Sagalaev and Masliakov introduced viewers to the multiple ways in which they could participate in the discussion. There were prizes offered to viewers who sent in the best responses to requests from the show’s editors, such as one soliciting suggestions for the “organization of youth free time” (similar contests had been conducted on musical contest programs like Song of the Year during the 1970s). Masliakov also read from viewer letters as a subtitle reading “viewer opinions” flashed on screen in a modern computer-style font. He then conducted short interviews with studio audience members; the subtitle on the screen changed to “participant opinions.” Other media for receiving and displaying audience feedback were more high-tech: moments later, as the conversation with the Oil and Gas and Komsomol authorities began, Masliakov offered viewers detailed instructions on how to leave a message on the answering machine the Youth Desk had set up for several dedicated telephone lines, the numbers for which were likewise displayed on screen. This was the late-1980s version of a well-established 1970s tactic, employed on musical contest shows like Artloto, of setting up a bank of telephones in the studio where female operators would take calls during the show and periodically offer summaries of the audience’s feedback to the show’s hosts.27 Perhaps the most famous novelty of Central Television’s perestroika-era programming was the telemost (the term means “tele-bridge”), a satellite linkup used to facilitate conversation between audiences in far-flung locations. The most famous of these telemost broadcasts connected Soviet and American citizens; the first such broadcast took place in February 1986 in Seattle and Leningrad, facilitated by Vladimir Pozner on the Soviet side and Phil Donahue on the United States side.28 Although the international nature of these satellite “bridges” and the quite frank conversations they enabled between Cold War enemies were indeed unprecedented for Soviet broadcasting, the telemost was very much based on ideas and precedents 246

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from the late 1960s. In 1967, the Soviet Union planned to participate in a Europe-wide live satellite broadcast set for June 25, 1967, and titled “Our World”; Central Television dropped out days before the broadcast, but incorporated a similar live satellite linkup show (limited, however, to Soviet territory) into its festivities for the fiftieth anniversary of 1917 in November 1967.29 As they had in the late 1960s, commentators in the 1980s linked the satellite bridges to the old television values of liveness, immediacy, and the conquering of distance. View and Twelfth Floor employed satellite linkups with distant Soviet cities and other, less-expensive forms of out-of-studio broadcasting for all these reasons, and more specifically, to demonstrate their programs’ engagement with viewers and willingness to give voice to distant citizens’ questioning of central authorities. When they first aired, View and Twelfth Floor made an effort to distinguish themselves from Central Television’s programming of the 1970s and early ’80s. Young people at the time, particularly educated urban youth, rock fans, readers of samizdat and listeners to magnitizdat, held negative views of television’s impact on culture and consciousness, views that were exemplified in songs about television by popular guitar poets like Vysotsky and Aleksandr Gradskii. In an early show from fall 1987, View even played a video clip of Gradskii performing “Song About Television (An Advertisement for Television).” Gradskii’s lyrics criticized television in terms familiar in Soviet discourse (both published and unofficial) at least since the 1950s, for presenting an unrealistically positive picture of Soviet life, for lacking suspense and creating passive viewers, and above all for displaying over-the-top emotionality while at the same time being inauthentic and closely censored. “Here in another studio / a costly program,” Gradskii sang, “measured in the amount of tears cried on it.”30 Following this video clip of Gradskii’s concert, View’s hosts appeared on screen and announced that the goal of View was to “avoid all the things that Gradskii sang about.” In Gradskii’s grab bag of Central Television sins, however, there was little that had not long been denounced by Central Television’s own staff, Party leadership, and intelligentsia critics in the press. By setting out to reform Central Television—to once again create active viewers and engage diverse and youthful audiences with lively music and interviews that would mobilize rather than pacify—View and other perestroika programs 247

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produced by the Youth and News Desks drew on well-established rhetorical conventions and formal strategies from Central Television’s entertainment programming during the Brezhnev era.

Central Television’s Producers as “Players” If View’s producers understandably sought, during perestroika, to distinguish their show from the television that was made during Lapin’s long 1970s, a new wave of memoir literature and television retrospectives by and about the show’s large team of creators and hosts takes the opposite perspective, emphasizing their intellectual and creative debts to mentors like Voroshilov and Proshutinskaia, and connecting the look and feel of View and other perestroika news programs to their work on game shows in the 1970s and early ’80s.31 According to Sagalaev, the game show What? Where? When? emphasized “brainstorming, contests of erudition and education, the ability to think quickly,” and the “rules of brainstorming were worked out” there in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Sagalaev also stressed that news and game shows continued to influence one another as they developed side by side during perestroika. As the revived KVN and What? Where? When? began to change, “one form pushed the other forward, so that, if one show had this form, then another show, next door, could have political content as well.”32 The creative biographies of Voroshilov and his students Sagalaev and Lysenko, both key producers of game shows and then perestroika news programs, suggest, however, that a strong distinction between form and content on these programs is not entirely sustainable. All three men made serious documentary programs for the Youth Desk during the decade after 1968. At the end of the 1960s, Lysenko and Voroshilov, who had recently been fired after the cancellation of Auction, made a film promoting a return to the early revolutionary practice of electing factory leadership. The film, which featured a factory where brigade leaders were elected, and employed a hidden camera for some segments, was ultimately not aired, but it is difficult to ignore the connections between such a film and the series of game shows and musical contests that featured audience voting created from 1970 onward. One early high point of Sagalaev’s career was his receipt of a prestigious state award for his work on the Youth 248

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Desk’s episodes of Our Biography [Nasha biografiia], a massive 1977 documentary film series in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of 1917.33 With that film project as well, Sagalaev remembers pushing the boundaries of the acceptable—indirectly raising the problem of depopulation of rural villages, for example.34 Sagalaev described both his work on game shows and on the documentary series in terms of a tactic he called “shielding yourself with an umbrella [pokryt’sia zontikom]”—identifying a legitimate propagandistic goal and justifying one’s limited pushing of the boundaries in terms of achieving that goal.35 The authors of perestroika news programs have been extremely successful in the post-Soviet Russian mass media. The heads of most of the major post-Soviet Russian television networks, for example, were and are alumni of View and Twelfth Floor.36 Sagalaev moved from chief editor of the News Desk in the late 1980s to chairman of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Company (VGTRK) after 1991; he was quickly followed in that post by Lysenko. Sagalaev then helped found one of Russia’s first commercial channels, TV6. Prominent production companies founded by former prominent Central Television Youth Desk staff drew their names from the language of play, experimentation, and artistic authorship linked to Soviet “quality” television. Kira Proshutinskaia, with her husband and fellow View alum Anatolii Malkin, helped found a prolific production company called Auteur Television [Avtorskoe televidenie or ATV]. Voroshilov, along with his longtime artistic partner and producer, Natalia Stetsenko, founded a production company called Experiment Studio [Studio eksperiment]. After being elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989 and serving as director of information programs briefly at ORT [later, Channel 1], Aleksandr Liubimov became second in charge of Channel 1 in 2001–3, and later, in 2007, of the Rossiia Channel. Liubimov left that post in 2011, when he became involved in opposition politics.37 Given their success, we should not be surprised that these View alumni and their friends have become the subject of heroic biographies that present them as players and innovators, aware of the larger political goals and historical significance of their work. But the meteoric rise of these television staff members who were associated first with game shows, and then with View and related news and discussion programs, has not always 249

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been positively received. List’ev, most famously, was killed in 1995, and many of the others have been effectively forced out of the production of Russian television during the Putin era. Their legacy, moreover, is now quite controversial—like many other icons of perestroika culture, View and its creators have sometimes been presented not as heroes but as traitors. In the introduction to a recent collection of memoirs written and edited by another View creator, Evgenii Dodolev, Mikhail Leont’ev notes that the heroes of the book “describe how fun and exciting [azartno] it was to work in those times. To destroy a great country,” Leont’ev comments dryly, “is generally more fun and exciting than sorting through that which has been destroyed.”38 Echoing a common theme in late Putin-era writings about the tragic price of perestroika, Sagalaev expressed regret for the costs exacted upon others by his promotion of perestroika in the News Desk, including the sudden death of a Time reporter, Evgenii Sinitsin, after Sagalaev removed him from the air when he was unable to alter his traditional Soviet journalistic mannerisms to fit the new styles of perestroika.39 But the current ambivalent relationship to the makers of experimental television during perestroika obscures many important intellectual and artistic continuities that still link Russian television in the Putin era firmly to the past—and not only to perestroika but to the beginnings of Russia’s era of television under Brezhnev. Although some View and Twelfth Floor alumni have moved on or been sidelined, others remain close to the top of media and political institutions in Russia (and have neither the time nor the inclination to write memoirs). Those whose voices are muted or missing in the recent memoir literature include View’s most successful participants: Ivan Demidov, who, after many years at TV6, occupied high positions in the United Russia Party and now works in Putin’s presidential administration; Demidov also served, in 2012–13, as vice minister of culture. The most prominent of all, however, is Konstantin Ernst, a View producer who has been the director of Channel 1 since 1995. For Demidov and Ernst, rising to the highest peaks of Russian media power has not meant abandoning the programs and ideas that shaped them at Central Television. Demidov, for example, served regularly on KVN juries throughout the 1990s. Ernst’s triumphant media spectacle, the opening ceremonies of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, was described in the press as a 250

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deistvo—that old word drawn from the revolutionary avant-garde, revived by Central Television’s Youth Desk in the late 1950s, and used to describe innovative, festive television shows throughout the 1960s and ’70s. These continuities between media elites during the last Soviet decades and the first two post-Soviet ones are not necessarily surprising—continuity of elites has been the story of Russia’s post-Soviet transition in both state and economy.40 Work in television also requires training and technical skills that make the preservation of old elites the norm. But the continuities between Soviet and post-Soviet television extend deeper, into the realm of ideas and beliefs about television’s nature as a medium and its relationship to the state. Ernst and Demidov, as well as Liubimov, Proshutinskaia, and many others who remain at the top of Russian television today, preside over a television system in which new broadcasting students in journalism departments are trained using textbooks written by former Soviet television staff-turned-scholars of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, including Sergei Muratov, Rudol’f Boretskii, Valerii Tsvik, Anatolii Lysenko, and the late Georgii Kuznetsov, among others.41 What is more, key television genres, formats, strategies, and traditions of the Brezhnev era remain highly relevant to contemporary Russian State television’s highest profile broadcasts. One striking example is the persistence of star-studded holiday musical variety shows and the annual New Year’s greeting from the Russian president at midnight, a tradition begun by Brezhnev that President Boris Yeltsin famously used to announce his resignation and designate his successor, Vladimir Putin. Less remarked on are the Soviet origins of Putin’s annual live call-in shows, during which he takes a series of questions from viewers, via a variety of media—not only telephone and postal mail, but live satellite hookup, SMS, and a dedicated website.42 While Brezhnev of course never participated in anything like this, the dream of a live call-in program where viewers could question high-ranking officials originated in the early 1960s and was preserved and developed on musical contest programs and game shows. There too, viewers were encouraged to express their opinions and, within limits, to question authority, via the most immediate media of the time—letter, telegram, and telephone. There are, of course, overwhelming differences between the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian television systems, most important among them the 251

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availability of tens of traditional broadcast channels and hundreds of cable and satellite channels, and the role of commercial interests in shaping the broadcast schedule and production of programs. Yet many of what might seem to be the most dramatic changes—such as the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism and socialist realism as the guiding principles of television production, or the adaptation of television formats from the global market—were already becoming characteristic of Central Television’s entertainment programming in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Russian television producers are presumably no longer obliged to handle Lenin’s image according to special protocols, but his image and name were already absent from the highest profile entertainment programs of the 1970s, from serial films to Song of the Year. The obligation to enlighten viewers was never exclusive to socialist television systems, of course, and Central Television staffs regularly borrowed and adapted television formats from socialist and capitalist television systems, although without the legal and financial frameworks that global format exchanges took on in the post-Soviet period.43 Scholars have distinguished the contemporary Russian media system from the Soviet one by emphasizing that Putin seeks to control only the “commanding heights” of the Russian mass media: the nationwide state-owned television channels and, within that, prime-time news programming, leaving the Internet, and much entertainment television, largely unregulated.44 This is changing rapidly, however, as the broadcast channels integrate state messages into their entertainment programming and United Russia lawmakers increasingly assert their right to regulate and censor Internet media producers. But arguments that focus on Putin’s objectives for television overlook the agency of television professionals themselves, whose professional experiences and education incline them to draw on those aspects of Soviet television history that they find useful in the present. More broadly, however, they overlook the question of why Russian television’s Soviet past remains so useful. One answer is that key problems and tasks faced by Soviet Central Television in the Brezhnev era still remain relevant to contemporary Russian television. President Putin still seeks a “national idea” that can fill the space left by the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism. This search really began, however, during the 1970s, when cultural and political elites began to promote other sources of social unification and political authority: 252

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a “way of life” defined against Western capitalist modernity, respect for the sacrifices of the wartime generation, patriotism. All of these have become central to Putin and to the platform of his political party, United Russia. A great deal of the experimentation that took place on Central Television’s musical holiday shows and game shows of the 1970s was devoted to finding ways to appear responsive to audience demands and concerns while maintaining political control by a single party. As Putin’s “direct line” question-and-answer live television broadcast in April 2015 suggested, the performance of responsiveness to the public, the acknowledgment of conflicting views—in short, attention to the outward forms of democracy, though not its substance, is essential to the “democratic authoritarian” state Putin has built.45 Entertainment television under Putin has a real ideological and artistic vitality, reflected in high-profile serial films and long-running shows like What? Where? When?, which continues to explore the conflicts and disparities between central elites and provincial viewers.46 Russian television under Putin continues to perform a function not unlike that of Soviet Central television in the Brezhnev era: negotiating authority in a context where political activity outside the playful world of mass media is significantly constrained.

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N OT ES

Abbreviations GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii GBU “TsGA Moskvy” Gosudarstvennoe biudzhetnoe uchrezhdenie “Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Moskvy,” Fotoarkhiv (formerly Tsentral’nyi arkhiv elektronnykh i audiovizual’nykh dokumentov Moskvy) Gosteleradio Gosudarstvennyi komitet Soveta Ministrov SSSR po televideniiu i radioveshchaniiu (after 1970; from 1957 to 1970 this organization was named Gosudarstvennyi komitet po radioveshchaniiu i televideniiu pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR) Gosteleradiofond Gosudarstvennyi fond televizionnykh i radioprogramm OKhDOPIM Otdel khraneniia dokumentov obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Moskvy (formerly Tsentral’nyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Moskvy) RGALI Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva RGANI Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii RGASPI-m Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii-m (formerly Tsentr khraneniia dokumentov molodezhnykh organizatsii)

Introduction 1. For more on “media events,” see Dayan and Katz, Media Events, 1–24. On television as culture, see Carey, Communication as Culture, 13–36. On Soviet and now Russian elites’ overestimation of television’s political significance, see Mickiewicz, Changing Channels, 13–22.

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2. For more on experimentation in other media, arts, and everyday life in the 1960s and ’70s, see Bogomolov, Zatianuvsheesia proshchaniie, 141–51; Jones, “The Fire Burns On?,” 32–56; Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 10–12. 3. On intimacy, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 236–45, and Huxtable, “The Problem of Personality.” 4. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 47–50; Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals, 188–92. 5. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 12–13. 6. Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma; Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi Mir. 7. Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 121–60; Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism. 8. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 13; Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 109. 9. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous; Youngblood, Movies for the Masses; Gronow, Caviar with Champagne; Crowley and Reid, eds., Pleasures in Socialism. On the right to leisure, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 279; Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism, 11. 10. Edelman, Spartak Moscow, 8. On this realization at GDR television, see Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism, 10–11. 11. Gilburd and Kozlov, eds., The Thaw, 18–81; Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma, 258–61; Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw, 1–13; Lovell, “In Search of an Ending,” 303–21. 12. Bushnell, “The ‘New Soviet Man’ Turns Pessimist,” 179–99; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 297–334. On disillusionment among Soviet tourists in the aftermath of 1968, see Appelbaum, “A Test of Friendship,” 213–32. 13. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 176–222; Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public, 18–19. 14. In 1965 there were twenty-four television sets per hundred families in the Soviet Union; by 1970, there was one set for every two families, or about 35 million sets total. By 1975, there were more than 55 million television sets in the Soviet Union, with another 6.5 million being produced annually. Miasoedov, Strana Chitaet, Slushaet, Smotrit, 64, 70; Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public, 18–19. 15. “Sobytie i daty,” Virtual’nyi muzei televideniia i radio, www.tvmuseum.ru/catalog. asp?ob_no=17 (last accessed April 20, 2015). 16. On the Soviet “long 1970s,” see Lovell, “In Search of an Ending,” in Socialist Sixties, 304. See also the essays in a special issue on the “long 1970s” in Nepriskosnovennyi zapas 2, 52 (2007); Lipovetsky, “Self-Portrait on a Timeless Background,” 41–42. 17. Bacon, “Reconsidering Brezhnev,” 2; Fürst, “Where Did All the Normal People Go,” 621–40; Klumbyte. and Sharafutdinova, Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1–14; Rutland and Smolkin-Rothrock, “Introduction: Looking Back at Brezhnev,” 299–306; Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 4–8; Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, 10–13. 18. Bacon, “Reconsidering Brezhnev,” 4–6; Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 4–8; Fürst, “Where Did All the Normal People Go,” 627. 19. See the other essays in Brezhnev Reconsidered and Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, as well as the articles in Russian History 41 (2014). See also Christopher Ward, Brezhnev’s Folly.

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20. As several scholars have argued, the Soviet rock scene depended on the use of performance spaces controlled by the state, as well as toleration by the police. Troitsky, Back in the USSR, 33–34; Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 126–57. 21. I draw here on Jonathan Flatley’s overview of affect terminology in Affective Mapping, 12. On melancholy in the Russian context, see Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle, 234–67. 22. Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation, 1–31. 23. Suri, Power and Protest, 2. 24. Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 159–76; Mihelj, “The Politics of Privatization,” 251–67. 25. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 1–19; Beckett, When the Lights Went Out, 3–5; Ferguson et al., eds., The Shock of the Global. 26. As Stephen Bittner has noted, seeing the Soviet 1970s as a period of greater repression requires privileging one, liberal, Westernizing part of the Soviet intelligentsia over another, nationalist, conservative part; Bittner, Many Lives, 1–13. 27. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 236–45. 28. Schattenberg, “ ‘Democracy’ or ‘Despotism’?” 29. Zweynert, “ ‘Developed Socialism’ and Soviet Economic Thought in the 1970s.” 30. A subtitled clip of Kinchev performing this song is available on YouTube; www. youtube.com/watch?v=QWNtRyKIKfo (last accessed April 21, 2015). 31. Imre, Identity Games, 11–12. 32. Westad, “The Great Transformation.” 33. Imre, Identity Games, 13. 34. Ibid., 11. 35. Putin’s live television call-in shows are also the fulfillment of 1960s calls for Party officials to appear on television more often; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 192–94. For similar developments in Yugoslavia in the 1960s, see Mihelj, “Audience History as a History of Ideas,” 28–29. 36. The growing field of European television history has begun to incorporate the former East (often following the boundaries of EU expansion) into a shared conceptual framework that emphasizes transnational exchange, imitation, and interaction. See, for example, Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism; Bignell and Fickers, eds., A European Television History; Havens, Imre, and Lustyik, eds., Popular Television in Eastern Europe. Key venues include a new journal, View: Journal of European Television History and Culture, and an online archive, www.euscreen.eu. 37. Mihelj, “Television Entertainment in Socialist Eastern Europe,” in Popular Television in Eastern Europe, ed. Havens, Imre, and Lustyik, 15–16. Mihelj draws on data from Varis, International Flow of Television Programmes, and Nordenstreng and Varis, Television Traffic. 38. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 179. 39. Hilmes, Network Nations, 2. 40. Ibid., 8.

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41. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 1–11. 42. Ibid., 279. 43. Ibid., 246. See also Janco, “KVN: Live Television and Improvised Comedy.” 44. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 261–68. 45. Levine and Newman, Legitimating Television, 1–13. 46. Scholars focusing specifically on Eastern European television have emphasized transnational influences, as well as distinctive features of socialist Eastern European television. See, for example, the essays in Havens, Imre, and Lustyik, eds., Popular Television in Eastern Europe, especially Mihelj, “Television Entertainment in Socialist Eastern Europe,” 13–29. 47. On gender and the reception of television technology in the United States, see Spigel, Make Room for TV. 48. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 199–208. 49. Huxtable, “In Search of the Soviet Reader”; First, “From Spectator to ‘Differentiated’ Consumer,” 317–44. 50. Huxtable, “Real Socialism, Socialist Realism: Representing Soviet Normality in 1970s TV Drama,” paper presented at ASEEES 2014, San Antonio, Texas. On the importance of domestic serials elsewhere, see Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV; Mihelj, “The Politics of Privatization,” 251–67; Imre, “Television for Socialist Women,” 249–55; Anikó Imre, “Adventures in Early Socialist Television Edutainment,” in Popular Television in Eastern Europe, ed. Havens, Imre, and Lustyik, 30–46; Kochanowski et al., “An Evening with Friends and Enemies,” 81–101; Hammer, “Coy Utopia: Politics in the First Hungarian TV Soap,” 222–40; Machek, “The Counter Lady as a Female Prototype.” 51. On the distinctive genres that emerged across Eastern European socialist television systems, see Havens, Imre, and Lustyik, eds., Popular Television in Eastern Europe, 4, 30–46, 65–104. 52. As Sabina Mihelj has demonstrated, entertainment programming was a very substantial part of socialist Eastern European television systems’ offerings in the 1960s and 1970s. Mihelj, “Television Entertainment in Socialist Eastern Europe,” in Popular Television in Eastern Europe, ed. Havens, Imre, and Lustyik, 18–20. 53. Oushakine, “Laughter Under Socialism,” 247–55. 54. On intermittent encouragement of cultural innovation, see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 126–57. On censorship, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 233–35, 251–53. Censorship included preproduction censorship conducted by the editor of each show, then the chief editor of the Programming Desk, followed by the final prebroadcast signature of the Glavlit censors who read, edited, and signed off on Central Television scripts before they aired. It also included the numerous cases in which TV staffers were called on the carpet after a program that had already aired evoked displeasure from the Central Television leadership, with varying consequences. 55. A second all-Union channel became available only in 1982. 56. Quoted in Muratov and Topaz, eds., TV Vremena peremen, 92.

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57. As Sabina Mihelj argues, the ideas that media producers held about their audiences are a significant object of study, because they shaped both programming and the audience itself, via opening up some possibilities for audience reaction, while foreclosing others; Mihelj, “Audience History,” 25. 58. On the importance of gender, taste, and consumption as Cold War battlegrounds, see Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen,” 211–52; Kelly, Refining Russia (especially chapter 5); and the essays in Bren and Neuberger, eds., Communism Unwrapped.

Chapter 1. Not a Mirror but a Magnifying Glass 1. On the long history in Western culture of claims about transformative new media, see Bolter and Grusin, Remediation. 2. Nadel, “Cold War Television,” 146–47. 3. For the fullest discussion of Sappak in English, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 236–37. 4. Sappak, “Televidenie, 1960. Iz pervykh nabliudenii.” 5. Clark, Petersburg, 30–38. 6. Sappak, Televidenie i my, 56. 7. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 244; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 140–54. 8. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 244. 9. Boddy, Fifties Television, 74; Bernhard, U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 52. 10. Mihelj, “Television Entertainment in Socialist Eastern Europe,” 13–29; Mihelj, “The Politics of Privatization,” 251–67. 11. Caute, The Dancer Defects, 3–4. 12. For more on the expansion of global television broadcasting as an arena of Cold War competition, interaction, and cooperation, see Schwoch, Global TV, and Lundgren, “Live from Moscow,” 45–55. 13. For a discussion of the origins of this quality of the postwar twentieth-century state, see Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, 132–34. 14. Sergei Lapin, “Televizionnoe veshchanie,” 378–80. Sappak’s Televidenie i my is on the list of literature for state baccalaureate exams in Moscow State University’s Higher School of Television, available at http://ftv.msu.ru/for_students/gos_bak.php. See also the syllabus for a special course in 2014, “The Television Reporter on Live Air,” at the St. Petersburg State University Higher School of Journalism and Mass Communications, available at http://jf.spbu.ru/stu/3215/3217-148.html. 15. On TV and byt, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 199–208. 16. These debates reiterated debates about documentary film in the early 1930s, particularly around Dziga Vertov’s work; Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 72. 17. On the personalities of individual “ordinary” citizens as the key site of political activity during the Thaw, see Pinsky, “The Individual After Stalin.” For more on the socialist “way of life” as the key site of Cold War competition, see Evans, Soviet Marxism-Leninism, 132–43; Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 207; Shaw and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold Wars,

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47–50, 112–24; Klumbyte., “Soviet Ethical Citizenship,” 92; and Evans, “The Soviet Way of Life as a Way of Feeling.” 18. Dayan and Katz, Media Events, 1. 19. See, for example, V. Parkov, “Vozmozhnosti televideniia ne ispol’zuiutsia,” Sovetskaia kul’tura, July 16, 1953, p. 2; “Razmyshleniia u televizora,” Literaturnaia gazeta, May 12, 1956. Problems with the Ministry of Communications, the other ministry with authority over Central Television, continued, since Gosteleradio was still dependent on the ministry for most of its equipment, from mobile television stations to cable for its cameras. “Rech’ Tov. Trainina na partiinom sobranii Gosudarstvennogo komiteta po radioveshchaniiu i televideniiu pri SM SSSR,” February 28, 1958, OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 2, l. 1. Gosteleradio’s name changed over time. In 1970, the order of “television” and “radio broadcasting” in the name were reversed, to reflect television’s ascendance as the primary Soviet mass medium. 20. The new state committee’s administration also moved into spacious offices in a newly constructed building at 25 Piatnitskaia Street. But this higher status was accompanied by greater scrutiny: during the summer of 1957 the Central Committee also created a “radio and television sector” within its own administration to watch over television’s innovations. Kuznetsov and Mesiatsev, “Zolotye gody.” 21. Roth-Ey, “Mass Media,” 341–42. 22. There had, of course, been many out-of-studio broadcasts before this point, from sporting events, but also from factory floors and airport runways; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 227. On the Youth Festival’s transformation of the city, see Gilburd, “To See Paris and Die,” 69–76. 23. Sappak, Televidenie i my, 184–85. On Vertov’s influence on Soviet television enthusiasm, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 236–45. 24. Sappak, Televidenie i my, 177, 186. 25. Ibid., 186. 26. Ibid. 27. Clark, Petersburg, 33–34. 28. Sappak, Televidenie i my (1968 ed.), 185. 29. Vartanov, “Problema vzaimootnosheniia dokumenta i obraza,” 68–69. 30. Neia Zorkaia has written that this quotation from Eisenstein could serve as an epigraph for the early years of television; Zorkaia, “Formirovanie kontseptsii televizionnoi mnogoseriinosti,” 91. 31. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 36–41. 32. For the most complete account of the scandal, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 246–53. See also A. Iurovskii’s account in Kuznetsov and Mesiatsev, “Zolotye gody,” www. tvmuseum.ru/catalog.asp?ob_no=4623; Elena Gal’perina, “Ispoved’ redaktora,” 206; and Boretskii, Gosteleradiofond oral history project interview (n.d.). 33. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 253. 34. “Stenogramma letuchki rabotnikov Tsentral’noi Studii televideniia” (June 14, 1957), GARF f. 6903, op. 31, d. 3, l. 13.

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35. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 355–56. 36. Ibid. 37. “Stenogramma letuchki rabotnikov Tsentral’noi Studii televideniia” (June 14, 1957), GARF f. 6903, op. 31, d. 3, l. 13. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 248–50. 41. Contests involving appeals to the larger audience at home were carefully organized in advance but staged to appear spontaneous. In the case of the audience contest calling for babies with the initials V.V.V., producers had ensured that such children did exist and made arrangements with their parents a week in advance. Gal’perina, Giul’bekian, and Sergeeva, eds., KVN? KVN . . . KVN!, 10. Television workers debated the need to plant audience members who could answer the program’s quiz questions in a manner befitting Soviet youth, and thus avoid the embarrassment of less than literate members of the audience bungling simple questions. “Stenogramma letuchki rabotnikov Tsentral’noi Studii televideniia” (June 14, 1957), GARF f. 6903, op. 31, d. 3, l. 17. 42. “Stenogramma letuchki rabotnikov Tsentral’noi Studii televideniia” (June 14, 1957), GARF f. 6903, op. 31, d. 3, l. 17. 43. Clark, Petersburg, 33–35. Many viewers disagreed, writing that the show’s producers should have been given awards for the exciting, spontaneous spectacle of the final broadcast; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 250. 44. Gal’perina, Giul’bekian, and Sergeeva, eds., KVN? KVN . . . KVN!, 11. Even those who were hired only after the program was taken off the air remember being warned by superiors with the phrase: “What, wasn’t one VVV enough for you?” E. Gal’perina, “Ispoved’ redaktora,” 206. 45. von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 134–36. For the use of the word in amateur theater, see Mally, Revolutionary Acts, 49–50. 46. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 197–98. 47. von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 4–5. 48. On reengaging the Soviet population, see Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 122–23. 49. Romberg, “Aleksei Gan’s Constructivism,” 53. 50. Ibid., 64–65. 51. Quoted in E. Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’,” Virtual’nyi muzei radio i televideniia, www.tvmuseum.ru/catalog.asp?ob_no=8725. 52. “Stenogramma letuchki rabotnikov Tsentral’noi Studii televideniia” (June 14, 1957), GARF f. 6903, op. 31, d. 3, l. 63. 53. On Soviet amateur theater, see Mally, Revolutionary Acts, and Costanzo, “Reclaiming the Stage,” 398–424. 54. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 251–53. 55. Ibid., 255. 56. Gal’perina, Giul’bekian, and Sergeeva, eds., KVN? KVN . . . KVN!, 11.

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57. Kirillov’s arrival in September 1957, just in time to read the announcement that a Soviet satellite had orbited the moon, was likely no coincidence. I. Kirillov, “Glazami diktora,” 134–41. 58. For an overview of continuity announcers in early European television, see de Leeuw and Mustata, “In-Vision Continuity Announcers.” For recollections and images of French continuity announcers, see Mahé, La television autrefois, 18–21. 59. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 240–43. As Roth-Ey points out, these intimate forms of address distinguished the continuity announcers’ mail from that received by movie stars and radio announcers (p. 242). Intimate, direct forms of address were typical of continuity announcers across Europe, as demonstrated in de Leeuw and Mustata, “In-Vision Continuity Announcers.” On sincerity, authenticity, and mass culture in Russia, see Fishzon, “The Operatics of Everyday Life.” 60. Mikhail Romm, “Pogliadim na dorogu,” Iskusstvo kino 11 (November 1959): 127–28. 61. For the ongoing search for the proper form of orality on Soviet radio, see Lovell, “Broadcasting Bolshevik,” 78–97. 62. Genis and Vail’, 60-e. Mir sovetskogo cheloveka, 68–71. 63. Baughman, Same Time, Same Station, 4. For one example of the frequent reference to television as a “guest” in the apartment, see Iraklii Andronikov, “Rasskaz na ekrane,” Literaturnaia gazeta, May 7, 1959. On the dialectical relationship between gender and broadcasting’s intrusion into the intimate, feminine home, see Lacey, Feminine Frequencies, 10–11. 64. “Tvorcheskii poisk—prezhde vsego,” Literaturnaia gazeta, April 9, 1960. 65. Sappak, “Televidenie, 1960,” 179. 66. Ibid., 180. 67. Sappak, Televidenie i my (1963), 61. 68. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia, 181. See also Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! 69. Sappak, Televidenie i my (1963), 117. For more on the ambitions of Thaw artists and especially journalists, see Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 140–49; see also Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism. 70. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 267–68. 71. For more on debates about the intelligentsia personality on television, see Huxtable, “The Problem of Personality,” 119–30. 72. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 38. 73. KPSS o sredstvakh massovoi informatsii, 542. 74. Sappak, Televidenie i my (1963), 46. 75. It did not help matters that two of the people Sappak named as ideal television personalities, Frank and Fucˇik, were dead. 76. Andronikov first appeared on television in 1954, but his appearance in the 1959 television film Zagadka N.F.I. established his reputation as a telegenic storyteller and scholar; Iurovskii, Televidenie, 128. 77. Irakli Andronikov, “Slovo napisannoe i skazannoe,” Literaturnaia gazeta, April 18, 1961, p. 3.

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78. See Leonid Zolotarevskii’s reminiscences in Kuznetsov and Mesiatsev, “Zolotye gody,” www.tvmuseum.ru/catalog.asp?ob_no=4623. 79. Ibid. A report following the Youth Festival gives a more mixed impression of how these broadcasts really went; it mentions that some TV journalists still employed stilted, formulaic language; “Otchet i informatsiia Moskovskikh organizatsii po VI Vsemirnomu festivaliu molodezhi i studentov v g. Moskve,” OKhDOPIM f. 4, op. 104, d. 30, p. 181. 80. Kuznetsov and Mesiatsev, “Zolotye gody.” The Youth Festival also fell between two interventions by Khrushchev in the capital’s artistic life: his address to the Moscow Writers’ Union on May 13, and his article “For Close Ties Between Literature and Art and the Life of the People,” published on August 28. Both sought to rein in unorthodox experiments in the arts and literature, and television workers, many of whom sympathized and socialized with artists and writers, were occasionally punished for covering controversial exhibitions, including after a program covering the 1962 Vystavka molodykh khudozhnikov. OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 147, l. 181. 81. Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium, 85. 82. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 39. 83. The diktory had passed a test of their foreign-language skills, since they would be responsible for broadcasting in French or English. Svetlana Zhil’tsova, a regular Central Television diktor, had won one of the places on the team, but was denied permission to leave the country and was replaced at the last minute by a stewardess. Glukhovskaia, “Briussel’ EKSPO-58,” 160. 84. Ibid., 161. 85. Ibid. 86. The Soviet team’s communication with Zitrone was fostered by the fact that he was a native Russian-speaking émigré. 87. Glukhovskaia, “Briussel’ EKSPO-58,” 162. 88. The text of the decree is available in KPSS o sredstvakh massovoi informatsii, 539–45. 89. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 287–88. 90. KPSS o sredstvakh, 540. 91. Ibid., 542. 92. Ibid., 540. 93. KPSS o sredstvakh, 540. 94. Ibid., 541. 95. On Party officials’ reluctance to embrace television, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 194–95. On the debates about personality on Thaw-era television, see Huxtable, “The Problem of Personality.” 96. “Stenogrammy zasedaniia sektsii telereportazha vsesoiuznogo tvorcheskogo soveshchaniia po voprosam reportazha v radioveshchanii i televidenii” (March 1–2, 1961), GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 712, ll. 15–16. 97. Ibid., ll. 28–29. 98. Stanislavsky, My Life in Art, 465.

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99. “Daty i sobytiia,” Virtual’nyi muzei radio i televideniia, www.tvmuseum.ru/search. asp?cat_ob_no=17&ob_no=17&a=1&pg=13. 100. For another account of this broadcast and Gagarin’s charisma, see Jenks, The Cosmonaut Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling, 160–61. Eduard Sagalaev, who joined Central Television in 1975, recalls that even fifteen years later the most prestigious beats for television reporters were those, like covering Soviet space exploration, where reporters could boast about Soviet achievements while also telling the truth. Interview with author, February 2007. 101. Kuznetsov and Mesiatsev, “Zolotye gody.” 102. This was very much part of the rhetoric of the event; Sappak, Televidenie i my (1968 ed.), 167. But it was also a genuine transnational media event. Lundgren, “Live from Moscow,” 45–55. 103. Kuznetsov and Mesiatsev, “Zolotye gody.” 104. Sappak, Televidenie i my (1968), 168. 105. Vartanov, “Problema vzaimootnosheniia dokumenta i obraza,” in V zerkale kritiki, 77–80. 106. E. Krymova, “Prezhde vsego, iskrennost’,” Televidenie, radioveshchaniie, no. 4 (April 1982), 13.

Chapter 2. Programmnaia Politika 1. As Sabina Mihelj argues, the history of media audiences must also be a history of ideas about audiences, since it is precisely the ideas of television producers about their viewers that shape television production most directly; Mihelj, “Audience History as a History of Ideas,” 25. 2. By the mid-1980s this point had become an important criticism of Sappak’s work. In 1985, for example, one astute Soviet critic observed that the location of the “new vision” in Sappak’s description of television was primarily in Sappak’s own politically and aesthetically trained eye; Bogomolov, “Sud’ba kontseptsii priamogo TV,” in V zerkale kritiki, ed. Borev and Furtseva, 107–26, 118. In the United States, Pat Weaver’s expectation that most viewers already were or would rapidly become intellectuals met a similar fate; Baughman, Same Time, Same Station, 106. 3. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 131–45; Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age, 155–58. As Roth-Ey notes, expressing concern about competition from foreign radio was a useful stance for journalists, allowing them to justify greater resources and flexibility for their work. 4. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 187. 5. Boretskii, Televizionnaia programma, 143. 6. Ibid., 141–42. 7. For the origins of the audience-oriented schedule at the BBC in the 1930s, see Scannell, Radio, Television, and Modern Life, 9–10. 8. On the impact of the Kosygin reforms in film, see First, “From Spectator to ‘Differentiated’ Consumer.” For newspapers, see Huxtable, “In Search of the Soviet Reader.”

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9. First, “From Spectator to ‘Differentiated’ Consumer,” 332. For more on the golden age of Soviet sociology, including media sociology, see Shlapentokh, The Politics of Sociology in the Soviet Union; Grushin, Chetyre zhizni Rossii. 10. For the shift from enlightenment under NEP to mobilization during the Great Break, see Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, 11–45. For consumer values in Stalin-era and postStalin Soviet culture, see Gronow, Caviar with Champagne, Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen,” 211; and Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture Under Brezhnev. 11. I am indebted to the concise and witty observations about Soviet cultural production, consumption, and markets in Brian Kassof ’s excellent unpublished article on the Soviet book market, “The Market’s Two Bodies,” presented at the East European Colloquium, Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte und Landeskunde, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, June 2005. 12. On the relationship between television and traditional agitation, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 192–94. On the experience of late Soviet agitation, see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 93–102. 13. Kassof, “The Market’s Two Bodies,” 4. 14. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses. 15. The population could also be engaged as coauthors; Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book. 16. “Vystupleniia kommunistov na ob”edinennom partiinom sobranii Gl. red. Tsent. telev. Goskomiteta po radiov i teelv. pri SM SSSR” (January 25, 1962), OKhDOPIM, f. 2930, op. 1, d. 31, l. 5. 17. As one TV staffer assigned to report on VVV’s strengths and weaknesses during the summer of 1957 put it, “reactions are positive everywhere—in the tram, on the metro, in factories, in apartments—everyone is talking about VVV”; “Stenogramma letuchki rabotnikov Tsentral’nogo televideniia” (June 14, 1957), GARF f. 6903, op. 31, d. 3, l. 13. 18. “Predislovie,” GARF f. 6903, op. 3. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. One brief and unsuccessful effort to incorporate this form of model audience more regularly was the creation, also in 1959, of a Public Council of Television Viewers [obshchestvennyi sovet telezritelei]. Composed of representatives from Moscow-region factories, collective farms, scientific institutes, and educational institutions, the council, initially made up of twenty-seven members but soon expanded to eighty-five, was meant to connect Central Television’s content producers with television viewers by expressing opinions and providing feedback that would represent the latter’s views. “Stenogramma zasedaniia obshchestvennogo soveta telezritelei” (January 13, 1959), GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 612, l. 2. By December 1960, Central Television producers were already sidelining the council. Ibid., ll. 32–33. A few records of further meetings survive in the archives of the Central Television administration, including one as late as 1962, “Protokoly zasedanii obshchestvennogo soveta telezritelei pri Tsentral’noi studii televideniia,” GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 770.

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22. On Soviet letter-writing practices, see Kozlov, “I Have Not Read, but I Will Say,” 557–97; Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants and Citizens,” 78. 23. “Predislovie,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, “Otdely pisem Tsentral’nogo televideniia, Tsentral’nogo vnutrisoiuznogo radioveshchaniia, i Tsentral’nogo radioveshchaniia na zarubezhnye strany.” In 1960, as part of the larger reorganization of Central Television, the letters bureau was made part of the main programming directorate [Glavnaia direktsiia programm], responsible for allocating broadcast time among the editorial desks [redaktsiia] and creating the schedule. 24. For an account of the similar use of listener letters in early radio in the United States, see Razlogova, The Listener’s Voice. 25. Reports from 1957 and 1959 have not survived, and reports from 1958 are not complete; the 1960 annual report is the first surviving one to include statistics on letters answered. GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 24. 26. Letter writers belonged to the Communist Party in far higher percentages than the Soviet population as a whole; Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public, 121. The reports the Letters Desk produced were themselves selective in their attention—they focused primarily on letters with critical comments about television’s schedule and content, rather than on (more numerous) letters that asked for contact information or assistance with a personal problem, or were responses to audience quizzes. Although it was relatively rare in the first half of the 1960s, they sometimes also highlighted the comments and perspective of particular subgroups of viewers whose letters supported the viewpoint of Central Television’s Party leadership on a particular question. See, for example, GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 44, ll. 2–3. 27. See, for example, RGANI f. 5, op. 58, d. 25, ll. 97–98. See also a 1962 letter from Central Television to the Central Committee, in response to letters from Party members the Central Committee had forwarded; GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 741, ll. 8–17. 28. See, for example, GARF f. 6903, op. 10, dela 24 and 65, l. 38. 29. Soviet newspapers employed this tactic too until subscription limits were lifted on central newspapers in 1964; Huxtable, “In Search of the Soviet Reader.” 30. Dissatisfaction was not universal. Mickiewicz noted that many Soviet TV journalists in the mid-1980s felt that analysis of viewer letters was superior to sociological surveys; Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 81–82. 31. “Itogovaia spravka o rezul’tatakh sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia populiarnosti radio i televizionnykh programm, provedennego na predpriiatiiakh g. Moskvy,” GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 277, l. 17. 32. This chapter focuses on audience research conducted by Central Television directly; however, Central Television staffers also had access to published results of media audience surveys conducted by sociologists and other media organizations, which were quite extensive, and sometimes of higher quality; Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public, 1–17; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 268–73. 33. GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 277, l. 17.

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34. Ibid., l. 18. 35. Many Central Television workers understood this was a longstanding problem. At the end of Televizionnaia programma, Boretskii quoted Lenin’s minister of enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharskii, who had written, forty years earlier, that the viewer was neither “a patient who wants to drink his medicine” nor a “a school child who you can sit down behind a desk”; Boretskii, Televizionnaia programma, 178. 36. See, for example, GARF f. 6903, op. 31, d. 3, l. 63. 37. GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 522, l. 35. 38. Viewers complained that inaccuracies in the printed schedule made it impossible for them to plan their evening leisure. See, for example, a 1965 letter quoted in GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 66, ll. 131, 143. 39. The Central Television schedule began to be printed in Pravda only in 1959; Glukhovskaia, “Briussel’ EKSPO-1958,” 160. 40. Schedules printed in Pravda on the dates given. By October 1959, Central Television had begun broadcasting on a second channel; on October 12 the only program on that channel was an unspecified sporting event. 41. For more on Soviet serial films, see Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies.” 42. Surveys were used by the NMO almost immediately after its founding, as early as 1945; “Predislovie,” GARF f. 6903, op. 3. Survey research was also widely used in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, but the denunciation of sociology as a bourgeois pseudoscience under Stalin during the 1930s and ’40s brought sociological research to a halt. 43. See, for example, GARF f. 6903, op. 3, dela 184, 211, 249. Dealing with leisure-time budgets, these surveys were typical of Soviet sociological research conducted in the early 1960s, which was largely limited to questions that did not directly concern public opinion about state institutions or initiatives. 44. Researchers generally consider 1965 the beginning of the “golden age” of Soviet sociology; Shlapentokh, The Politics of Sociology, 33–34. 45. See, for example, GARF f. 6903, op. 3, dela 281, 324, 411, 412. 46. Methods used to sample and poll the population are not always recorded, but one survey mentioned the use of quota sampling, a nonrandomized sample selection strategy; GARF f. 6903, op. 3, dela 407, 408. For more on Soviet survey methods and the weaknesses of quota sampling versus randomized samples, see Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public, 14–15. 47. Several surveys focused explicitly on one sector of the audience, such as “youth” or “rural residents”; GARF f. 6903, op. 3, dela 328, 329. 48. GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 211, l. 3. 49. “Itogovaia spravka o rezul’tatakh anketnogo oprosa radioslushatelei i telezritelei o radio i tele-peredachakh dlia sel’skikh zhitelei” (1965), GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 280, l. 20. 50. The four rubrics that were least often reported “read regularly” were “Peredovaia [leading people and organizations/best practices],” “Ekonomika,” “Propagandistskie stat’i [propagandistic articles],” and “Rabota sovetov [the work of the Soviets].” Vasilii

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Davydchenkov and Vladimir Shlapentokh, “ ‘Izvestiia’ izuchaiut chitatelia,” Zhurnalist, 1968, no. 2 (February), 23–25. 51. “Itogovaia spravka o rezul’tatakh sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia populiarnosti radio i televizionnykh programm, provedennego na predpriiatiiakh g. Moskvy,” GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 277, l. 37. 52. See, for example, “Itogovaia spravka o rezul’tatakh anketnykh oprosov radioslushatelei i telezritelei o khudozhestvennykh peredachakh radio i televideniia,” GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 281; “Itogovaia spravka o rezul’tatakh anketnogo oprosa telezritelei o molodezhnykh programmakh i statisticheskie tablitsy k nim,” GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 329. 53. “Itogovaia spravka o rezul’tatakh anketnom oprosa ‘Zriteli o programmakh i peredachakh Tsentral’nogo televideniia’ za fevral’–mai 1967 g. i dokumenty k nei,” GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 407, ll. 1–2. 54. For surveys focusing on “stepen’ udovletvorennosti telezritelei programmami televideniia,” see GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 410; Pavel Gurevitch, “Zhazhda informatsii,” Zhurnalist, 1968, no. 8 (August), 61–62. 55. “Itogovaia spravka o rezul’tatakh ezhednevnogo oprosa radioslushatelei i telezritelei g. Moskvy o radio-i teleperedachakh, provedennogo s 30 iiulia po 5 avgusta 1967 g. i dokumenty k nei,” GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 408, l. 4. 56. GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 277, l. 12. 57. RGASPI-m f. 43, op. 1, d. 36, l. 750. 58. GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 277, l. 17. 59. GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 408, l. 6. 60. This reevaluation was taking place across the Eastern bloc. On this process on Yugoslav TV, see Mihelj, “Audience History.” For Soviet film and print media, see First, “From Spectator to ‘Differentiated’ Consumer,” and Huxtable, “In Search of the Soviet Reader.” 61. Georgii Fere, “Kak ia byl televizionnym tekhnikom,” Zhurnalist, 1967, no. 4 (April), 36. 62. This claim was articulated by the head of the methodological section of Estonian Television, Rut Karemiae, in a 1967 article; Karemiae, “. . . Kak tiazhelye pushki v boiu!,” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, 1967, no. 7 (July), 30–33. This framework for understanding viewer boredom continued to be used throughout the 1970s, since it usefully shifted the problem from the viewers or Soviet ideology itself toward the most controllable variable: Central Television personnel themselves. 63. Jones, “The Fire Burns On?” 64. Huxtable, “In Search of the Soviet Reader.” 65. Ibid.; First, “From Spectator to ‘Differentiated’ Consumer,” 332–40. Huxtable, “In Search of the Soviet Reader,” argues that the journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda were far more reluctant than filmmakers to abandon the idea of a general “mass reader” in favor of a diverse, sociologically differentiated audience; as First shows, filmmakers also retreated from the differentiated audience by the late 1970s.

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66. First, “From Spectator to ‘Differentiated’ Consumer,” 344. 67. “Itogovaia spravka o rezul’tatakh sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia populiarnosti radio i televizionnykh programm, provedennego na predpriiatiiakh g. Moskvy,” GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 277, l. 12. 68. Fere, “Kak ia byl televizionnym tekhnikom,” 38. 69. For a contrasting example, see Scannell’s chapter on British television’s “dailyness” in Radio, Television, and Modern Life. 70. The exception was a program begun in 1957 titled For You, Women! [Dlia vas, zhenshchiny!]. The mass-audience identity for Channel 1 and Orbita was also predicated on the simultaneous creation of the third and fourth broadcast channels when Ostankino opened, particularly the third or “instructional” [uchebnoe] program, which went on air November 4, 1967, where most of Central Television’s directly didactic and enlightening content, ranging from foreign-language classes to popular science films to entire correspondence courses were relegated; “Po gorizontali, po vertikali,” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, 1967, no. 11 (November), 49–50. 71. See, for example, Nikolai Mesiatsev, “Doklad na Vsesoiuznoi Konferentssii po televideniiu “Puti dal’neishego povysheniia kachestva televizionnykh program,” RGASPI-m f. 43, op. 1, d. 40, l. 44; and Fere, “Kak ia byl televizionnym tekhnikom,” 38. 72. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 199–208. 73. Anatolii Bogomolov, “Pomen’she smotrite televizor,” Zhurnalist, 1967, no. 6 (June), 39–41. 74. GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 277, l. 37. One show that exemplified this problem was Ekran bol’shoi khimii or Industrial Chemistry on Screen, a show created as part of Khrushchev’s push for the introduction of modern industrial chemistry in the Soviet Union. 75. “Spravka po itogam teoreticheskoi konferentsii ‘Printsipy mnogoprogrammnogo televideniia,’ ” in “materialy k protokoly #2 zased Goskomiteta ot 21 ianvaria 1966 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 886, ll. 196, 213. 76. Ibid., l. 206. Of course, viewers would retain a choice among channels because of television’s consumption in the home, regardless of Central Television’s efforts to direct their selections. 77. Ibid., l. 207. 78. GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 277, l. 12. 79. “Spravka po itogam teoreticheskoi konferentsii ‘Printsipy mnogoprogrammnogo televideniia,’ ” in “materialy k protokoly #2 zased Goskomiteta ot 21 ianvaria 1966 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 886, l. 207. 80. First, “From Spectator to ‘Differentiated’ Consumer,” 336–39; Huxtable, “In Search of the Soviet Reader,” 630–31. 81. The broadcast of soccer and hockey matches appeared in Central Television’s reports on its “antialcohol propaganda.” See, for example, “Stenogramma sobraniia partiinogo aktiva ‘O sostianii raboty po vypolneniiu Postanovlenii TsK KPSS o merakh po usileniiu bor’by protiv p’ianstva i alkogolizma, vytekaiushchikh iz reshenii KPK pri TsK

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KPSS ot 20 aprelia 1977 goda’ ” (July 13, 1977), OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 3, d. 230, ll. 18–19. 82. Chaplin, Turning on the Mind, 1–4. 83. GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 412, ll. 1–5. 84. RGASPI-m f. 43, op. 1, d. 40, ll. 42–43. 85. “Setka peredach 1-oi programmy TsT na 1969–70 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 973, l. 252. 86. In April 1969, the chief editor for news, N. Biriukov, was reprimanded for allowing changes to the broadcast time of news programs including Vremia; GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 962, l. 31. 87. GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 973, l. 243. 88. “Ob uluchshenii postanovki politicheskoi propagandy po radio i televideniiu,” Protokol #15 zasedaniia Komiteta po radioveshchaniiu i televideniiu pri SM SSSR ot 22 (July 1966), GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 892, l. 226. 89. GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 412, l. 5. 90. Setka peredach 1-oi programmy TsT na 1969–70 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 973, l. 252. 91. GARF f. 6903, op. 48, d. 115, l. 9. 92. Ibid., l. 10. 93. GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 41, ll. 9–10. 94. A. Shpikalov and V. Vladimirov, “Povyshat’ kachestvo raboty,” Zhurnalist, 1979, no. 7 (July), 2–3, 6–7. 95. GARF f. 6903, op. 48, d. 115, ll. 5, 11–12. 96. Mesiatsev’s ouster was already being prepared by April 1968, when the first draft of a memo critical of several errors in the coverage of Lenin on television was signed by V. Stepakov and K. Simonov, the heads of the Central Committee’s propaganda and communications divisions, respectively; “O sereznykh nedostatkakh v rabote TsT i merakh po dal’neishemu razvitiiu televideniia v SSSR,” RGANI f. 5, op. 60, d. 28, ll. 23–64. These memos culminated in a list of candidates Stepakov recommended to head a new “Ministry of Television and Radio.” However, in 1970 Stepakov himself was removed, along with Mesiatsev as part of a sweeping purge of ideological cadres in 1970. Accounts of these events include Koenig, “Media and Reform,” 142–44; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 213–18. 97. GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 1045, ll. 196, 201. 98. See Lapin’s criticism of the NMO in June 1970; OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 1096, ll. 54–55. 99. “Godovoi obzor pisem telezritelei za 1970 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 101, ll. 1–2. 100. See, for example, GARF f. 6903, op. 48, dela 115 (1972) and 318 (1976). Sociological research into media consumption and leisure-time budgets continued throughout the 1970s; Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public, 1–17. 101. OKhDOPIM, f. 2930, op. 2, d. 244, ll. 8–9. The existence of this desk from 1967 is in itself revealing. What began as the Social-Political Programming Desk [glavnaia redaktsiia

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obshchestvenno-politicheskikh peredach], incorporating both news and agitational programming, lost news production in 1965 to a new News Desk [glavnaia redaktsiia informatsii] created that year. Then in 1967 the remainder of the Social-Political Programming Desk was renamed the Propaganda Desk [glavnaia redaktsiia propagandy]; “Predislovie,” OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1. The rejection of direct propaganda had been the espoused goal of the Youth Programming Desk since at least the late 1950s; Elena Gal’perina recalls being instructed during her first days there that there should be no direct [lobovoi] propaganda in Youth Desk programs; Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’.” 102. OKhDOPIM, f. 2930, op. 2, d. 241, l. 56. 103. A letter report from 1971 boasts that Central Television had broadcast more than six hundred films that year, which led to the near elimination of viewer requests for more movies, something that had previously been in “every third letter”; GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 1, ll. 540–41. Lapin’s own tastes were often overridden by the state’s most important television viewer, Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev reportedly intervened on behalf of shows that he or his wife enjoyed, such as the comedy-variety show Kabachok 13 stul’ev, preventing their cancellation; Koenig, “Media and Reform,” 139. 104. Sergei Lapin, “Tribuna liudei truda,” Zhurnalist, 1972, no. 5 (May), 14–16. 105. For a discussion of the shakeup in the Party’s ideological apparatus in the late 1970s, see Koenig, “Media and Reform,” 158–63.

Chapter 3. From Café to Contest 1. On Soviet holidays and mass festivals in the revolutionary, Civil War, NEP, and Stalin eras, see Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals; Clark, Petersburg; Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous; and Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals. 2. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, 5–7, 16–17. 3. Ibid., 16–17. 4. Rolf, “A Hall of Mirrors,” 602. For the history of the Soviet New Year’s Film, see DeBlasio, “The New-Year Film.” See also Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin!, with a discussion of the “moral economy of the gift” in the Soviet press based largely on sources published during holiday dates (pp. 84, 89). 5. The only full treatment of post-Stalin Soviet ritual is Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers. Other works focus primarily on public festivities and the ceremonial of the political elite; Binns, “The Changing Face of Power”; Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives and The Living and the Dead; Glebkin, Ritual v sovetskoi kulture. 6. Iurovskii, “Ot pervykh opytov k reguliarnomu veshchaniiu.” 7. Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 150; “Perepiska s ministerstvami kul’tury SSSR i RSFSR o rabote Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie radioinformatsii” (May 9, 1956–November 30, 1956), GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 514, l. 16. 8. Acquiring them was quite difficult; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 196–97. Central Television’s leadership had to request assistance at the level of the Ministry of Culture or the Central Committee to procure the right to broadcast recent films or plays at holiday

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times. See, for example, “Letter to Comrade N. A. Mikhailov, USSR Minister of Culture, from Jan 28, 1956,” GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 513, l. 5. 9. For lists of programs and schedules for holiday dates, see for example “Perepiska s ministerstvami kul’tury SSSR i RSFSR o rabote GURI tom I. Letter of 21 Jan 1956,” GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 503, ll. 4–5; “Programma peredach tsentral’nogo televideniia s 27 aprelia po 3 maia 1964,” GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 832, ll. 103–9; “Protokol #29 zasedaniia Gosudarstvennogo komiteta Soveta Ministrov SSSR po televideniiu i radioveshchaniiu, “O novogodnykh programmakh Tsentral’nogo Televideniia” (1971), GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 13, l. 54. 10. “Obzor pisem telezritelei,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 23, ll. 72–73. 11. “Dokumenty k zasedaniiam kollegii Goskomiteta,” GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 385, l. 174. 12. On efforts to bring “culture” to the Soviet people, see Kelly, Refining Russia, and Hoffman, Stalinist Values. 13. On theories of emotional influence and the various pathways television producers saw to creating “good moods” on Soviet television, see Evans, “The Soviet Way of Life as a Way of Feeling.” 14. Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 123. 15. Dayan and Katz have called these “diasporic ceremonies,” television holidays that translate “a monumental occasion into a multiplicity of simultaneous, similarly programmed, home-bound microevents” focused on a symbolic center, not unlike religious celebrations in the home; Dayan and Katz, Media Events, 145. 16. Valentina Shatrova, “Rozhdeniie golubogo ogon’ka,” Virtual’nyi muzei televideniia i radio, www.tvmuseum.ru/catalog.asp?ob_no=8475 (accessed November 28, 2015). 17. Ibid. 18. On the history of the Russian and Soviet variety stage from 1900 to 1955, see MacFadyen, Songs for Fat People. For more on Little Blue Flame’s connections to the intellectual and social currents of the Thaw, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 124–25. 19. For more on the Thaw as a revelatory visual, aural, and personal experience, see Gilburd, “Picasso in Thaw Culture,” 65–108; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 89–120. 20. A broadcast in February 1963 hosted by the actors Vasilii Lanovoi and Liudmila Khitiaieva took travel as its theme, and featured a lengthy discussion of what kinds of virtual travel the actors and other Soviet citizens might enjoy. “Na Goluboi ogonek No. 49” (February 16, 1963), GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 436, efirnaia papka 4564. The show likewise saw itself as bringing the world to viewers, by inviting foreign musicians touring in Moscow to appear on the show. In 1962–63 these included the winners of the Tchaikovsky International Musical Competition, and the Italian opera theater of La Scala, among others. Shatrova, “Rozhdeniie golubogo ogon’ka.” 21. “O subbotnikh i voskresnykh radio-i teleprogrammakh (itogi anketnogo oprosa radioslushatelei i telezritelei)” (1963), GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 211, l. 18. 22. Sergei Muratov, “Effekt vozdeistviia,” Zhurnalist, 1967, no. 2 (February), 30.

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23. “Vystupleniia kommunistov na ob”edinennom partiinom sobranii Glavnykh redaktsii. Tsentral’nogo televideniia Goskomiteta po radioveshchaniia i televideniia pri SM SSSR” (January 25, 1962), OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 31, l. 32. 24. “Obzor pisem zritelei, poluchennykh tsentral’nym televideniiem v aprele 1965 goda,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 66, ll. 21–22. 25. Shatrova, “Rozhdeniie golubogo ogon’ka.” 26. Musical Desk staff recalled the show’s near cancellation in 1965 at another moment of crisis, in 1969; “Partsobranii glavnoi redaktsiia muzykal’nykh programm ot 9 aprelia 1969,” OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 911, l. 17. 27. Ibid. 28. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, 16–18. 29. In this, the variety stage resembled the Soviet circus; Neirick, When Pigs Could Fly, 13–19. 30. Videos of their performances are available on YouTube, www.youtube.com/ results?search_query=голубой+огонек+1967+ноябрь&search_type=&aq=f. 31. On the history and extent of foreign radio listening in the Soviet Union and the Soviet state’s response, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 131–75; Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public, 137–42; Nelson, War of the Black Heavens; Maury Lisann, Broadcasting to the Soviet Union. 32. Editing decisions about holiday show lineups included instructions about whom not to show in close-up, for cosmetic as well as political reasons. See, for example, “Protokoly zasedanii obshchestvennogo soveta telezritelei pri Tsentral’noi Studii Televideniia” (1960), GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 666, ll. 18–20. 33. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 162–66. 34. One indication of this change was the decision, after August 1968, to move the broadcast of an expensive all-live television holiday program called Odin chas iz zhizni rodiny [One Hour in the Life of the Motherland, later shortened to Chas rodiny or One Hour in the Motherland] from the November 7 holiday to the New Year. Major new television programs were launched during the New Year season, such as the news program Vremia on January 1, 1968. 35. To mark their distinctive position, New Year’s broadcasts of Little Blue Flame were often called by their own name, New Year’s Flame [Novogodnii ogonek], a privileged status not extended to other holidays. 36. This change was most likely the result of increased resources for expensive travel to film these model viewers in their homes. See, for example, Novogodnii ogonek “Samaia vysokaia,” December 31, 1967; footage viewed in October 2006 at the Russian Ministry of Communications’ Gosteleradiofond storage facility in Reutovo, Russia, and also available as a DVD recording titled Goluboi ogonek 1967 (Bomba Music, 2005). 37. Goluboi ogonek 1963 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 38. Sandulenko, age thirteen in 1963, the son of a well-known singer of Gypsy romances, Leonid Nikolaevich Sandulenko, had traveled to Italy to meet the Italian child

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singer Robertino Loreti, who was extremely popular in the Soviet Union. Sandulenko became known as the Soviet Robertino Loreti. Although Sandulenko was not foreign, Mirov pretended to mistake him for an Italian singer. These two performances were presented as gifts in part because they were prerecorded. Other foreign musicians appeared on the show, including Hans Eisler and Edith Haas with the Schwarz-Weiss orchestra (GDR) and G. Germani and Z. Schra [Схра] from Czechoslovakia. 39. Novogodnyi ogonek “Samaia vysokaia,” December 31, 1967; Goluboi ogonek 1967 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 40. Goluboi ogonek 1962 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 41. For a full discussion of the 1968–70 crisis at Gosteleradio, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 213–18. 42. RGANI f. 5 (Apparat Tsentral’nogo Komiteta KPSS), op. 59, d. 28, ll. 105–25 (letter from N. N. Mesiatsev, August 23, 1967). 43. Ibid. 44. “Letter from P. Moskovskii and A. Yakovlev” (October 20, 1967), RGANI f. 5, op. 59, d. 28, l. 142. 45. Ibid., 143. 46. On the search for new Soviet rituals in the post-Stalin era, see Smolkin-Rothrock, “A Sacred Space Is Never Empty.” 47. The 1968 New Year’s broadcast was also cut in a way that highlighted the end of foreign performances: instead of the traditional post-midnight, foreign-music half of the program, the first program on Central Television in 1969 was a musical TV movie produced by Tvorcheskoe Ob”edineniie “Ekran,” the television movie division of Gosteleradio that placed orders with the country’s film studios; “O merakh po dal’neishemu uluchsheniiu muzykal’nykh programm Tsentral’nogo televideniia” and “O novogodnykh programmakh tsentral’nogo televideniia,” GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 976, l. 80. Lineups for both years are available at www.russiandvd.com/store/product.asp?sku=41775&re=producta and www. russiandvd.com/store/product.asp?sku=41776&re=producta. 48. Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 291. 49. “O merakh po dal’neishemu uluchsheniiu muzykal’nykh programm Tsentral’nogo televideniia” and “O novogodnykh programmakh tsentral’nogo televideniia,” GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 976, ll. 14–15. A 1980 letter report described as common knowledge the fact that the majority of viewers who wrote to Central Television requested estrada, rather than classical genres; “Obzor pisem telezritelei” (1980), GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 104, ll. 114–15. 50. “O merakh po dal’neishemu uluchsheniiu muzykal’nykh programm Tsentral’nogo televideniia” and “O novogodnykh programmakh tsentral’nogo televideniia,” GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 976, l. 10. 51. The Czech performers were young musicians included in a joint broadcast of the Soviet musical contest show called Hello! We’re Looking for Talents! and a similar Czechoslovak show, Zlata kamera, broadcast in early January; “Obzory pisem telezritelei za 1971 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 1, l. 6.

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52. “Novogodnii ogonek,” December 31, 1970; footage viewed in October 2006 at the Russian Ministry of Communications’ Gosteleradiofond storage facility in Reutovo, Russia. 53. By 1972, the number of viewer letters to the show dropped to just a few hundred for the entire year, at a time when the most popular of Central Television’s musical programs were receiving tens, even hundreds of thousands of letters. See, for example, “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1972 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 2, ll. 124–25. 54. Ibid. 55. Remarkably, almost no recordings of the show between 1971 and 1979 have been preserved in the Gosteleradiofond archive. The pre-air scripts, or “efirnye papki,” of these programs are, however, available, in GARF f. 6903, op. 35. 56. Vartanov, Televizionnaia estrada, 31–33. See also the discussion of entertainment programs in Literaturnaia gazeta, 1980, no. 6. 57. Vartanov, Televizionnaia estrada, 32. 58. For an overview, see Katalin Miklóssy, “Competing for Popularity: Song Contests and Interactive Television in Communist Hungary,” in Competition in Socialist Society, ed. Miklóssy and Ilic, 107–24. 59. The show’s ads were intended to direct viewers’ votes. As Sergei Lapin told the show’s staff in 1977, “of course, you all know, everything is done purposefully, everything is organized, you can make any song . . . you can elicit a stream of letters for any song. . . . It’s how you present them, which songs you suggest—on that, let’s say, a great deal depends.” “Stenogramma otchetnoi partiinoi konferentsii, postanovlenie ot 22 dekabria 1977 goda,” OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 3, d. 223, l. 86. 60. “Pesnia-71 peredacha-reklama. No. 3 ot 21 noiabria 1971,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1368. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Pesnia-71 [Song-71], January 1, 1972 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 64. The show’s mail increased sharply after the program’s first year; Song-72 received roughly 100,000 letters; “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1972 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 2, l. 125. This number was dwarfed by the viewer mail to another musical program, Artloto, also created in 1971, which received an unprecedented 900,000 letters in 1971. Artloto, however, offered prizes to viewers for entering the show’s “lottery,” including record albums and players, signed celebrity photos, and color televisions. 65. Pesnia-71, January 1, 1972 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 66. Kirillov’s observation that “pesnia delo ton’koe” [“song is a delicate matter”] echoes the famous line from the 1969 Soviet “Eastern” White Sun of the Desert, “vostok delo ton’koe” [“the East is a delicate matter”], suggesting the extent to which Song of the Year was engaged with other popular cultural forms. 67. Pesnia-71, January 1, 1972 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 68. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 181–95; Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City. For a firsthand account by a Soviet rock musician, see Troitsky, Back in the USSR. On guitar

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poetry, see Smith, Songs to Seven Strings. For a lucid overview of popular music genres and milieus in the Brezhnev era, see Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 154–67. 69. Song of the Year’s theme was “Pesnia ostaetsia s chelovekom,” composed by A. Ostrovskii, lyrics by S. Ostrovoi. 70. Pesnia-71, January 1, 1972 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 71. Sociological audience research had introduced the idea of the “differentiated audience” in film and print journalism as well as television (as described in Chapter 2). 72. Pesnia-72, January 1, 1973 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 73. Ibid. 74. Pesnia-73, January 1, 1974 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 75. Central Television was in fact receiving more than 100,000 letters in the show’s early years. The letter division reported 109,000 letters for Song-72, and 62,000 for Song-73 in December 1973 alone. These numbers did decline over time, however; there were only 27,000 letters for Song-76. “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1972 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 2, l. 125; “Obzor pisem telezritelei 1973 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 27, l. 168; “Obzor pisem telezritelei 1976 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 53, l. 120. 76. Pesnia-72, January 1, 1973 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 77. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 207–37. 78. These songs included “Komsomol’tsy-dobrovol’tsy” (1957); “Pesnia o BAMe” (1975); “Ne Plach’ Devchonka” (1971). 79. “Obzor pisem telezritelei za ianvar’ 1975 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 40, l. 74. 80. Pesnia-76, January 1, 1977 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 81. Pesnia-77, January 1, 1978 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 82. On the very widespread Soviet strategy of dividing concerts into two acts, one devoted to direct political messages and the other to pleasing the audience, see V. D. Ivanov and L. P. Musakhanov, “Balans khudozhestvennoi kul’tury (na materiale ekspertnogo oprosa po sovetskomu iskusstvu 1970-kh),” in Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’ v Rossii 1970-kh godov kak sistemnoe tseloe, 127. 83. Pesnia-75 and Pesnia-76 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 84. Pesnia-77, January 1, 1978 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 85. “Obzor pisem telezritelei za ianvar’ 1978 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 80, ll. 67–68. 86. Ibid. 87. On the importance of conflict between elites, see Cohen, “The Friends and Foes of Change.” 88. Remington, The Truth of Authority, 3–5. 89. “Stenogramma otchetnoi partiinoi konferentsii, postanovlenie ot 22 dekabria 1977 goda,” OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 3, d. 223, l. 86. 90. “Protokol No. [illegible] otkrytogo partiinogo sobraniia Glavnoi redaktsii programm dlia molodezhi ot 10 ianvaria 1978 goda ‘o zadachakh partiinoi organizatsii redaktsii po sozdaniiu massovykh, razvlekatel’nykh peredach,’ ” in “Protokoly partsobranii i zasedanii partbiuro pervichnoi partorganizatsii Glavnoi redaktsii programm dlia molodezhi

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Tsentral’nogo televideniia,” OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 3, d. 477, l. 7. Sagalaev’s opinion could not be taken lightly; the Youth Programming Division won several state prizes under his direction, and he was rising very quickly. The prizes were for the documentary film series Nasha Biografiia (1977). Sagalaev went on to head Central Television’s Youth Programming Desk (1984–88) and News Desk (1988–90). 91. Ibid; Pesnia-77 and -78 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 92. The show’s title was drawn from the chorus of “Pesnia ostaetsia s chelovekom,” Song of the Year’s theme song. 93. “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1976 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 53, l. 121. 94. “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1978 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 79, l. 127. 95. See, for example, “Obzor pisem telezritelei aprel’ 1978 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 83, l. 63. 96. Evans, “The Soviet Way of Life as a Way of Feeling.” 97. “Protokoly Nn. 36–37 zasedanii kollegii Goskomiteta i materialy k nim,” GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 781, l. 60. 98. Pesnia-80, January 1, 1981 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. 99. Vartanov, Televizionnaia estrada, 31–35. 100. That both shows are still on the air (broadcast by the state-controlled Rossiya channel) is indicative of their continued relevance to Russian political life.

Chapter 4. Time and the Problem of Boredom 1. GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1003, efirnaia papka #1275. 2. Quoted in N. Ivanovskaia, “O programme Vremia,” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, 1968, no. 5 (May), 30–33. 3. On foreign radio broadcasting, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 131–75. For a worried 1966 report on foreign broadcasting and a 1965 letter from the chairman of Gosteleradio to the Central Committee apparat, see RGANI f. 5, op. 58, d. 25, ll. 134–46, and RGANI f. 5, op. 33, d. 227, ll. 49–50. For an example of concern about the slow pace of domestic news, see GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 408, l. 6. 4. Sergei Muratov, “Effekt vozdeistviia,” Zhurnalist, 1967, no. 2 (February), 29–31. 5. Ibid. 6. Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 71–72. 7. Muratov, “Effekt vozdeistviia,” 27. 8. Vlada Petric, cited in Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 72. 9. Boris Iakovlev, “Eshche raz o Vremeni,” Zhurnalist, 1969, no. 2 (February), 27. 10. The discussions of the new television news show in 1968 closely resembled related conversations in Soviet radio around the radio program Maiak, created in 1964, which also mimicked foreign broadcasting styles in order to compete with them; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 167–74. 11. “Stenogramma otchetnogo partsobraniia pervichnoi partiinoi organizatsii Tsentral’nogo televideniia,” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 2, d. 440, l. 69.

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12. Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 19. 13. Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 28–30. 14. For more detail, see Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, chapter 1; Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 2, 6–7. 15. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 109. This particular linkage of evidence of socialism’s arrival with renewed commitment to building socialism was already in evidence in the Stalin era, at least since Stalin’s famous speech in November 1935 announcing that “life has become better, life has become merrier”; Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin!, 89. 16. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 47–50. 17. Ibid., 71. 18. Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 28–30. For more on ideology and the production of Soviet news, see Remington, The Truth of Authority, 130–31. 19. Hannerz, Foreign News, 31–32. Hannerz also mentions that such stories, while not necessarily strongly temporally specified, are often tied to what he calls “hard news,” which he defines as “major, unique events, highly temporally specified, with consequences that insist on the attention of newspeople and their audiences.” 20. Data are for 1967; Gans, Deciding What’s News, 13. 21. The quotation is from an address by the chief of the Central Television News Desk in 1966; GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 905, l. 13. This definition of an “event” was an explicit matter of policy among Central Television’s highest executives, who forbade most direct coverage of unpredictable events like natural disasters. Coverage of local conflict, in the form of bad actors like corrupt factory bosses, was permissible at some times, but always in the context of the resolution of these problems. 22. Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 19. 23. Schwoch, Global TV, 118. On the Gagarin broadcast, see Lundgren, “Live from Moscow,” 45–55. 24. This was a frequent way in which television producers conceived of the medium as a whole in the late 1950s and early 1960s; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 253–61, 265–67. 25. Zolotarevsky, Tsitaty iz zhizni, 7. These guests included nearly every Soviet celebrity of the early 1960s, from actors and musicians to all of the cosmonauts. 26. For a typical script, see GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 405, efirnaia papka #9251. 27. Zolotarevsky, Tsitaty iz zhizni, 8. 28. Ibid., 10. 29. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 279. 30. See, for example, GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 408, l. 6. 31. “Stenogramma zasedanii televizionnoi sektsii vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia po problemam radio i teleinformatsii g. Moskva” (November 23–26, 1966), GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 905, ll. 8–11. 32. On the socialist “way of life,” see Evans, Soviet Marxism-Leninism, 132–43; Shaw and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War, 47–50, 112–24. See also Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 207; Klumbytė, “Soviet Ethical Citizenship,” 92. On the centrality of morality and ethics in the Khrushchev era, see Field, Private Life and Communist Morality.

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33. GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 905, ll. 10–11. 34. Biriukov’s words echoed those of Boris Shumiatsky, head of Soiuzkino, in 1935, praising Vertov’s embrace of a style more compatible with socialist realism. Vertov, Shumiatsky wrote, had created “organized, connected, and ideologically moulded” material in Three Songs of Lenin (1934); quoted in Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 120. 35. GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 905, l. 13. 36. GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 905, ll. 135–36. 37. Ibid., 136–37. 38. Ibid., 139. 39. Ibid., 138. 40. Eduard Sagalaev, interview with author, Moscow, March 2007. 41. Muratov, “Effekt vozdeistviia,” 29. 42. For a discussion of the gendered diktor/vedushchii distinction and the decline of female diktory, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 267–68. 43. “Stenogrammy sobranii partiinykh aktivov o podgotovke k 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia V. I. Lenina i o rabote po povysheniiu marksistsko-leninskogo obrazovaniia,” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 904, l. 47. Turbin may or may not have been right about the political commitedness of some of the diktory—there are several references in Central Television’s Party archive for 1966 to the failure of diktory Anna Shilova and Svetlana Zhil’tsova to attend their required courses at the University of MarxismLeninism; OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 384, ll. 8–13, 31. As Roth-Ey points out in Moscow Prime Time, the self-assertion of television journalists often drew on gendered discourses of cultural authority (p. 266). 44. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 110–15. 45. Muratov, “Effekt vozdeistviia,” 29. 46. Alexei Yurchak identifies this as a broader phenomenon in post-Stalin Soviet culture, which he calls “Lefort’s Paradox”; Everything Was Forever, 10–11. On the early Cold War origins of making first-person testimony the heart of international reporting, see Dina Fainberg, “Notes from the Rotten West, Reports from the Backward East: Soviet and American Foreign Correspondents in the Cold War, 1945–1985” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2012), 29–35. 47. Georgii Kuznetsov, “Vstrechaiutsia telepersonazhi,” Zhurnalist, 1969, no. 6 (June), 32–33. 48. Ibid., 33. 49. In one typical intervention in 1966, Central Television’s leadership criticized News Relay and Television News for lacking “memorable images of Soviet laborers”; “Rezoliutsiia partiinogo aktiva Tsentral’nogo televideniia 28 iiulia 1966 goda,” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 384, l. 86. 50. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 2, 33–36; Papazian, Manufacturing Truth, 15–19. The genre is defined, crucially for Soviet socialism, by its representation not only of an individual, but of that individual’s relationship to society.

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51. Anatolii Bogomolov, “Novost’ prikhodit k vam: posle vsesoiuznoi konferentsii po radio-i teleinformatsii,” Zhurnalist, 1967, no. 1 (January), 47. 52. Ibid. 53. L. Dmitriev, “Dokumental’noe iskusstvo. IV. Chelovek televideniia,” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, 1967, no. 8 (August), 19–21. Dmitriev’s article was the fourth in a year-long series on the theme of “Man and television” in the journal. 54. Ibid., 19. 55. Ibid., 20. 56. Ivanovskaia, “O programme Vremia,” 30–33. 57. Ibid., 31. 58. Ibid., 32–33. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. As part of his rehabilitation, Vertov’s writings were published in a new volume in 1966, aimed precisely at professionally interested audiences like Central Television’s journalists, cameramen, and editors. I thank Serguei Oushakine for pointing this out to me. S. Drobashenko, ed., Dziga Vertov: Stat’i, dnevniki, zamysli. 62. “Obzory pisem telezritelei za ianvar’, fevral’, aprel’–sentiabr’, noiabr’, dekabr’ 1968,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 80, l. 35. 63. A report on viewer letters received in February 1968 mentioned that “every author touching on the question of Vremia’s format asked that we change the sign-on . . . by cutting or softening the music and the knocking of the teletype machines”; GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 80, ll. 33–34. 64. Ibid., 31; Boris Iakovlev, “Eshche raz o ‘Vremeni,’ ” Zhurnalist, 1969, no. 2 (February), 27–28. 65. “Stenogramma piatoi otchetno-vybornoi partiinoi konferentsii komiteta po radioveshchaniiu i televideniiu pri sovete ministrov SSSR,” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 700, l. 69. 66. Ivanovskaia, “O programme Vremia,” 33. 67. Ibid., 32. 68. Goriaieva, Radio Rossii, 74. 69. “Protokol #1 obshchego partiinogo sobraniia Glavnoi redaktsii informatsii ot 28 Okt 1969,” OkhDOPIM” f. 2930, op. 1, d. 911, l. 104. 70. “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska k setkam 1-IV programm TsT SSSR na 1969–70 gg.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 973, l. 241. 71. Ivanovskaia, “O programme Vremia,” 31. 72. Kristin Roth-Ey, “Finding a Home for Television in the USSR, 1950–1970,” Slavic Review 66, no. 2 (2007): 295–300. 73. N. Biriukov, “Teleinformatsiia. Nastoiashchee i budushchee,” Televidenie i radioveshchaniie 11 (November 1970): 10. 74. “O sereznykh nedostatkakh v rabote Tsentral’nogo televideniia i merakh po dal’neishemu razvitiiu televideniia v SSSR,” first draft, April 16, 1968, RGANI f. 5, op. 60, d. 28, ll. 23–30.

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75. In the mid-1970s, Lapin reminded television workers that part of the reason they had not become a ministry was that Mikhail Suslov had insisted television and radio retain a journalistic organization into content desks [glavnye redaktsii], rather than an administrative one with directorates [upravleniia]. 76. In Russian, Gosudarstvennyi komitet . . . pri Sovete ministrov versus Gosudarstvennyi komitet . . . Soveta ministrov; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 217. 77. Henrikas Iouchkiavitchious, interview with author, Moscow, February 2007. 78. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 273–80. 79. This change is mentioned in an annual report by Central Television’s letter division in 1970; GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 101, l. 5. 80. Lapin’s approach to on-air personnel was not entirely negative, but his praise was reserved for diktory who did not present themselves as authority figures. “Many of the [diktory] have become, we might say, the people’s favorites,” Lapin began. Appearing on screen, he continued, they “personify our capital . . . [and] are sometimes taken for the Kremlin’s trusted envoys [doverennye liudi Kremlia], their voices symbolize the voices of our motherland.” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 1096, l. 45. 81. Sergei Lapin, “Tribuna liudei truda,” Zhurnalist, 1972, no. 5 (May), 14–16. 82. Ibid., 14. This line of attack on journalists “pushing themselves forward” in programs featuring model workers was not new; Central Television executives had been criticizing journalists in these terms with growing frequency in the late 1960s. See, for example, Anatolii Bogomolov, “Novost’ prikhodit k vam: posle vsesoiznoi konferentsii po radio-i teleinformatsii,” Zhurnalist, 1967, no. 1 (January), 47. Central Television employees and TV critics who advocated for more authoritative journalists in news programming often struck a defensive tone. As Georgii Kuznetsov wrote in his 1969 article in Zhurnalist, “lately the accusations have become more frequent: reporters are pushing their humble selves out into the foreground, but who are they, exactly?”; Kuznetsov, “Vstrechaiutsia telepersonazhi,” Zhurnalist, 1969, no. 6 (June), 33. 83. “Doklad i stenogrammy vystuplenii v preniiakh na sobranii partiinogo aktiva ob itogakh iiul’skogo (1970 g) plenuma TsK KPSS,” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 1097, l. 18. 84. Ibid., 21. 85. “Doklad i stenogrammy vystuplenii v preniiakh na sobranii partiinogo aktiva ob itogakh iiul’skogo (1970 g) plenuma TsK KPSS,” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 1097, l. 12. 86. “Protokoly partsobranii i zasedanii partbiuro pervichnykh partorganizatsii Glavnykh readaktsii Tsentral’nogo televideniia: propagandy; informatsii,” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 1105, ll. 38–39. 87. Ibid. 88. V. N. Manziura, “Tema truda v peredachakh programmy Vremia,” GARF f. 6903, op. 48, d. 173, l. 4. 89. “Doklad i stenogrammy vystuplenii v preniiakh na sobranii partiinogo aktiva ob itogakh iiul’skogo (1970 g) plenuma TsK KPSS,” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 1097, l. 21.

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90. Sergei Lapin, “Tribuna liudei truda,” Zhurnalist, 1972, no. 5 (May), 15. Lapin discussed the problems with worker portraits in detail in this 1972 article in Zhurnalist, in which he sharply criticized television journalists for asking artificial questions, and interviewing workers in unflattering, overwhelming settings. 91. See, for example, Dmitriev, “Dokumental’noe iskusstvo. IV. Chelovek televideniia,” 19–20. 92. Text of Gorizont, April 4, 1971; GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1360. 93. Semen Bun’kov, “Tridtsat’ schastlivykh sluchaev,” Zhurnalist, 1973, no. 2 (February), 17–19. 94. Sergei Lapin, “Tribuna liudei truda,” Zhurnalist, 1972, no. 5 (May), 15. 95. See, for example, letter reports in GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 102, ll. 23–24; GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 1, ll. 474–75. The latter mentions a case where factories and construction sites in need of large new workforces requested coverage on Vremia in order to attract workers. 96. “Stenogramma IX otchetno-vyborochnoi partiinoi konferentsii,” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 2, d. 635, l. 48. 97. “Stenogramma sobraniia partiinogo aktiva ob itogakh oktiabr’skogo (1977) Plenuma TsK KPSS, vneocherednoi VII sessii Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR i zadachakh partorganizatsii Goskomiteta,” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 3, d. 231, ll. 26–27. 98. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 18–26. 99. See, for example, the lengthy 1973 report on complaints about distribution of honoraria in OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 2, d. 446, ll. 192–95; and another 1973 discussion of corrupt honoraria practices in OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 2, d. 433, ll. 12, 77–78, 89. 100. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 77–125. For complaints about formulaic and statisticladen news, see OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 147, l. 10; OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 2, d. 649, l. 157. 101. Accomplishing this was highly problematic, and Central Television continually faced obstacles in getting the local studios to curtail their own broadcasts, broadcast Central Television’s Channel 1 in full, and so on. See, for example, GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 1012, ll. 272–79; GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 14, l. 6. On the conflict between local studios and Moscow, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 185–92. 102. For a description from 1973 of how this planning process worked, see GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 257, l. 49. For complaints about the inability to get a mobile television station at Central Television without a month’s notice, see Georgii Kuznetsov, “Vstrechaiutsia telepersonazhi,” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, 1969, no. 6 (June), 32. 103. V. M. Vil’chek, “Ostorozhno: liudi!,” Zhurnalist, 1972, no. 9 (September), 34–36. 104. Georgii Kuznetsov, “K voprosu o vilakh,” Zhurnalist, 1975, no. 3 (March), 61–62. 105. Ivanovskaia, “O programme Vremia,” 32. 106. See Biriukov’s comments to this effect in GARF f. 6903, op. 1, d. 905, l. 12. 107. “Stenogrammy sobranii partiinykh aktivov o gotovnosti partiinoi organizatsiii sluzhb Komiteta k provedeniiu veshchaniia, sviashchennogo 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia V. I. Lenina,” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 1096, l. 34.

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108. “Doklad i rezoliutsiia partsobraniia pervichnoi partrganizatsii Tsentral’nogo televideniia ‘O zadachakh partorganizatsii TsT po propagande reshenii i dokumentov XXIV s”ezda KPSS,’ ” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 2, d. 13, ll. 14–15. 109. These programs were Mezhdunarodnaia panorama (thirty minutes, four times a month), Beseda na mezhdunarodnye temy politicheskogo obozrevatelia gazety ‘Pravda’ Iu. A. Zhukova (thirty minutes, twice a month), Sodruzhestvo (thirty minutes, twice a month), and Sovetskii soiuz glazami zarubezhnykh gostei (fifteen minutes, twice a month); GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 625, l. 6. For a detailed comparison of Soviet and American foreign news in the mid1980s, see Ellen Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 85–123. 110. Ibid. 111. Gosteleradio’s response, the dramatic increase in foreign news coverage, is recorded in “Stenogramma partaktiva ob itogakh noiabr’skogo (1978) Plenuma TsK KPSS i zadachakh, vytekaiushchikh iz vystuplenii na Plenume General’nogo sekretaria TsK KPSS tov. L. I. Brezhneva,” OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 3, d. 451. 112. “Stenogramma partaktiva ob itogakh noiabr’skogo (1978) Plenuma TsK KPSS i zadachakh, vytekaiushchikh iz vystuplenii na Plenume General’nogo sekretaria TsK KPSS tov. L. I. Brezhneva,” OkhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 3, d. 451, ll. 14–15. 113. Ibid., 14. 114. Ibid.; for a list of the foreign affairs commentators and their main professions in 1976 (there were then seven), see GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 625, l. 15. 115. Farid Seiful’-Muliukov, “Segodnia v mire,” Zhurnalist, 1979, no. 9 (September), 10–11. 116. Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium, 85. 117. In 1981 they were still only three in number, versus eleven international news commentators; RGANI f. 5, op. 84, d. 106. “Auditoriia programm obozrevatelei Tsenral’nogo televideniia po voprosam vnutrennei zhizni strany. Spravka,” GARF f. 6903, op. 48, d. 348, ll. 4, 21. 118. Eduard Sagalaev, interview with author, Moscow, March 2007. 119. Ninel’ Shakhova, who joined Vremia as a reporter on cultural news in November 1971, recalls how Lapin criticized a diktor named Ol’ga Dobrokhotova, over an interview she conducted with the jazz musician Leonid Utesov. As Shakhova remembers it, “Lapin was against anyone sitting next to Utesov on camera. The most important thing was him, his thoughts, his words, his memories.” Shakhova, Liudi moego “Vremeni,” 276–77. 120. From the Channel 1 official site, www.1tv.ru/owa/win/ort5_peredach.peredach?p_ shed_name_id=12 (last accessed June 1, 2009). Nonetheless, the role of model biographies has experienced a resurgence under Putin. Since at least 2009, Channel 1 has created a dedicated digital documentary channel called Time, a “unique, historical-biographical channel about the lives of wonderful people, great people of our time and legendary personalities of the past: actors, athletes, musicians, politicians, and scholars”; www.vremya. tv/about (last accessed March 5, 2015).

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Chapter 5. “Spiritual Coauthorship” 1. For the fullest analysis of the film’s context and formal features, see Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies,” and Lovell, “In Search of an Ending.” See also Baudin, “Le phénomène de la série culte en context soviétique et post-soviétique.” 2. As Prokhorova notes, these basic outlines of the Seventeen Moments premise were also present in several earlier Soviet serials, such as His Highness, the Adjutant (directed by E. Tashkov, 1969); Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies,” 65–80. Tikhonov also specialized in these masks from early in his film career. As both Raiskii in Chrezvychainoe proisshestvie (1958, directed by V. Ivchenko) and Bezborod’ko in Zhazhda (1959, directed by E. Tashkov), Tikhonov played a Soviet hero forced to go undercover among enemies, feigning collaboration with them; Kolesnikova and Senchakova, Viacheslav Tikhonov, 29–31, 45. 3. On how and why socialist television audiences were imagined as active audiences in Yugoslavia, and related developments elsewhere in the communist and capitalist worlds of the 1960s, see Mihelj, “Audience History as a History of Ideas.” 4. V. Kisun’ko, “Bez pal’by i pogon’ ” Televidenie i radioveshchanie, no. 12, 1973. On the connection between Soviet culture and popular values, see Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 5–6. 5. On other “deals” between the postwar Soviet state and elites, see Dunham, In Stalin’s Time, and Millar, “The Little Deal.” 6. On Dietl, see Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 130–200. As several scholars have observed, Seventeen Moments’ Cold War storyline made clear the miniseries’ conservative credentials, as did Lioznova’s decision to include several scenes with an actor playing Stalin, after the latter’s long absence from Soviet film. The TV adaptation of Semenov’s novel was originally proposed by Yuri Andropov, the chief of the KGB, and the series’ credits pseudonymously listed two KGB officers as “consultants”; Leonid Parfenov, “Noveishaia istoriia. Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny 25 let spustia” (NTV 1998, in two parts), www.youtube.com/watch?v—nhUwijpNHA, and www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ sZyMEXKYFg. 7. Lovell, “In Search of an Ending,” 310; Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies,” 104; Lipovetsky, “Iskusstvo alibi,” 3. 8. Tikhonov himself emphasized this interpretation of the film in his memoir, claiming that he suggested to Lioznova a famous scene in the café, where Stirlitz sees his wife, brought to Germany by Soviet intelligence for a rendezvous with him. After reading the script, Tikhonov felt this purely human element was missing: “There was a lot of professional, psychological, and purely conspiratorial interest, but that kind of warmth, if you will . . . was missing.” Tikhonov also recalls working with Lioznova to develop this scene, “where our hero is not a professional spy, but simply a man, missing his wife.” Tikhonov, Zhizn’—eto takoe vospominanie, 66. 9. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” 171–73. For a critique of the individualistic approach to “reception,” see Rapping, The Movie of the Week, xxii–xxxii. 10. Imre, “Television for Socialist Women,” 249–55; Anikó Imre, “Adventures in Early Socialist Television Edutainment,” in Popular Television in Eastern Europe, ed. Havens, Imre,

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and Lustyik; Mihelj, “Television Entertainment in Socialist Eastern Europe”; Machek, “The Counter Lady as a Female Prototype”; Kochanowski et al., “An Evening with Friends and Enemies”; and Hammer, “Coy Utopia.” 11. Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 159–76; Mihelj, “The Politics of Privatization,” 251–67. On the relationship between “public” and “private” in late Soviet life, see Bönker, “Depoliticalisation of the Private Life?” 12. Quoted in Galushko ed., Dramaturgiia burzhuaznogo televideniia, 5. 13. Ibid., 8, 9. 14. Ibid., 8. 15. “Stenogrammy sobrani partiinykh aktivov, posviashchennykh dekabr’skomu (1963 g.) i iiun’skomu (1964 g.) Plenumam TsK KPSS,” OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 147, l. 199. 16. Rajagopalan, Leave Disco Dancer Alone!, 66–97. 17. For more on Kolosov’s serial and the origins of the Soviet TV miniseries, see Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies,” 40–43; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 231–33; Prokhorov, “Size Matters.” 18. “Obzory pisem telezritelei za fevral’ 1965 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 65, ll. 34–36. 19. Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies,” 40–41. 20. “Obzory pisem telezritelei za fevral’ 1965 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 65, l. 35. 21. “Obzory pisem telezritelei za fevral’ 1965 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 65, l. 36. 22. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 196–98. 23. Ibid., ll. 29–30. 24. Examples include two serials by the bard poet and writer Mikhail Ancharov, Den’ za dnem’ (1971) and V odnom mikroraione (1976). 25. “Postanovleniia kollegii Goskomiteta i materialy k zasedaniiam kollegii,” GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 626, ll. 111–12. 26. Vladimir Derevitskii, “V Semeinom krugu,” Zhurnalist, 1970, no. 6 (June), 18–20. This article also mentions similar shows in Poland, the GDR, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Estonia. 27. On this problematic set of names for this genre, see Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies,” 63–65. 28. Seventeen Moments was broadcast between August 11 and August 24, but, according to Parfenov’s documentary film, had been intended for broadcast in May, in time for the festive broadcasting period associated with Victory Day; Parfenov, “Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny: 25 let spustia.” Broadcast times and dates quoted in Lovell, “In Search of an Ending,” 307. 29. Rapping, The Movie of the Week, 12–13. 30. Ibid., xxviii. 31. Derevitskii, “V Semeinom krugu,” 20. 32. The conference resulted in a published volume two years later; Mikhailova and Lipkov, eds., Mnogoseriinyi telefil’m, 3–4. 33. Bogomolov, “Teleekran, seriinost’ i problemy khudozhestvennogo vremeni,” 131.

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34. Mikhalkovich, “Istoriia i printsip seriinosti,” 45. 35. V. Kisun’ko, “Bez pal’by i pogon,’ ” Televidenie i radioveshchanie 12 (1973); Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 5–6. 36. The khudsovet met in November 1972 and March and April 1973. Transcripts of the discussion are in RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, dela 353, 354, 355. 37. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennaia soveta studii po priemu 1-oi, 2-oi, i 3-ei serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 353, l. 20; RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 355, l. 8. 38. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennaia soveta studii po priemu 1-oi, 2-oi, i 3-ei serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 353, l. 11. 39. Ibid., l. 23. 40. Anri Vartanov, “O kharaktere mnogoseriinogo povestvovaniia,” in Mnogoseriinyi telefil’m, 99–100. 41. On the council’s reactions to the film’s slowness, see Lovell, “In Search of an Ending,” 310–12. Lioznova’s earlier work, including Tri Topolia na Pliushchikha (1967), also featured long, ponderous shots. 42. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennaia soveta studii po priemu 1-oi, 2-oi, i 3-ei serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 353, l. 10. Dorman was well positioned to judge, since he himself had directed and would subsequently direct several spy films. 43. Ibid., l. 4. 44. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 4-oi 5-oi i 6-oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 354, l. 19. 45. Ibid., l. 13. 46. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennaia soveta studii po priemu 1-oi, 2-oi, i 3-ei serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 353, l. 18. 47. Ibid., l. 37. 48. Lovell, “In Search of an Ending,” 311; “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennaia soveta studii po priemu 1-oi, 2-oi, i 3-ei serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 353, l. 38. 49. Ibid., ll. 31–32. 50. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 7-oi, 8-oi, 9-oi, 10-oi, 11-oi, i 12-oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 355, l. 5. 51. Lipovetsky explores Stirlitz as mediator very fruitfully in “Iskusstvo alibi,” 6–8. 52. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 7-oi, 8-oi, 9-oi, 10-oi, 11-oi, i 12-oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 355, l. 18.

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53. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 4-oi 5-oi i 6-oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 354, ll. 9, 12; “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 7-oi, 8-oi, 9-oi, 10-oi, 11-oi, i 12-oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 355, ll. 10, 24. 54. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 4-oi 5-oi i 6-oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 354, l. 12. 55. Vartanov, “O kharaktere mnogoseriinogo povestvovaniia,” 94–108, 99–100. Members of the Gorky Studio also noted the film’s successful creation of suspense, despite the viewer’s knowledge of the book’s and the war’s outcome; “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 4-oi 5-oi i 6-oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 354, l. 5. 56. Lovell, “In Search of an Ending,” 310; Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies,” 93; Lipovetsky, “Iskusstvo alibi,” 4. 57. Lovell, “In Search of an Ending,” 315. 58. Ibid. 59. This comment is attributed in the meeting transcript to a female speaker named as “T. I. Tolchun”; I was unable to identify this person, but my best guess is that this is a transcription error and the speaker was the director Yulia Tolchina, who made a children’s film called Est’ u menia drug in 1974. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 7-oi, 8-oi, 9-oi, 10-oi, 11-oi, i 12-oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 355, l. 23. 60. E. Evstigneev, “. . . Tol’ko eshche luchshe,” Literaturnaia gazeta, October 3, 1973. 61. Al. Avdeenko, “Dvenadtsat’ vecherov,” Sovetskaia Kul’tura, August 28, 1973, p. 3. 62. Kisun’ko, “Geroi i ego dramaturgicheskoe voploshcheniie,” 64. Kisun’ko makes the same argument immediately after the film’s broadcast as well, in V. Kisun’ko, “Bez pal’by i pogon’,” Televidenie i radioveshchanie, no. 12 (1973): 16. 63. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennaia soveta studii po priemu 1-oi, 2-oi, i 3-ei serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 353, l. 28. 64. Evstigneev, “. . . Tol’ko eshche luchshe.” 65. “Not infrequently,” Avdeenko wrote, these close-ups, accompanied by Kopelian’s voiceover or the composer Mikhail Tariverdiev’s sentimental, nostalgic melodies, were empty of “dramatic depth or development of the image. There is more staticness than thought,” he continued, “more painterliness than character.” Avdeenko, “Dvenadtsat’ vecherov.” See also “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 7-oi, 8-oi, 9-oi, 10-oi, 11-oi, i 12-oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 355, l. 23.

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66. V. Demin, “Uroki mgnovenii,” Sovetskii ekran, no. 24 (1973): 4; see also “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 4-oi 5-oi i 6oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 354, l. 5. 67. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 4-oi 5-oi i 6-oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 354, l. 37. 68. Lipovetsky, “Iskusstvo alibi,” 2. 69. “Obzor pisem telezritelei,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 22, l. 41. 70. On Khrushchev and the release of Gulag prisoners, see Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer. 71. Avdeenko, “Dvenadtsat’ vecherov.” 72. Lipovetsky, “Iskusstvo alibi,” 3. 73. See, for example, Brown, Plutopia, 3–4. 74. Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies,” 100. 75. On the top-down effort to find a new style and new heroes for Soviet culture during and after the Thaw, see Jones, The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, 10–13. 76. As Lipovetsky argues, Stirlitz’s assignment does not contribute to the defeat of Germany—that is already assured by spring 1945. Instead, by thwarting efforts to sign a separate peace on the Western front, Stirlitz ensures the progress of Soviet troops westward to Berlin, making possible the Soviet postwar empire in Eastern Europe. Lipovetsky, “Iskusstvo alibi,” 5. 77. Lovell, “In Search of an Ending,” 312. 78. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennaia soveta studii po priemu 1-oi, 2-oi, i 3-ei serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 353, l. 47. 79. Leonid Parfenov, “Noveishaia istoriia. Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny 25 let spustia” (NTV 1998). 80. Rapping, The Movie of the Week, 35; on Czechoslovak serials, see Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 7–8. Avdeenko noted that “everyday life is cut out”; Avdeenko, “Dvenadtsat’ vecherov.” 81. Riley, “Stalin (and Lenin) at the Movies,” 131. 82. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 4-oi 5-oi i 6-oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 354, l. 42. 83. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennaia soveta studii po priemu 1-oi, 2-oi, i 3-ei serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 353, l. 23. 84. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta studii po obsuzhdeniiu 7-oi, 8-oi, 9-oi, 10-oi, 11-oi, i 12-oi serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 355, l. 20.

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85. Ibid., l. 43. 86. Jones, “Introduction,” 7–13, and essays in Parts II and III of Dilemmas of DeStalinization; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 121–60; see also Zubkova, Russia After the War. 87. Stirlitz’s words to Schlag are “my goals are completely honest” [moi tseli izbytochno chestny]. 88. In this sense, Stirlitz’s “honesty” resembles that of the TV journalists whose education and expertise were necessary to establish the authenticity and convincingness of their subordination to the Party’s viewpoint and objectives. 89. Lipovetsky, “Iskusstvo alibi,” http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2007/3/li16.html. 90. Avdeenko, “Dvenadtsat’ vecherov.” 91. Lovell, “In Search of an Ending,” 310. 92. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennaia soveta studii po priemu 1-oi, 2-oi, i 3ei serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 353, l. 10. 93. On Stirlitz jokes, see Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies,” 119–21; Nepomnyashchy, “The Blockbuster Miniseries on Soviet TV.” 94. Nepomnyashchy, “The Blockbuster Miniseries on Soviet TV,” 269; Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies,” 111. 95. “Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennaia soveta studii po priemu 1-oi, 2-oi, i 3-ei serii televizionnogo fil’ma rezhissera T. M. Lioznovoi ‘Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny,’ ” RGALI f. 2468, op. 8, d. 353, l. 39. 96. Stirlitz jokes abound on the Internet. This one is from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/ pmwiki.php/Main/RussianHumour.

Chapter 6. “KVN Is an Honest Game” 1. On socialist “edutainment,” see Havens, Imre, and Lustyik, eds., Popular Television in Eastern Europe, 4. 2. The producers saw themselves in terms very similar, therefore, to those of Soviet journalists gathered around Aleksei Adzhubei at the newspaper Izvestiia during this period; Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 1–23, 33–45. On the youth “problem” after Stalin, see Kristin Roth-Ey, “Mass Media,” 46–98. For more on youth identities and the Cold War elsewhere, see Medovoi, Rebels. For the Soviet “youth problem” before the Khrushchev era, see Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia. 3. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen.” 4. DeLong, Quiz Craze, 3. 5. On the U.S. quiz show scandals, see ibid.; Hoershelman, Rules of the Game; Anderson, Television Fraud. 6. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 253. Other Central Television shows produced by amateurs included Let’s Go, Girls! (1970–85), What? Where? When? (1975–present), Hello! We’re Looking for Talents! (1970–73), and Little Blue Flame.

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7. This name also consciously referred to the first mass-produced, relatively affordable Soviet television set, the KVN, which was named with the initials of its inventors; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 253; Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’.” 8. On KVN, see Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 253–61; see also Janco, “KVN: Live Television and Improvised Comedy.” 9. See, for example, Sappak, Televidenie i my, 50–51. This idea endured long beyond the late 1950s. In an article about the fourth annual Central Television seminar on reportage [reportazh] in Tallinn in 1969, the journalist Georgii Kuznetsov compared the ideal journalistic feature to sports broadcasting from a football game: the conclusion would be unknown, and out of the control of the broadcaster himself; “Vstrechaiutsia ‘telepersonazhi’,” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, 1969, no. 6 (June), 32–33. 10. Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’.” 11. Ibid.; Gal’perina, Giul’bekian, and Sergeeva, eds., KVN? KVN . . . KVN!, 13. 12. A. Lysenko, interview with Irina Pchelina, on Virtual’nyi muzei radio i televideniia, www. tvmuseum.ru/catalog.asp?ob_no=10625. 13. Ibid. 14. The first example befell the very famous, boyish host of Hello! We’re Looking for Talents!, a musical talent search, and many other programs, including KVN, Aleksandr Masliakov. The second involved the legendary creator of Auction (the show which featured the Bulgarian pop singer in question), Let’s Go, Guys!, and What? Where? When?, Vladimir Voroshilov. Both were back on the air shortly after these incidents. 15. “Stenogramma sobraniia partaktiva Goskomiteta CM SSSR po televideniiu i radioveshchaniiu ot 1 oktiabria 1973 goda,” OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 2, d. 433, l. 89; “O praktike privlecheniia neshatnykh avtorov k sozdaniiu peredach v Glavnykh redaktsiiakh Tsentral’nogo televideniia i radioveshchaniia,” GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 256, l. 179. 16. Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’.” 17. Gal’perina, “Molodezhnaia redaktsiia.” 18. Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’ ”; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 253–54; Janco, “KVN: Live Television and Improvised Comedy,” 125–27. Muratov, Akselrod, and Iakovlev had all participated in student theater performances known as kapustniki. 19. Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’.” 20. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 255–57. 21. Gal’perina, Giul’bekian, and Sergeeva, eds., KVN? KVN . . . KVN!, 11. 22. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 255–57. 23. Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’.” 24. Ibid.; A. V. Men’shikov, “KVN—Byloe i dumy,” Virtual’nyi muzei televideniia i radio, http://tvmuseum.ru/catalog.asp?ob_no=10516. 25. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 260. 26. Men’shikov, “KVN—Byloe i dumy.” 27. KVN’s efirnye papki included only the introductory remarks of the show’s hosts and a description of the contests in which teams would compete, not the team’s skits, jokes, songs, or other responses.

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28. Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’.” 29. For contrasting evaluations of the significance of the show’s political satirical play, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 255–56, and Janco, “KVN: Live Television and Improvised Comedy,” 128–33. 30. The youth redaktsiia made a documentary film based on one of the journalist Anatolii Agranovskii’s essays; Gal’perina, “Molodezhnaia redaktsiia,” www.tvmuseum.ru/ catalog.asp?ob_no=22&page=3. Adzhubei appeared on television as well; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 153. 31. Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 140–45; Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, 33–70. 32. For Odessa’s role on KVN, and more on the myth of Jewish Odessa in Soviet culture, see Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers, 131–90. 33. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 260; Janco, “KVN: Live Television and Improvised Comedy,” 134–35. 34. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 255. 35. For the “new form of transportation” contest, see KVN-64, “Romantiki,” Gosteleradiofond archive, remote storage facility in Reutovo, Russia, October 11, 2006. For other contests, see Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’,” www.tvmuseum.ru/catalog. asp?ob_no=8725. 36. In the 1964 BRIZ contest to create a new form of transportation, one team presented a new Soviet “flying turtle” car that promised to be slower than walking, as part of a satire on the quality of Soviet automobiles and, conversely, the decades-long waits to purchase them; KVN-64 “Romantiki.” 37. Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’.” 38. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 253; Janco, “KVN: Live Television and Improvised Comedy,” 135–36. 39. KVN raskryvaet sekrety, 25–26. 40. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 257. 41. The College Bowl radio (1953–56) and television (1959–70) show in the United States was similarly modeled on sport, although it did not emphasize improvisation or humor. 42. Edelman, Serious Fun, 57; Edelman, Spartak Moscow. 43. KVN raskryvaet sekrety, 22. 44. Edelman, Serious Fun, ix–x, 57–58. 45. In the show’s first few years the jury was seated on stage and interacted with the players directly and frequently; by the mid-1960s the jury had moved to a balcony above the stage and conversed with contestants somewhat less often. The show’s audience and participants complained about this change. See, for example, KVN raskryvaet sekrety, 268–70. 46. KVN-64, “Romantiki.” 47. Viewer letter reports in Central Television’s archive are sporadic and incomplete before the mid-1960s. I did not find complaints about KVN’s jury before 1966, but memoir sources mention that these complaints began in 1963 at the latest. See, for example, “Obzory pisem radioslushatelei (sovetskikh i zarubezhnykh) i telezritelei za ianvar’–mart,

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iul’–dekabr’ 1964 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 58, l. 214; and “Obzory pisem telezritelei za fevral’ 1965 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 65, ll. 12–13. 48. See, for example, “Obzory pisem telezriteli za ianvar’–mart i avgust 1966,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 69, ll. 38, 65. The report for March notes that one-third of the letters to the show (or about sixty letters) were complaints about the jury’s fairness. This kind of letter appears frequently and consistently in subsequent years; for example, “Obzory pisem telezritelei za ianvar’, fevral’, aprel’–sentiabr’, noiabr’, dekabr’ 1968,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 80, ll. 12, 39a. 49. Men’shikov, “KVN—Byloe i dumy.” 50. Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’.” Gal’perina claims that the deciding voice was that of the chess master Mikhail Tal’, who convinced the jury to award an additional point for the special pins. 51. Ibid. 52. KVN raskryvaet sekrety, 21. 53. Men’shikov, “KVN—Byloe i dumy.” 54. KVN raskryvaet sekrety, 256. 55. Georgii Fere, “Chego my zhdem ot KVN?,” Zhurnalist, 1968, no. 1 (January), 14. 56. See, for example, Gal’perina, Giul’bekian, and Sergeeva, eds., KVN? KVN . . . KVN!, 14–95; Gal’perina and Sergeeva, KVN otvechaet na pis’ma, 64–68. 57. KVN raskryvaet sekrety, 251. 58. Georgii Fere, “Chego my zhdem ot KVN?,” 13. 59. Ibid., 15. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. One indicator that such parallels were always on the minds of the show’s participants is the story of Andrei Men’shikov’s Moscow Construction Engineering Institute (MISI) team’s debut in 1967. Anticipating that everyone would expect this new team to emphasize its youth, the team dressed up as old men, with white beards, 1930s-style ties, hunched posture, and rattling coughs. Men’shikov claims that one member of the jury, the journalist and writer Iaroslav Golovanov, later told him that everyone on the jury had at first thought that they were imitating the Politburo; the MISI team then stood up straight and dramatically took off their beards, revealing their youthful faces. Men’shikov, “KVN—Byloe i dumy.” 63. KVN raskryvaet sekrety, 251. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 253. 66. Ibid., 251. 67. Gal’perina and Sergeeva, eds., KVN otvechaet na pis’ma. 68. Ibid., 6. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 7–8.

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71. Ibid., 73. 72. Fere, “Chego my zhdem ot KVN,” 16. 73. Ibid. 74. KVN raskryvaet sekrety, 265. 75. Ibid., 270–71. 76. Nathans, “The Dictatorship of Reason.” 77. Matvei Levinton, “KVN,” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, 1968, no. 2 (February), 21. On partisanship among Soviet soccer fans and official responses to it, see Edelman, Serious Fun, 188–93. 78. See, for example, “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1969 god,” GARF. f. 6903, op. 10, d. 88, l. 11a; “Obzory pisem telezritelei za ianvar’, fevral’, aprel’–sentiabr’, noiabr’, dekabr’ 1968,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 80, ll. 12, 67–67a. 79. On the loss of the old spirit and improvisation, see for example “Obzory pisem telezritelei za 1971 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 1, ll. 7–7a, 491; KVN otvechaet na pis’ma, 63–65. 80. For a more detailed discussion of the 1968–70 crisis at Gosteleradio, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 213–19. Andrew Janco argues, based on memoir literature, that KVN fell victim to a round of program closures that began in 1970 but continued through 1971– 72; Janco, “KVN: Live Television and Improvised Comedy,” 135. 81. Youth Desk staff claimed that even the city Party Committee in “a strict city like Ul’ianovsk” (Lenin’s birthplace) did not hold meetings on evenings when KVN was broadcast; “Protokol #7 otkrytogo partiinogo sobraniia Glavnoi redaktsii peredach dlia molodezhi ot 25 avgusta 1971 g.,” OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 2, d. 16, l. 133. 82. Ibid., 130–32; “Stenogramma otchetno-vybornogo partsobraniia pervichnoi partorganizatsii Tsentral’nogo televideniia” (November 20, 1972), OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 2, d. 241, l. 17. 83. “Protokol #7 otkrytogo partiinogo sobraniia Glavnoi redaktsii peredach dlia molodezhi ot 25 avgusta 1971 g.,” OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 2, d. 16, ll. 130–32. 84. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 260. A. Men’shikov reports that the chief editor of the Youth Programming Division in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Valerii Ivanov, was attacked at a meeting of the Gosteleradio leadership about the prominence of Jewish players on KVN, with “remarks of the type, ‘what kind of program are you making? You have one captain named Bromberg, and the other is Fromberg!’ ” Men’shikov claims that Ivanov replied, “But we also have a captain Men’shikov!” Men’shikov, “KVN—Byloe i dumy.” 85. For the 1972 Masliakov affair, see “Protokoly zasedanii Komiteta No 22–No 26 i prilozheniia k nim,” GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 135, l. 5. 86. After the cancellation of Let’s Go, Guys! in 1973, Central Television created at least two similar programs, Rebiata nastoiashchie [Real Guys] and Sprint dlia vsekh [Sprint for Everyone]. 87. One script is available in “Tsentral’naia televideniie. Glavnaia redaktsiia programm dlia molodezhi. Teksty televizionnykh peredach za noiabr’ 1973 g. 1 noaibr’–26 noiabria,” GARF f. 6903, op. 34, d. 133, ll. 70–95.

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88. Fere, “Chego my zhdem ot KVN,” 15. 89. Vladimir Makoveev, “ ’Auktsiony,’ ili pervye ‘reklamnye shou’ na televidenii.” On the Soviet economy as an economy of excess, rather than scarcity, see Oushakine, “Against the Cult of Things,” 198–236. 90. Gumbert, “Split Screens?,” 156–57. 91. For descriptions of these contests, see for example Men’shikov, “KVN—Byloe i dumy”; KVN otvechaet na pis’ma, 38–39; Gal’perina, “KVN—Kak eto delalos’.” 92. Makoveev, “Auktsiony.” Tickets to Auction were also given away as consolation prizes on other game shows, such as Let’s Go, Girls! See, for example, “A nu-ka devushki ot 21 fev. 1970 g,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1193, efirnaia papka #1039. The audience was relatively small, however, made up of ninety-nine “couples”—a form of organization that reflected Auction’s focus on household consumption; S. Torchinskii, “Auktsion,” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, 1969, no. 8 (August), 38. 93. Anatolii Lysenko, “My s Voroshilovym dralis.’ Kak dvum legendam TV vmeste rabotalos’ i uvolnialos’,” Novaya gazeta, no. 94 (December 15, 2005), p. 37; Makoveev, “Auktsiony.” Makoveev only remembers five of the six, but there are scripts for six episodes in Central Television’s archive. Makoveev explains that black-and-white TV sets were featured because after color sets began to be manufactured on a large scale, but were still quite expensive, Soviet households ceased buying black-and-white sets (creating an excess of inventory) but were not yet buying large numbers of color sets either. 94. Torchinskii, “Auktsion,” 37. 95. See, for example, the Youth Desk editor Margarita Eskina’s discussion of the need for more portraits of working-class youth, in their capacity as “young owners [molodoi khoziain]” of the country in a Party meeting of Youth Desk staff on March 24, 1969, in OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 913, l. 122. 96. Ibid., 38. 97. Torchinskii, “Auktsion,” 38. 98. Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 15. 99. Ibid. 100. Makoveev, “Auktsiony.” 101. See, for example, “Auktsion #5 Dary moria i okeana,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1024, efirnaia papka 9315. 102. Auction received just over 100,000 letters in 1969; “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1969 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 88, l. 11; Makoveev, “Auktsiony.” 103. “Obzory pisem telezritelei za ianvar’–dekabr’ 1969 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 89, l. 61–62a. 104. Torchinskii, “Auktsion,” 38–39. 105. See, for example, “Auktsion #5. Dary moria i okeana,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1024, efirnaia papka 9315; and “Auktsion #6. Gosudarstvennoe strakhovanie,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1193, efirnaia papka 719. In the latter episode audience members voted by

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raising their hands, rather than with applause; Makoveev reports the use of a microphone to measure applause in the television broadcast as well. 106. “Auktsion #5. Dary moria i okeana,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1024, efirnaia papka 9315. 107. Makoveev suggests that the vote was skewed by the fact that Lysenko let the audience know that a special microphone was registering their applause only partway through the demonstration of each model; applause for the models after that point was therefore louder; Makoveev, “Auktsiony.” 108. Ibid. 109. Torchinskii, “Auktsion,” 38. 110. These winners were announced in “Auktsion #5. Dary moria i okeana,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1024, efirnaia papka 9315. 111. Voroshilov mentions these viewer complaints in Torchinskii, “Auktsion,” 38. 112. Ibid.; see also Makoveev, “Auktsiony.” 113. “Obzory pisem telezritelei za ianvar’–dekabr’ 1969 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 89, ll. 61a–62; see also letters quoted in Torchinskii, “Auktsion,” 39. 114. One story mentions a musical contest on the show’s sixth episode, devoted to insurance policies, in which a pop group performed a song about a group of scientists who were mortally injured in a nuclear accident and then decided to live out their remaining days in luxury on the proceeds of their life insurance policies. Another account claims that the Politburo member Mikhail Suslov attended a hockey game at which Soiuztorgreklama awarded a color television to a player who was named “best player of the game.” Suslov was not pleased; he began to investigate all of Soiuztorgreklama’s activities and soon shut down Auction as well. Lysenko, “My s Voroshilovym dralis’ ”; Makoveev, “Auktsiony”; Grabel’nikov, Zhurnalisty XX Veka, 691. 115. After Auction’s cancellation, Voroshilov created and directed Let’s Go, Guys! [A nu-ka, parni!] (1971–73), a show focusing on male working-class youth and featuring athletic contests and demonstrations of military preparedness. 116. Artloto, discussed in Chapter 7, offered viewers autographed photos, records, and record players and received hundreds of thousands of letters as a result. There were exceptions to the modesty of the prizes, however, on local stations. A Leningrad show called Glory [Slava] that focused on model workers was criticized in a 1971 article for offering luxurious prizes, like vacation packages, refrigerators, even pianos and boats; Tatiana Marchenko, “V Leningrade takaia peredacha . . .,” Televidenie, radioveshchaniie, no. 4 (April 1971): 20. 117. Makoveev, “Auktsiony.” 118. See, for example, Lapin’s comments in “Protokol #7, zasedanie partsobraniia Glavnoi Redaktsii Informatsii ot 9 iiunia 1970,” in OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 1105, ll. 18, 38–39. Lapin’s intervention in favor of non-intelligentsia subjects of the television camera is discussed in Chapter 4. 119. For more on Kapler, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 121–27.

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120. “Doklad i stenogrammy vystuplenii v preniiakh na sobranii partiinogo aktiva ob itogakh iiul’skogo (1970 g) plenuma TsK KPSS,” OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 1097, l. 18. 121. Aleksandr Vasinskii, “Vsepronikaiushchii i tysiachelikii. Zametki vladeltsa televizora,” Zhurnalist, 1976, no. 5 (May), 49; “O propagande sistemy professional’notekhnicheskogo obrazovaniia v glavnoi redaktsii programm dlia molodezhi TsT” (November 1977), GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 781, l. 63. 122. “A nu-ka, devushki!,” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, 1970, no. 6 (June), 23. 123. “O propagande sistemy professional’no-tekhnicheskogo obrazovaniia v glavnoi redaktsii programm dlia molodezhi TsT” (November 1977), GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 781, ll. 63–64. 124. The song was titled “Let’s Keep Going, Going, Merry Girlfriends! [Idem, idem, veselye podrugi],” and its chorus was “Let’s go, girls! Let’s go, beauties! / Let the country sing about us / and with a ringing song let everyone worship / our names among the heroes!” 125. On Soviet beauty contests, see Melanie Ilic, “Women and Competition in Soviet Society,” in Competition in Socialist Society, ed. Miklóssy and Ilic, 159–75. In post-Soviet memoirs and interviews, Youth Desk personnel often stress the show’s uniquely Soviet, enlightening qualities. Anatolii Lysenko, a Youth Desk editor and host of Auction, recalled that the show’s focus was not on beauty but on professionalism and intellect; interview with Irina Pchelina, http://ftv.msu.ru/index.php?mode=news&id=158. Andrei Men’shikov makes a similar claim in “Za kadrom. Televizionnye baiki proshlogo veka,” www.tvmuseum.ru/catalog.asp?ob_no=10698. Both Men’shikov and Lysenko neglect to mention the very prominent consumer and homemaking contests that were also a key feature of the show, which fit less well with the idea of a superior, enlightening Soviet beauty contest. 126. “Voprosy esteticheskogo vosptianiia v peredachakh glavnoi redaktsii programm dlia molodezhi i glavoi redaktsii programm dlia detei tsentral’nogo televideniia” (June 1973), GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 253, l. 61. 127. Men’shikov, “Za kadrom.” 128. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen,” 214. 129. Vasinskii, “Vsepronikaiushchii i tysiachelikii,” 49. 130. For descriptions of the production of several broadcasts of the show, see Men’shikov, “Za kadrom.” 131. “A nu-ka devushki ot 21 Fev. 1970 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1193, efirnaia papka 1039. 132. Proshutinskaia hosted the show until 1975; from 1975 it was hosted by Aleksander Masliakov, the host of KVN and Hello! We’re Looking for Talents! 133. “A nu-ka, devushki!, 21 February 1970,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1193, efirnaia papka 1039. 134. “A nu-ka, devushki!, 16 March 1970,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1193. 135. “A nu-ka, devushki!, 28 December 1971,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1358. 136. On the dance contest, see “A nu-ka, devushki!,” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, 1970, no. 6 (June), 23.

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137. “O propagande sistemy professional’no-tekhnicheskogo obrazovaniia v glavnoi redaktsii programm dlia molodezhi TsT,” GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 781, l. 63. 138. “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1972 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 2, l. 64. 139. “A nu-ka, devushki!,” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, 1970, no. 6 (June), 23. 140. “Obzor pisem telezritelei 1973 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 27, l. 82. 141. Ibid., l. 81. 142. Men’shikov, “Za kadrom.” 143. The show was shot from locations in Moscow very early on, including an episode set at VDNKh in 1972; “A nu-ka, devushki!, 7 March 1972,” GARF f. 6903, op. 34, d. 53. By the mid-1970s it was broadcasting from more remote villages outside Moscow, as in the case of one broadcast described by Men’shikov in “Za kadrom.” 144. Men’shikov, “Za kadrom.” 145. The show seems to have been somewhat less popular than KVN or Hello! We’re Looking for Talents! in the early 1970s. One survey in 1972 found that roughly 60 percent of viewers reported watching Let’s Go, Girls!, versus more than 80 percent for KVN and Hello! “Subbotnie i voskresnye peredachi 1-oi programmy tsentral’nogo televideniia (Analiz printsipov programmirovaniia i issledovaniie auditorii),” GARF f. 6903, op. 48, d. 115, ll. 14–32. 146. After receiving just over 100,000 letters in 1970, the show received just over 10,000 in 1972; just under 20,000 in 1973, just over 10,000 in 1976; letter reports in GARF f. 6903, op. 36. 147. “A nu-ka, devushki!, 21 February 1970,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1193, efirnaia papka 1039. 148. Ibid. 149. Footage of pre-1985 broadcasts of the show seems not to have survived in the Gosteleradiofond archive. Description of this ceremony is based on the script, which, although signed by the Glavlit censors without edits, may not have been carried out exactly as written; “A nu-ka devushki ot 21 fev. 1970 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1193, efirnaia papka 1039. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid. 152. Men’shikov, “Za kadrom.”

Chapter 7. A Dress Rehearsal for Life 1. What? Where? When? was created in 1975, but as a family-based quiz show like Family Feud in the United States, and broadcast only a handful of times. The basic outlines of its current format were developed in 1977. 2. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 128. 3. Nathans and Platt criticize Yurchak for drawing too sharp a distinction between his subjects and dissidents; “Sotsialisticheskaia po forme,” http://magazines.russ.ru/ nlo/2010/101/ke12.html. 4. Imperiia azarta can be viewed at http://cccp.tv/video/Imperija_azarta.

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5. The Moscow Hippodrome, one venue where gambling was public and legal, remained open for much of the Soviet period, and card games and billiards were important preoccupations of Soviet political and cultural elites, a fact that is reflected in both Soviet literature and post-Soviet memoirs. See, for example, Anatolii Rybakov’s Deti Arbata and Leonid Leonov’s Vor; Aroseva, Bez grima na bis. 6. On Soviet lotteries and their place in the larger Soviet economy, see Ironside, “The Value of a Ruble.” For a list of these lotteries, see Terebova, Katalog lotereinykh biletov RSFSR i SSSR. 7. I am drawing here on one tradition in the history and philosophy of play and gambling, which aims to understand the cultural functions of play and its attractions for players. For the best survey of this tradition as it relates to gambling and other games of chance specifically, see Reith, The Age of Chance, 1–13, 127–73. 8. The first drawing received 900,000 postcards, despite the fact that the first show had been broadcast in a bad time slot, without any publicity beyond the mention of an “estrada concert” in the printed TV program; “Obzory pisem telezritelei za 1971 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 1, l. 462a. 9. Ibid. 10. Reith, The Age of Chance, 156–58. 11. Artloto #8 (November 27, 1971), GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1368. 12. Artloto #9 (January 1, 1972), GARF f. 6903, op. 35, d. 39, l. 48. 13. Artloto #11 (March 31, 1972), GARF f. 6903, op. 35, d. 39, l. 147. 14. Artloto #2 (March 20, 1971), GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1368. 15. Ibid.; Artloto 1-yi Vypusk (March 13, 1971), GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1368. 16. Artloto #11 (March 31, 1972), GARF f. 6903, op. 35, d. 39, l. 147. 17. Artloto #9 (January 1, 1972), GARF f. 6903, op. 35, d. 39, l. 48. 18. Artloto #11 (March 31, 1972), GARF f. 6903, op. 35, d. 39, l. 151. 19. Artloto #12 (May 27, 1972), GARF f. 6903, op. 35, d. 39, l. 245. 20. Ibid.; Artloto #2. 21. Artloto #10 (February 27, 1972), GARF f. 6903, op. 35, d. 39, ll. 105–6. 22. Artloto #24 (July 1, 1973), GARF f. 6903, op. 35, d. 95, l. 208. 23. Artloto #39 (October 25, 1974), GARF f. 6903, op. 35, d. 160, ll. 226–27. 24. Fiske, Television Culture, 270. 25. On lotteries under Khrushchev, see Ironside, “Khrushchev’s Cash-and-Goods Lotteries.” 26. Reith, The Age of Chance, 94–106, 128–29. 27. Vartanov, Televizionnaia estrada, 35–40. 28. Hanson, “Plebiscitarian Patrimonialism in Putin’s Russia.” 29. “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1978 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 79, l. 55. 30. “Protokol #5 otkrytogo partiinogo sobraniia Glavnoi redaktsii programm dlia molodezhi ot 27 aprelia 1977 g. Doklad on ‘Perspektivy molodezhnogo veshchaniia v 1978 g. i voprosy perestroiki raboty redaktsiia,’ ” ibid., ll. 17–18.

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31. “Stenogramma otchetnoi partiinoi konferentsii” (December 22, 1977), OKhDOPIM f. 2930, op. 3, d. 223, l. 61. 32. Voroshilov, Fenomen igry (Moscow: Bibliotechka khudozhestvennyi samodeiatel’nosti, 1982); an electronic version of the relevant section is at http://znatoki.kulichki.net/dz/ mats/fen15.html. 33. Voroshilov continued, however, to tinker with the game’s rules and format until his death in 2001. For a detailed account of each year’s matches, see http://chgk.tvigra.ru/ library/?30years. 34. “Razgovory na khodu s Nataliei Stetsenko,” in A. Korin, Fenomen “Chto? Gde? Kogda?,” 33. 35. Voroshilov, Fenomen igry; an electronic version of the relevant section is at http:// znatoki.kulichki.net/dz/mats/fen15.html. 36. For a detailed account of each year’s rules and matches, see http://chgk.tvigra.ru/ library/?30years. 37. Voroshilov, Fenomen igry, http://chgk.tvigra.ru/library/?fenomen/14#cur. 38. Interview with author, Moscow, February 13, 2007. 39. Voroshilov, Fenomen igry, http://chgk.tvigra.ru/library/?fenomen/14#cur. 40. Lewin, The Soviet Century, 261. 41. Voroshilov, Fenomen igry, http://chgk.tvigra.ru/library/?fenomen/14#cur. 42. Ibid. 43. On the rise of individualism in late Soviet culture, see Paretskaya, “A Middle Class Without Capitalism?” 44. Kseniia Larina, radio interview with Aleksandr Drouz and Viktor Sidnev, Ekho Moskvy, aired March 23, 2003, 11:10–12:00. Transcript available at http://chgk.tvigra.ru/ library/?articles/echo05#cur. 45. “Chto? Gde? Kogda?—televizionnaia igra,” www.tvmuseum.ru/catalog.asp?ob_no=6801. 46. According to Sagalaev, Voroshilov had always wanted the game to be played for money; Sagalaev, who saw Voroshilov as his mentor but was technically Voroshilov’s boss and censor, had rejected this idea since he understood that it would mean cancellation. Interview with Eduard Sagalaev, Moscow, February 13, 2007. 47. Such settings abounded on Soviet television in the 1970s. For example, the wildly popular comedy serial Kabachok “13 Stul’ev” was set in a Polish bar and frequently featured estrada performances in Western European languages; the serial film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was set in a comfortingly distant, prerevolutionary milieu. On Sherlock Holmes, see Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies,” 207–29; Nepomnyashchy, “Imperially, My Dear Watson,” in Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 128–40. 48. Nathans and Platt, “Sotsialisticheskaia po forme,” http://magazines.russ.ru/ nlo/2010/101/ke12.html. 49. Interview with Sagalaev, Moscow, February 13, 2007; Interview with Aleksandr Drouz, St. Petersburg, March 19, 2015. 50. Voroshilov, Fenomen igry, http://chgk.tvigra.ru/library/?fenomen/14#cur.

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51. Interview with Sagalaev, Moscow, February 13, 2007. Sagalaev believes Voroshilov saw the znatoki in exactly this way. 52. Ibid. 53. Korin, Fenomen Chto? Gde? Kogda?, 147. 54. Chto? Gde? Kogda? na 6-ti dvd diskakh. Legendarnye finaly, mezhdunarodnye igry 80-x (Gosteleradiofond, 2006), DVD recording. 55. The first non-book prizes were introduced in the 1985 final, but these were of low monetary value—a toy owl (the show’s mascot) and the famous top that spun the wheel, for example. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. For the history of the diamond owl and the players who have received it, see the website of the current Russian television company producing Chto? Gde? Kogda?, Prodiuserskii tsentr “Igra-TV,” http://chgk.tvigra.ru/encyclopedia/?nagrada2. 58. Interview with author, February 2007.

Epilogue 1. Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 136–37. 2. Memoir accounts of the origins of View [Vzgliad] vary substantially in their accounts of the show’s exact timing and the bureaucratic forces promoting it, but the initiative began well before Chernobyl. Mickiewicz dates the origins of View to 1985; Mickiewicz, Changing Channels, 69. Twelfth Floor first aired in January 1986, and the 27th Party Congress in February 1986 was followed by a meeting between Gorbachev and Central Television’s leadership. If we follow Lysenko’s account, in which the show’s creation was initiated at the same time as that of Before and After Midnight (which first aired in October 1986; its host, Vladimir Molchanov, recalls being recruited in the days immediately following Chernobyl), then sometime between February and April 1986 is likeliest. Vladimir Molchanov, “Ne bylo okno, kotoroe ne gorelo by v moskve i drugikh gorodakh,” in TV Vremena peremen. Gorbachev, Memoirs, 187. On the origins of Twelfth Floor in a preperestroika youth program, The World and Youth [Mir i molodezh’], see Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 172–78. 3. For the specific connection to the rise of VCRs, see Paasilinna, Glasnost’ and Soviet Television, 149. 4. Mickiewicz, Changing Channels, 65–82. 5. Paasilinna, Glasnost’ and Soviet Television, 150; Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 177; Mickiewicz, Changing Channels, 65–92. See also Siefert, Mass Culture and Perestroika; Birgit Beumers, Pop Culture Russia!, 16–20. 6. Anatolii Lysenko, “I vot poiavliaiutsia chetvero obormotov,” in TV-vremena peremen?, 88. 7. Ibid.; see also Dodolev, The Vzgliad—Bitly perestroiki, 34–35. 8. Conflicting claims about who deserves most credit for creating the show abound, but multiple accounts confirm that Lysenko and Sagalaev were among the key organizers,

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along with Stas Polzikov, Sergei Lomakin, Andrei Shipilov, and others; Dodolev, The Vzgliad—Bitly perestroiki, 35–36. 9. See, for example, View of October 2, 1987. See also Do i posle polunochi of March 5, 1987. This broadcast of the relatively staid Do i posle polunochi featured dancers in luxurious 1920s-style costumes doing the Charleston; after this clip, the program’s hosts commented that “there was a time when this kind of dancing was criticized, but happily that time is now past”; accessed via etvnet.com. 10. Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 148. 11. Dodolev, The Vzgliad—Bitly perestroiki, 32. 12. For more on the Soviet response to VCRs, see Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 11–13. 13. Do i posle polunochi of November 26, 1988, and March 5, 1987; accessed via etvnet.com. 14. Wachtel, “One Day—Fifty Years Later.” 15. Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 265–79. 16. While Before and After Midnight’s set resembled a living room, furnished with upholstered chairs and lacking the imposing desk dividing hosts and commentators visually from the audience, it was not markedly different from sets for similar discussion programs in the West. Central Television also had several shows in the 1960s and ’70s that featured sets dressed up as cafes or living-room-like spaces. 17. Twelfth Floor broadcast from 1986, accessed via tv-80.ru, http://tv-80.ru/molodezhnye/ 12-etazh/. 18. The use of the calque from English “brainstorm” [mozgovoi shtorm] also reflects the influence, among Youth Desk staff, of Voroshilov’s promotion of this practice, reflected in What? Where? When?’s “minute for reflection.” 19. Dima Zakharov was to be the smart guy, Sasha Liubimov the playboy, List’ev the analytical one, and Oleg Vakulovskii, who appeared only on the first few broadcasts, the unflappable police inspector; Dodolev, The Vzgliad—Bitly perestroiki, 35–37. 20. Ibid. 21. Interview with Lomakin in ibid., 35–37. 22. On the continued strength of these conventions for Central Television diktory in the late 1980s, see Ermilova, Ekran liubvi i trevogi, 30–35. 23. View episode from October 3, 1987. 24. Quoted in Dodolev, The Vzgliad—Bitly perestroiki, 34. 25. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 126–57. 26. View of October 2, 1987. 27. See, for example, “Tsentral’noe televidenie. Glavnaia redaktsiia muzykal’nykh programm. Teksty televizionnykh peredach za mai–iiun’ 1977 g. 1 maia–28 iiunia,” GARF f. 6903, op. 35, d. 330, l. 356. 28. Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 43–49. 29. Parks, Cultures in Orbit, 23–24. 30. Text from www.gradsky.com/txt/186.shtml. A few lines later, the song alludes directly to Ot vsei dushi [With All My Heart], the show best described by this parody of 1970s

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television’s mix of pathos, surveillance, and censorship; Evans, “The Soviet Way of Life as a Way of Feeling.” 31. See, for example, Anatolii Lysenko, TV zhiv’em i v zapisi (Moscow: PROZAiK, 2011) and essays in TV—vremena peremen. Kniga priznanii i otkrovenii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Ikar, 2010). 32. Ibid. 33. The series of hour-long documentary films, one for each year of Soviet history, was entitled Our Biography [Nasha biografiia]. These films were effectively a remake of an earlier series, made in 1967, that was likewise based on the premise of one film covering each year of Soviet history, entitled Chronicles of a Half Century [Letopis’ poluveka]. 34. Interview with author, February 2007. 35. Ibid. 36. Lysenko made this observation in an interview with Dodolev; Dodolev, The Vzgliad—Bitly perestroiki, 73. 37. The show also served as a stepping stone for political figures, such as Anatolii Sobchak, Boris Nemtsov, and Galina Starovoitova, to name just three, who went on to prominence in the 1990s partly thanks to their appearances on View; ibid., 40. 38. Leont’ev “Predislovie”; Dodolev, The Vzgliad—Bitly perestroiki, 7. 39. Sinitsin died of a heart attack shortly after Sagalaev took him off the air; Sagalaev, “Eto byla tragediia—ia dolgo prosil u gospoda boga proshcheniia,” in TV vremena peremen, 145–46. 40. See, for example, Rivera, “Elites in Post-Communist Russia.” 41. See, for example, Istoriia otechestvennogo televideniia. Vzgliad issledovatelei i praktikov. Uchebnoe posobie, ed. G. A. Shevelev, Vysshaia shkola (Fakul’tet) Televideniia MGU imeni M.V. Lomonosova (Moscow: Aspekt Press, 2012); and Teleradioefir: istoriia i sovremennost’, ed. Ia. N. Zasurskii (M: Aspekt Press, 2005). These books cover influential early critics like Sappak extensively and, alongside work by well-regarded media scholars, feature essays by current media elites that, in some cases, define the contemporary Russian television system’s problems and objectives in terms familiar from the Brezhnev era. See, for example, Ernst, “Kogda govoriat, chto Internet ub’et televidenie, eto glupost’,” in Istoriia otechestvennogo televideniia, 113–18. There is also a young and vibrant field of Russian media studies. See, for example, Beumers et al., eds., The Post-Soviet Russian Media, 2–5. 42. For more on the call-in shows, see Maslennikova, “Putin and the Tradition of the Interview”; and Ryazanova-Clark, “The Discourse of a Spectacle.” 43. On Russia’s adaption of global genres and formats, see Hutchings and Rulyova, Television and Culture in Putin’s Russia, 11 and chapters 4–7. 44. Gehlbach, “Reflections on Putin and the Media,” 77–87. 45. Hanson, “Plebiscitarian Patrimonialism in Putin’s Russia.” 46. Hutchings and Rulyova, Television and Culture, 220.

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Archives Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) [State Archive of the Russian Federation] Fond 6903: Gosteleradio SSSR Gosudarstvennoe biudzhetnoe uchrezhdenie, “Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Moskvy” (GBU “TsGA Moskvy”) [State Budgetary Organization, “Central State Archive of Moscow”]. This organization comprises several Moscow City archives, including the Photography archive, formerly the Tsentral’nyi arkhiv elektronnykh i audiovizual’nykh dokumentov Moskvy [Central Archive of Electronic and Audiovisual Documents of Moscow]) Gosudarstvennyi fond televizionnykh i radioprogramm (Gosteleradiofond) [State Fund of Television and Radio Programs] Gosteleradiofond oral history project Television recording collection Otdel khraneniia dokumentov obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Moskvy (OKhDOPIM) [Department for the Preservation of Documents of Moscow’s Social and Political History] Fond 4: Moskovskii gorodskoi komitet KPSS [Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] Fond 2930: Partiinyi komitet Gosteleradio SSSR [Gosteleradio Party Committee] Rossiiskii gosurdarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) [Russian State Archive of Literature and Art]

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Fond 2468: Tsentral’naia kinostudiia detskikh i iunosheskikh fil’mov im. Gorkogo [Gorky Central Film Studio for Children’s and Youth Film] Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI) [Russian State Archive of Contemporary History] Fond 5: Apparat tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS [Staff of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii-m (RGASPI-m) [Russian State Archive of Social Political History–Youth] Fond 1: Apparat Tsentral’nogo Komiteta VLKSM (Komsomol) [Staff of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League]

Contemporary Newspapers and Periodicals Iskusstvo kino Literaturnaia gazeta Novyi mir Ogonek Pravda Sovetskaia kul’tura Sovetskaia pechat’ Sovetskoe radio i televidenie Televidenie i radioveshchanie Zhurnalist

Interviews Aleksandr Drouz, St. Petersburg, 2015 Henrikas Iouchkiavitchious, Moscow, 2007 Nikolai Mesiatsev, Moscow, 2007 Eduard Sagalaev, Moscow, 2007 Natalya Stetsenko, Moscow, 2015

Websites http://cccp.tv http://www.euscreen.eu/ http://gtrf.ru/ http://tv-80.ru/ http://tvmuseum.ru

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I ND EX

Alpatov, Mikhail, 34 Anderson, Margaret, x Andreeva, Paulina, xi Andronikov, Iraklii, 34, 35–36 Andropov, Yuri, 173 Angelina, Pasha, 209 animation, computer, 238, 239 Anti-Party Group, 38 applause meter, 206, 216 Ardamatskii, V., 33 Arkanov, Arkadii, 220, 223 Aroseva, Ol’ga, 219, 223 art, television and, 26, 45 Artistic Problems of Mass Communications Media, 158 Artloto, 216, 217–23, 224, 233, 246, 275n64, 295n116 arts avant-garde, 11, 14, 21 censorship in, 5

ABBA, 113 Academy of Sciences, International Workers’ Movement Institute, 76 Academy of Social Sciences [Akademiia obshchestvennykh nauk pri TsK KPSS], 205–6 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The (serial film), 299n47 advertising, 203, 205–8, 209 Adzhubei, Aleksei, 189, 289n2 Afghanistan, war in, 236 Afinogenov, A. Z., 160 Akopov, Aleksandr, 208 Aksel’rod, Albert, 187, 188 Alexeev, A. A., 29, 188 All-Russian State Television and Radio Company (VGTRK), 249 All-Union Radio, 52, 139 All-Union Trade Advertising Organization [Soiuztorgreklama], 205

319

INDEX

disengagement of, 15, 70–71, 88–89, 160, 268n62 engagement of, 3, 50, 151–52, 154, 163, 164, 168, 180–82, 208, 212, 238, 241, 244–48 European, 21 feedback from, 15, 52–53, 93–94, 98, 206, 215, 246 for foreign broadcasts, 47–48 imagined response of, 143, 160 intellectual level of, 35, 41, 64 letters from, 15, 19, 50–51, 52–53, 55, 66–67, 77, 87, 89, 101–2, 103, 105–7, 111, 112, 133, 154, 193, 194, 196–97, 200, 205, 213, 218, 219–20, 225, 241, 245–46, 266n26 manipulation of, 81, 85, 117, 142, 186, 215, 253, 261n41 mass, appealing to, 69–70, 74–76, 184, 187, 268n65 measuring responses of, 49–54, 101, 206 meetings with, 52, 53, 58 model, or ideal, 50, 51, 53, 77, 101, 265n21 negotiations with, 91 as participants, 244–48 reassessment of, 63–64 relationship with, 47, 48, 58, 61, 140–41 schedule preferences of, 55–56, 58, 64, 69, 70–74, 79 shift from coercion to persuasion of, 23, 45, 119 sizes of, 53 sociological surveys of, 48–49, 54, 58–63, 82, 87, 205–6 spontaneity of, 30 targeted by program planners, 12, 30, 45, 63, 64–70, 72, 204–5

arts (continued) critics of, 27 and cultural shifts, 2–3, 26 high status of, 13 local organizations, 41 scheduling programs of, 73 Auction [Auktsion], 202–8, 215, 237 as advertising medium, 203, 205–8, 209 applause meter used in, 206, 216 audience as focus of, 204, 205–6 cancellation of, 207, 248, 295n114 creation of, 202–3 live broadcast of, 203–4 parallels with democratic politics, 204, 206 prizes in, 205, 206, 207, 229 rules of, 206 sociological analysis in, 205–6 working-class people featured on, 204, 212, 216 audience research, 17, 47–81 and differentiation, 63–74 end of, 76–77 measuring audience response, 49–54, 101, 206 rise of prime time, 79–81 sociological surveys and findings, 48–49, 54, 58–63, 82, 87, 205–6 television schedule as problem, 48, 54–58, 72 weekend programming, 74–76 audiences aiming to please, 14, 142 all-Union, 4, 23, 41, 48, 52, 58, 94, 193 choices of, 80 concessions to tastes of, 54–55, 69 connectivity with, 34, 158, 242, 244–46, 253 cynicism of, 64 differentiated, 63–74, 103–6, 109, 114, 268n65

320

INDEX

and social attitudes, 3, 8, 45, 238 speeches of, 146, 153 as TV viewer, 11, 271n103 Brezhnev era and broadcasting, 47, 49, 236, 237, 239, 248, 250, 251, 252 innovation in, 8, 152, 253 political disengagement in, 6 Britikov, Grigorii, 173 BRIZ [Biuro po ratsionalizatsii i izobretatel’stvu, Office for Rationalization and Inventiveness], 190, 192, 291n36 broadcasting, socialist principles of, 68–69 Brussels World Expo (1958), 39, 40, 42, 56 Bulaev, Alexander, 110

voting by, 8, 14, 18, 184, 206, 208, 213–15, 221, 248 young, 141, 148, 184, 238–39 audition videos, xi Auteur Television [Avtorskoe televidenie, ATV], 249 authenticity, 21, 33, 43, 149, 177 authority, questions of, 3, 19, 185 avant-garde, 7, 11, 14, 21–22, 26, 223, 251 Balashov, V., 125 Balikhin, Anatolii, 168 Bardzilova, I. G., 106 BBC, 10, 125–26, 134, 239 Before and After Midnight [Do i posle polunochi], 235–41, 243, 245, 300n2, 301n16 Bel’dy, Kola, 106, 107 Beliaeva, Eleonora, 105, 106 Benefis, 223 Biriukov, Nikolai, 116, 123–25, 137, 139 Bogomolov, Anatolii, 66, 70, 129 Bogomolov, Yuri, 158 Boiko, V. V., 125–26, 133 Bombard, Alain, 35 Boney M, 113 book publishers, 50 boredom and audience disinterest, 70–71, 88–89, 268n62 in news programs, 18, 63, 116–19, 126–28, 134, 139–40, 148 and program selection, 66–67 in slower pace, 159–60, 161, 181 in stagnation culture, x, 5–6, 182 Boretskii, Rudol’f, 48, 186, 251 Bormann, Martin, 165–66 Bremener, Mark, 160–61, 181 Bren, Paulina, 152, 153, 157 Brezhnev, Leonid, x, 111, 120 aging of, 7, 109, 171, 182

Caute, David, 22 censorship in arts and media, 5, 189 circumvention of, 243 elimination of, 217, 237 and game shows, 189, 201, 223 and news broadcasts, 118, 145 preproduction, 258n54 and television, 1, 2, 14–15, 17, 63, 91, 97, 105, 111, 189, 218, 223, 233, 237 Central Committee “On the future development of Soviet television” (1960), 35, 40–43 and perestroika, 235 Plenums, 84, 111, 139, 146 programs dedicated to, 77 television controlled by, 11, 31, 35, 45, 80, 134, 139, 148, 207, 213, 218, 260n20, 270n96 and television industry conferences, 68, 134–35 upheaval in, 137

321

INDEX

Channel 1 administration of, 250 all-Union broadcasts of, 4, 48, 58 creation of, 48, 68 mass-audience identity for, 269n70 and Olympic Games, 1, 250 as ORT (1995–2002), 249 schedules of, 49, 57, 58, 68–69, 77–79, 136 Chapaev (film), 154, 181 Chekhankov, Fedor, 222 Chernobyl disaster, 235 chess competitions, 184–85 Chiaureli, Mikhail, 170, 175 China, Communist Party in, 8 Chukovskii, Kornei Ivanovich, 34 cinema and accountability to audiences, 48 audience surveys in, 63–64 competition with, 24 copying from, 42 difference from television, 22, 31 lighting, montage, poetic voiceover in, 25, 26, 117 popularity of, 74 Cinepanorama [Kinopanorama], 35, 75, 208 Civil War, serials about, 156 Clark, Katerina, 27 class prejudices, 12–13 Club of Cine-Travelers [Klub kinoputeshestvennikov], 75, 239 Club of the Merry and Resourceful. See KVN coercion, 3 shifting to persuasion after Stalin’s death, 23, 45, 119 Cold War, 21 complex diplomatic events in, 147–48, 150 détente in, 6, 182 and the Enlightenment, 22 game shows in, 184

Central Television, 44 broadcasting by satellite, 4, 59, 247 censorship in, 258n54 Channel 2, 187 conference on problems of television and radio news, 123–25 continuity announcers [diktory], 32, 34, 38, 126–28, 133, 147, 279n43 crackdown in, 94–97, 201 creatives [tvoriugi] in, 8, 187 distinctive features of, 12, 252–53 events planned and staged by, 144 and feature films, 155–56 goals of, 14 “golden age” of, 22 and Gosteleradio, 24–25 government controls over, 260n19 ideology workers in, 11, 13–14, 23, 27, 30, 35, 38 journalists on screen, 36–40, 126–28, 147 leadership of, 136–37 and Moscow Youth Festival, 23, 24–27, 36–38, 47, 186 organization of, 144 and perestroika, 235–37, 239–41, 242, 249–50 political experimentation in, x, 7, 13, 20, 236–37 producers as “players,” 248–53 programming by, 20, 23, 49, 66, 98, 111, 139, 236, 252 reforms of, 247–48 regional channels of, 15–16, 187 roles of, 47 and Time, 115–19, 131–40, 142, 146. See also audiences; Channel 1; game shows; news programs; Time change, possibility of, 8

322

INDEX

consumption, 49, 207, 215, 294n93 women’s decisions about, 210 continuity announcers [diktory], 32, 34, 38, 126–28, 133, 147, 244, 279n43 Council of Ministers, 24 creatives [tvoriugi], 8, 187 creativity, 7, 29 Crimea, annexation of, x, 1 Cronkite, Walter, 122 cynicism, 7, 64 Czechoslovakia game show formats borrowed from, 11, 28 music of, 223 Prague Spring, 3, 4, 94, 96, 97, 127, 135, 137, 153, 173, 182, 201 television serials in, 152, 155, 157

journalists in, 38 politics in, 90 Soviet superiority in, 62, 122, 170 Soviet vs. Western culture in, 11, 22–23, 24, 96–97, 120 and stagnant 1970s, 5–9 telemost links in, 246–47 Thaw in, 136 youth identity in, 208 commercialism, 22 communism, society’s progress toward, 119–20, 190 Communist in Our Time, The, 77 Communist Party authority of, 4–5, 11, 128, 131, 147, 177 Central Television as conduit for, 11, 140 of China, 8 as cultural vanguard, 50, 52, 117, 123, 240 and game shows, 201, 229–30 heroes of, 35, 44 leadership of, 40, 55, 64, 77, 169–70, 172, 178, 197 officials on screen, 41, 42, 126 political messages from, 83, 131, 134–35 portraiture preferred by, 129, 131 and the Thaw, 91, 128 truthfulness and sincerity of, 43, 177 unfulfilled promises of, 3, 114, 118, 120. See also Central Committee; Party Congresses computer-animated graphics, 238, 239 Connor, Steven, 8 Constructivism, 30 consumer demand, management of, 184 consumer goods, Auction as advertising for, 203, 205–8, 209 consumer knowledge, 204, 212, 215

Daniel, Yulii, 4, 127 de Burgh, Chris, “Lady in Red,” 240 decision-making, collective, 184, 185, 197 deistvo [mass action], 28, 29–31, 251 Demchenko, Maria, 209 Demidov, Ivan, 250–51 democratic authoritarian state, 253 democratic proceduralism, x, 20, 216 Derevitskii, Vladimir, 157 détente, 6, 182. See also Cold War Detkov, Igor, 240 Dietl, Jaroslav, 152 differentiation, audience, 63–74, 76, 103–6, 109, 114, 268n65 diktory [continuity announcers/news anchors], 32, 34, 38, 126–28, 133, 147, 244, 279n43 Direct Line with Vladimir Putin [Priamaia liniia s Vladimirom Putinym], 1, 253 diversity [mnogoobrazie], 240–41 Dmitriev, L., 130–31 documentary films, 25, 116, 117, 118, 142–43, 157, 249

323

INDEX

Lenin’s image absent from, 252 moralizing in, 17, 18–19 on noncalendrical festive occasions, 84 and political content, 63, 81 popular, 14, 50, 73, 74, 83–84, 108, 238, 244 sanctioned Soviet alternative to Western, 239 sports as, 192 too much, 66–67, 96 unregulated, 252 on weekends, 75 youth-oriented, 102–4, 109, 112–14, 239, 241. See also game shows entitlement, 3 Ernst, Konstantin, 1, 250–51 Europe journalists’ roles in, 39, 40, 42 rise of television in, 137 satellite links with, 247 television audience in, 21 Eurovision song contest, 98 Evening of Merry Questions. See VVV “Evening Outside Moscow” (song), 103 Evreinov, Nikolai, 30 Evstigneev, Evgenii, 167–68 experimentation, 7, 15, 17, 18 in game shows, 83, 208, 216, 223, 253 in news programs, 116, 117, 128 “Experimentator” (song), 8 Experiment Studio [Studio eksperiment], 249

documentary television programs, 18, 27, 79, 150, 151, 159 Dodolev, Evgenii, 250 domestic settings, limited use of, 13 Donahue, Phil, 246 Donskoi, Mark, 160 Dorman, Veniamin D., 159, 180 Drawing Fire onto Ourselves [Vyzyvaem ogon’ na sebia], 57, 154–56 Dunaev, Vladimir, 217–18 Dunaevskii, Isaak, 209 Dvornyi, Boris, 122 Eastern Europe game shows as “edutainment” in, 183 program exchanges with, 9, 153–55, 239 reflected in miniseries, 172–73 soap operas in, 155–56 Soviet occupation of, 170, 173, 288n76 television in, 9, 11–12, 153, 155 Economic Councils, 38 economic growth, zero, 5 economic reform, rejection of, 5 economic themes, programs about, 79–80 Edda (Hungarian rock band), 240 Edelman, Robert, 3 educational programs, 68, 75 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 34 Eisenstein, Sergei, 27 Empire of Risk [Imperiia azarta] (film), 217–18 Enlightenment, 22 entertainment audience preference for, 59, 80, 89, 201 and Cold War, 96–97 and gift-giving, 92–94 holiday broadcasting, 82, 84, 90–91 ideological vitality in, 253

Fall of Berlin, The (film), 170, 174–76 Family Feud (U.S. TV program), 225 Family’s Honor, A, 79 fanaticism, 172–73, 174, 177, 178 farmers, collective, 35, 41, 55, 75, 120, 121, 140, 209 Fere, Georgii, 195, 196

324

INDEX

gambling, 217–18, 219, 222–23 game shows, ix–xi, 183–215 audience letters about, 19, 206 audience participation in, 72, 184, 187, 192, 208, 214, 216, 224 audience targeted in, 12 censorship of, 189, 217 creation of, 11, 31, 45, 98 democratic proceduralism on, 20, 216 determining winners in, 202 ensuring fair play in, 184–85, 186, 192, 194, 195–98, 206 evolution of, 215, 216, 244 experimentation in, 83, 208, 216, 223, 253 formats of, x, 11–12, 215, 229, 248 high status of, 14 influence of, 9, 248, 249 juries in, 19, 184–85, 215 local staging of, 185 manuals for, 185, 197, 199 and mass festivals, x, 28, 85 playfulness of, 9 political content in, 81, 184, 229 popularity of, 51, 207 precedents for, 85, 183 prizes in, 207, 222, 229, 231, 294n92, 295n116 purposes of, 215 and radio quizzes, 183, 184 rigging suspected, 184 rules in, 19, 184, 206, 225 and rules of chance, 218, 221–23 and Soviet system, 217 U.S. scandals in, 184 in Western world, 194–95 Gan, Aleksei, 30 Gavrilova, I., 208 gender discrimination, 12–13 generation gap, 3, 241 Gerber, Alla, 160, 169

Festival Programming Desk, 186 festivals, x, 1–2, 24, 28, 31, 85, 104, 183, 190, 239 film. See cinema Film Programs Desk, 50 First Five-Year Plan, 116, 129 Fiske, John, 222 Flatley, Jonathan, 6 Fokin, Yuri, 46 and Lapin, 138 and News Relay, 57–58, 122, 133, 138, 244–45 and Seminar on Reportage, 42–43 and Youth Festival, 37 foreign news, 60, 117–18, 146–49, 229 foreign radio in border areas, 156 competition with, 18, 23, 47, 62–63, 80, 104, 116, 239 influence of, 75, 90, 235 foreign television, 9–10 adaptation of formats from, 252 in border areas, 156 competition with, 47–48, 50, 62–63, 80, 123, 235, 239 news broadcasts, 18 foreign videos, illegal, 235, 239 For Soldiers of the Soviet Army, 74, 75 For You, Women! [Dlia vas, zhenshchiny!], 269n70 Fradkin, Mark, 106 France, state television in, 70 Frank, Anne, 35 Frez, Il’ia, 160, 181 Friends (U.S. sitcom), 242 Fucˇik, Julius, 35 Fürst, Juliane, 6 Gagarin, Yuri, 35, 44–45, 47, 122 Gal’perina, Elena, 186, 187, 189, 194–95, 198–99, 271n101

325

INDEX

audience boredom with, 88–89, 160 communist, 35, 44 cosmonauts, 92 focus on, 14, 35, 119, 130–31, 168, 249 and game shows, 192, 204, 229, 230 indistinguishable from one another, 155 intelligentsia, 122 as moral ideals, 130 need for, 170, 172 of perestroika, 250 post-Stalin, 19, 178, 189–90 Thaw-era, 85, 174 working-class, 87, 202, 204, 209 Hilmes, Michele, 10 Himmler, Heinrich, 151, 165, 167 His Highness, the Adjutant, 284n2 historical memory, 154, 171 Hitler, Adolf, 170, 171, 172 holiday calendar, 13–14, 18 dates, 84, 86 functions of, 83 Little Blue Flame, 85–98 religious, 239 serials scheduled in, 156 Song of the Year, 85, 98–114 television in, 83–86, 272n15 holiday variety programs, 12–13, 14, 82, 97, 113, 239, 251, 253 Hollywood films, competition with, 10, 156 Horizon television sets, 206, 207 House of Actors, 35 humor, 14 Artloto and, 219, 220, 223 KVN and, 74, 189, 190, 192, 199 Little Blue Flame and, 88, 89 satirical, 186, 189, 190, 291n36 “Hymn to the Democratic Youth of the World” (song), 104

gift-giving, 92–94 Ginzburg, Evgenii, 223 “Girls of My Country, The” (song), 90 Giul’bekian, Marat, 201, 208 Glagolev, N., 134 Glavlit, 218, 258n54 Glory [Slava], 295n116 Glukhovskaia, Lidiia, 39–40, 56 Good Morning (radio), 105 Good Night Little Ones [Spokoinoi nochi, malyshi], 13 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 5, 235 experiments with Soviet system, 7, 20, 231 Gorbachev era, television shows in, 235–36 Gordeeva, Liuda, 154 Göring, Hermann, 172 Gorky Studio, 151, 158–59, 160, 161, 167, 168, 175–77, 180–81 Gosteleradio (State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting), 62, 73, 94, 96 archives of, 275n55 cultural authorities in, 45, 111, 118, 136, 137, 189, 193 foreign broadcasting division, 243 formation of, 24–25 Lapin era in, 76–81, 94, 136, 137, 187, 201 and NMO, 51–52, 77 and scheduling, 55, 71, 144 Gradskii, Aleksandr, 247 Great Patriotic War, 88, 102, 156 Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 23 Gurin, Il’ia, 167 Hello! We’re Looking for Talents!, 201, 237, 245, 274n51 heroes of the air, 32, 34, 131

326

INDEX

on screen, 36–40, 126–28, 147, 149, 281n82 Union of Journalists, 38, 68. See also mass media Journal “Youth,” 187

Iakovlev, Mikhail, 187 Il’inskii, Igor, 24 improvisation, 26, 29, 33, 37, 42 Imre, Anikó, 8, 153 Industrial Chemistry on Screen, 269n74 innovation, 7–8, 215 intelligentsia, 127, 208 artistic, 245–46 as model persons, 32, 34–36, 58, 122 and Prague Spring, 97 talking heads, 57, 58, 244–45 television enthusiasts, 121 and the Thaw, 91 youth, 31, 204, 209, 224, 225 International Panorama [Mezhdunarodnaia panorama], 146, 148, 237, 239 Internet, 252 “Intervision” international system, 44 In the World of Animals, 239 In Your Kitchen After 11 [U vas na kukhne posle 11], 236, 239 Iron Curtain, 6, 12 irony, 4, 6, 8, 182 Isaev, Maksim (character), 151, 178 Iutkevich, Sergei, 34 Ivanov, Ivan, 242 Ivanovskaia, N., 136 Izvestiia, 60, 189

Kapler, Aleksei, 208 Karaev, Kara, 112 Kassof, Brian, 50 Kataev, Valentin, 115, 116 Katsev, I. G., 50–51 Kesselring, Albert, 172 KGB, 156, 240 Khrushchev, Nikita, 263n80 and leisure, 3, 23, 85, 229 public criticism of, 64 reorganization of government, 38 and Soviet people, 30 speeches by, 33, 44, 120, 169, 263n80 Stalin’s legacy challenged by, 2–3, 64, 169 use of television by, 184, 269n74 Khrushchev era festive news in, 122–23 Gulag returnees of, 170 optimism in, 3, 4, 26, 47 progress toward communism in, 119–20 reforms of, 23, 52, 120. See also Thaw Kinchev, Kostia, 8 Kirillov, Igor, 32, 101, 102, 103, 109 Kisun’ko, Vasilii, 168 Klebanov, Igor, 159 Klimov, Elem, 187 Koboladze, Andro, 175, 177 Kolosov, Sergei, 154 Kommunist, 240 Komsomol, 143, 212, 231, 246 Komsomol’skaia Pravda, 246 Kondratova, Nina, 32

journalists accountability of, 48 artistry of, 45 as commentators, 147, 149 crackdowns on, 127–28 creating new programs, 64, 116, 118 declining visibility of, 138 diversity of tasks for, 39–40 interpretation of events by, 38, 128 portraiture presented by, 129–31 preparing the news, 143–45 professionalism of, 39–40, 45

327

INDEX

popularity of, 190, 201, 224 protagonist of, 188 question of fair play in, 186, 192, 195–200 recurring contests in, 192 revival of, 237 rules of the game, 186, 192, 193–94, 198, 200 as sport, 190, 191–93, 195, 198–99, 200, 201, 202 themes of, 188 and transparency, 195–97, 198, 218 and younger generation, 74, 109, 185, 188 KVN Answers Letters, 198

Konstantinescu, Emil, 87 Kopelian, Efim, 159, 173, 177, 178, 179 Korshilova, Tat’iana, 109, 113 Kovelenov, Yuri, 104–5, 109 Krik, Benia (character), 161, 181 Krokodil’, 67, 70 Kuravlev, Leonid, 162 Kuznetsov, Georgii, 128, 251 KVN [Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh, Club of the Merry and Resourceful], ix, 20, 30, 185–202, 237 advance preparation for, 188–89, 195, 201 audience complaints about, 193–94, 196–98, 200 audience participation in, 192, 216, 224 and BRIZ, 190, 192 cancellation of, 19, 201, 215, 224 and censorship, 189 collective creative work on, 187, 197, 199 and corruption scandal, 201 creation of, 31, 185–87 finding competitors for, 201, 202 format of, 190, 198 fragmentation of, 201–2 and humor, 74, 189, 190, 192, 199 improvisation in, 188–89, 200, 201 intelligentsia youth on screen in, 31, 204, 209, 224, 225 jury in, 186, 192–94, 196–200, 202, 250, 291n45 local staging of, 195, 196, 199 as mass action, 31 “merry production gymnastics” on, 190 money and power behind the scenes, 194–95 political satire in, 186, 189, 190, 196, 229

language accessible, and poetic, 36 artificial, stilted speech, 33 formalized, 14, 15, 63, 64 for home audiences, 33 improvisation of, 37 Lapin, Sergei Georgievich, 76–81, 187, 201, 248 and audience research, 76, 77, 101 and domestic news, 138, 139–40, 141, 143, 145 and focus on young people, 111, 208 and foreign news, 138, 146–47 as Gosteleradio chairman, 76, 94, 136, 137, 201 and Little Blue Flame, 111, 275n59 and personnel, 281nn75/80, 282n90 and portraits, 138–40 and primetime scheduling, 79–80 and Time, 136–40 and workers, 208–9 “layer-cake” [sloenyi pirog] approach, 76, 79, 239 leisure, right to, 3 Lenin, Vladimir, 236, 252, 270n96

328

INDEX

gift exchange on, 91–94 heroes in spotlight, 87, 88, 89 holiday broadcasting, 82–83, 86, 89–91, 110 minimal script, 86 modeled on youth café, 86, 91–92, 97, 99 as New Year’s Flame, 91–94, 96, 273n35 and Ostankino tower, 94 and politics, 94–98 popularity of, 61, 89–90 rebroadcasts of, 97 Through the Pages of Little Blue Flame, 97 Liubimov, Aleksandr, 249, 251 Liubimov, Sasha, 301n19 live broadcasting, 9, 122, 236 abandonment of, 13, 23, 215 appearance of, 241–44, 247 decline of, 17, 31 in European countries, 39 of game shows, 203–4 inner meaning shown in, 25, 31 language used in, 33 out of studio, 36–39, 83, 84, 133–34, 203, 241, 242, 247, 260n22 parades, 83 and perestroika, 237–38, 241 Putin’s “direct line,” 1, 253 routine interrupted by, 27 spontaneity in, 25–26, 29, 33, 36, 37–38, 39, 241, 243 of sports, 36, 37, 185 unscripted, 28, 29, 241 Lomakin, Sergei, 242 Loreti, Robertino, 274n38 “Lotto Machine,” 219 Lovell, Stephen, 152, 180 Lysenko, Anatolii, 186–87, 236, 237, 242, 248, 249, 251, 296n125

“Lenin Bonfires,” 94–95 Leninist University of Millions, 77 Lenin Library, Moscow, ix Leont’ev, Mikhail, 250 Leont’eva, Valentina, 13, 32, 33, 34, 35, 42, 43, 58 Lepeshinskaia, Anna, 122 Let’s Go, Girls! [A nu-ka, devushki!], 208–15, 237 audience participation, 208, 212, 214 contests, 210–12, 225, 228, 229, 296n125 creation of, 208 experimentation in, 208, 216 juries, 213–14, 215, 216 “regular people” in, 202, 208–10, 212, 216, 225 source of, 209, 296n124 success of, 213 voting and vote counting in, 208, 214–15, 216, 222 Let’s Go, Guys! [A nu-ka, parni!], 202, 224, 228, 237, 295n115 Letters Desk, 52–53, 77 Levinton, Matvei, 189, 200 Levitan, Yuri, 88–89 Liadova, Liudmila, 122 Liberman-Kosygin reforms, 48 Lioznova, Tat’iana, 19, 151, 161, 165–66, 172, 174, 175–77, 181 Lipovetsky, Mark, 170, 172 List’ev, Vladislav, 15, 250, 301n19 Literary-Dramatic Programming Desk, 8, 127 literature, 2–3, 27, 240, 248, 250 Literaturnaia gazeta, 33, 35, 42, 167 Little Blue Flame [Goluboi ogonek], 85–98 audience feedback on, 89, 93–94 decline in popularity, 97–98 denial of permission to cancel, 89 evolution of, 85–86, 109–10

329

INDEX

Mighty Mouse (U.S. TV show), 85 Mihelj, Sabina, 153 Mikhalkovich, Valentin, 158 Mikhoels, Solomon, 171–72 military officials, as heroes, 87–89 miniseries, 150–82 apartment-block, 155 generation gap depicted in, 155 in international context, 153–58 literary sources of, 150, 151, 158–59, 161, 181 popularity of, 154, 158 socialist, 183. See also Seventeen Moments of Spring Ministry of Communications, 260n19 Ministry of Culture, 24, 68, 158 Ministry of Finance, 218 Ministry of Trade, 59, 203 Mirov, Lev, 92, 93 mobilization, 119 modal schizophrenia, 27 model persons as heroes of the air, 32, 34, 131 inner thoughts of, 148 intelligentsia as, 32, 34–36, 58, 122 on screen, 31–34, 42, 87, 90–91 selection of, 32–33, 40, 42, 129 transformation of, 116, 190 Molchanov, Vladimir, 236, 240, 300n2 Molniia communication satellites, 48 Moscow, youth café in, 86, 87, 89 Moscow 2042 (Voinovich), xi Moscow Youth Festival (1957), 29, 33, 35, 44 and Central Television, 23, 24–27, 36–38, 47, 186 live broadcast of, 36–39 Moskovskii, Pavel, 95, 134 Muratov, Sergei, 30, 88–89, 116, 126–27, 128, 187, 251

magnitizdat, 247 Magomaev, Muslim, 109, 112, 113 Maiak, 134, 137, 277n10 Maiakovskii, Vladimir, 22, 36, 46 Makoveev, Vladimir, 203, 206, 207 Malkin, Anatolii, 249 Mamedov, Enver, 79, 118, 145 “managed democracy,” x, 223 market research, 50 markets, 49, 50, 68–69 Marxist-Leninist ideology, 238, 252 Masliakov, Aleksandr, 108, 109, 113, 188, 201, 237, 242, 245, 246 mass action [deistvo], 28, 29–31, 251 mass coercion, 3 mass culture, 3, 190 mass festivals, x, 1–2, 24, 28, 31, 85, 104, 183, 190, 239 mass media, 3 audience surveys in, 63–64 censorship in, 5, 189 ceremonies in, 183 and cultural shifts, 2–3 journalistic changes in, 39 “new,” 27 in Putin era, 1–3, 9, 252–53 in socialist system, 58, 68–69 mathematics competitions, 184–85 Mathieu, Mireille, 96 May Day (1920), 30 Medvedev, Dmitry, xi Melodies and Rhythms of Foreign Popular Music, 113 Melodiia record label, 101–2, 218, 246 Men’shikov, Andrei, 189, 194, 213, 214, 292n62 Menuhin, Yehudi, 240 Merkulov, V., 89 Mesiatsev, Nikolai, 62, 71–74, 89, 94, 95, 270n96 Mickiewicz, Ellen, 59

330

INDEX

challenges of producing, 123–25, 143–45 commentators on, 147–48, 149 and counter-news, 123–25 events planned and staged for, 120, 144 experimental, 9 faster pacing of, 118, 123–26, 131, 133, 135, 139, 140, 149 foreign vs. domestic, 60, 63, 80, 117–18, 119, 121, 123, 125–26, 136, 138, 145, 146–49 formalized language in, 14 “hard news,” 278n19 hierarchy in, 148 high status of, 14 influence of, 248, 249 journalistic “essays,” 142, 143–45 journalists on screen in, 36–40, 126–28, 147, 149, 281n82 nature and purpose of, 120, 134, 142 and perestroika, 236–38, 241, 242, 249 political content in, 81, 118, 136, 139, 142 prohibition of negative portrayals in, 145, 278n21 purpose of, 140–43 rising importance of, 135–38 Russian control of, 252 scheduling of, 56–58, 73 Soviet slant on, 119–28 timeliness in, 143 unpopularity of, 63, 64 verisimilitude in, 143–45 video material in, 133 youth-oriented, 237. See also Time newsreaders. See diktory News Relay [Estafeta novostei], 57–58, 122–23, 131, 133, 138, 146, 244–45 new vision [novoe zrenie], 21–22, 27

music competitions in, 184–85, 246 and dance, 223, 238 electronic, 238 folk, 90, 96, 106 foreign, 223 guitar poetry, 102, 109, 247 heavy metal, 240–41 holiday entertainment, 18 improvisation in, 240 jazz, 102, 223, 240 live performance of, 231, 241 patriotic, 96, 104, 105–6, 107–9 political, 106–7, 238–39 popular [estrada], 50, 60, 89, 96, 99, 104, 106, 111, 218, 223, 238–41 repression of, 240 rock, 102, 106, 112, 238, 240–41 traditional Soviet, 102–3, 104 variety shows, 69, 74, 82, 86, 88, 90, 98, 215 videos, 239, 240 musical contests, 72, 81, 98–102, 108 Musical Kiosk [Muzykal’nyi kiosk], 75, 105 Musical Programming Desk, 8, 86, 89–90, 96, 218, 237 My Life in Art (Stanislavsky), 43, 46 nationalism, nostalgia toward, 8 Nemtsov, Boris, xi, 302n37 News [Novosti] (formerly Television News), 146 News Desk [Glavnaia redaktsiia informatsii], 116, 117, 119, 123, 136, 137, 138, 148, 164, 235, 236, 237, 248, 249, 250, 271n101, 277n90, 278n21 news programs anchors or hosts of, 12 and boredom, 18, 63, 116–19, 126–28, 134, 139–40, 148 and censorship, 118, 145

331

INDEX

New Year’s Flame [Novogodnii ogonek], 91–94, 96, 273n35 New Year’s programs, 9, 18, 91–94, 96, 214, 251. See also Little Blue Flame; Song of the Year Nielsen ratings system, 59 Nixon, Richard M., 85, 136, 202 NMO [Nauchno-metodicheskii otdel] audience surveys from, 53–54, 58–63 changes in, 76 leadership scandal in, 76–77 mission of, 51–52 on programming and coordination, 68–70, 75 renamed TsNP, 77 nostalgia, 8, 97, 182 Novgorodtsev, Seva, 239 Novitskii, Mark, 92, 93 Novyi Mir, 240

Overlords Unmasked [Vladyki bez masok], 146 Ozerov, Nikolai, 192 Parkhomovskii, El’rad, 197, 202 Party Congresses 20th (1956), 2, 33, 34 22nd (1961), 44, 69 festive period surrounding, 83–84 P’ekha, Edita [Edyta Piecha], 97 perestroika, 95, 217, 231, 235–38, 239–41, 242, 245–50 Petraitisov Family, The, 157 Platt, Rostislav, 162 play, 7, 30, 195 functions of, 8, 14, 222–23 Polish Sopot festival, 98 Politburo control of television by, 242 television juries modeled on, 185, 197, 202 political unmasking, 33–34 Polzikov, Stas, 242 portraits creation of, 45, 118, 121 in domestic news, 139 improvement of, 129–31 in Lapin era, 138–40 monotony of, 129, 131, 148 of workers, 121, 129, 130–31, 139–40, 141–42, 143 Pozner, Vladimir, 246 Prague Spring aftereffects of, 135, 137, 201 conflicts exposed by, 3, 96 and end of optimism, 4, 97, 127–28 and reform movement, 3, 4, 94, 153 and Seventeen Moments, 173, 182 Soviet invasion and, 4, 94, 201 Pravda [Truth] Party voice of, 4–5

Obraztsov, Sergei, 34 Oil and Gas Construction Agency [Neftgazstroi], 246 Olympic Games, 191, 214, 229 in Sochi (2014), 1, 250–51 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn), 240 “On the future development of Soviet television” (1960), 35, 40–43 optimism, 3, 4, 26–27, 28, 45, 47 Orbita satellite system, 203, 269n70 Ostankino Television Center, 44, 48, 59 bar, 228 opening of, 4, 66, 68, 94, 269n70 production spaces of, 244 Seventh Heaven restaurant atop, 93, 94 twelfth floor, 242 Our Biography [Nasha biografiia], 143, 249, 302n33

332

INDEX

Pushkin, Alexander, 212 Putin, Vladimir, x, 1, 251, 252–53 Putin era digital documentary channel, 283n120 ephemeral nature of, xi heroes of perestroika denounced in, 250 mass media in, 1–3, 9, 252–53 media elites of, 20, 250–51 stagnation culture in, x Pyr’ev, Ivan, 209

and public discussion of issues, 137, 152 television schedules published in, 44, 56–58, 77–79 President-2042 (game show), xi press. See mass media productivity, increases in, 45 programming and audience preferences, 55–56, 58, 64, 69, 70–74, 79 balance in, 80 hierarchical genres of, 14, 81 “layer-cake” approach to, 76, 79, 239 political, 81 in prime time, 79–81 weekend viewing, 70–71, 74–76 Programming Desk, 66, 70 Programming Directorate, 79 Prokhorova, Elena, 171 Prokopovich, Nikolai, 165 propaganda and audience differentiation, 68, 72, 74, 75 banned from KVN programs, 186 counterpropaganda, 123–24, 146 and news, 136, 142, 148, 271n101 and prime time scheduling, 74, 79 “programmnaia politika,” 48, 49 report of positive response to, 77 shifting focus on, 23, 49, 80 and television schedules, 48, 72–74, 79, 80 unpopularity of programs airing, 17, 23, 49, 60, 61, 68, 72, 74 Propaganda Desk, 79, 119, 142, 145, 271n101 Proshutinskaia, Kira, 211, 236, 237, 240, 249, 251 Public Council of Television Viewers, 265n21 Pugacheva, Alla, 111, 223

quiz shows. See game shows radio All-Union, 52 audience responses to, 55 audience surveys in, 63 difference from television, 22 and Gosteleradio, 24 holiday orientation of, 83 journalistic changes in, 39 language used in, 33 Latest News, 139 quizzes, 183, 184 research into effectiveness of, 51–52 television as complementary to, 59. See also foreign radio Rajagopalan, Sudha, 154 rationalism, 101 Red Square, 86 live broadcasts from, 83, 84, 85, 89 reform movements, repression of, 3, 4, 6. See also Prague Spring Rich Bride, The [Bogataia nevesta] (movie), 209 Rock Atelier, 240–41 Romm, Mikhail, 32 Rossiia Channel, 249 Roth-Ey, Kristin, 9, 11, 12, 155 on KVN, 188 on Moscow Youth Festival, 24

333

INDEX

Seminar on Reportage [Sempore], 42–43 Sergeeva, Bella, 198–99, 201 serials development of, 18–19 family-themed, 13, 156, 157, 173–74 high-profile, 253 historic topics in, 156 in international context, 153–58 long fictional forms of, 151 made for television, 57 open-ended, 156 political content in, 81 Soviet adaptation of, 11, 151 weekend programs, 76. See also miniseries Seven Days, 138 Seventeen Moments of Spring [Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny], 151–82 audience engagement with, 151–52, 163, 164, 168, 170, 180–82 based on spy novel, 151, 158–59, 173 Eismann character, 162–63, 178 in international context, 153, 156–58 moral ambiguity in, 19, 151, 152, 161–69, 179 as political film, 152, 158–61, 169–73, 180 Schlag character, 162–67, 169, 178, 179, 181 Stalin era depicted in, 165, 169–75, 177–78 Stirlitz character, 151, 157, 159–61, 162–67, 169–82 “Stirlitz joke,” 180–82 story of, 151, 284n6 success of, 152, 153, 182 visual collaboration in, 162–67, 169, 179, 287n65 Shabanov, P. I., 203 Shevelev, Grigorii, 236 Shilova, Anna, 101, 102, 103, 108, 109, 220, 279n43

Roth-Ey, Kristin (continued) on Party intervention, 41 on television enthusiasm, 22 on VVV, 28, 31 Russia cabaret tradition in, 82 media power in, 238, 252 Olympic Games in, 1, 250 post-Soviet transition of, 251, 252 Russian Revolution (1917) anniversaries of, 4, 57, 90, 94–95, 142–43, 194, 247 goals of, 177 meaning of, 45 and tradition, 102 Sagalaev, Eduard, 111, 233–34, 236, 237, 246, 248–50, 277n90 Sakontikov, Nikolai, 154 samizdat, 247 Sandulenko, Boris, 92, 273–74n38 Santor, Irena, 93 Sappak, Vladimir, 17 on effect of immediacy, 158, 237 on live broadcasts, 44–45, 237, 241 on model persons, 33, 34–35, 42, 58 and Moscow Youth Festival, 25–27, 35, 44 optimism of, 47, 157, 264n2 on the power of television, 21–22 and television enthusiasm, 23, 46 on unmasking political enemies, 34 and VVV, 29 satellite broadcasting, 4, 203, 246–47 Saul’skii, Yuri, 223 Schellenberg, Walter, 165, 167–68, 178–79 science, enthusiasm for, 190 Scientific-Methodological Office (later NMO), 51–53 scripts, censorship of, 15 Semenov, Iulian, 151, 173

334

INDEX

New Year’s broadcasts of, 91, 98–102 preliminary broadcasts of, 98 Song-71, 100–101, 103 Song-72, 103–4, 105, 275n64, 276n75 Song-73, 104–5, 106, 276n75 Song-74, 99, 105, 106 Song-75, 106–7, 109, 111 Song-76, 107, 109, 111, 276n75 Song-77, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112 Song-78, 111, 113 Song-79, 111 Song-80, 109, 111, 113 songs selected for, 99–102, 112, 114 structure of, 103, 216 and With a Song Through Life, 109, 111–12 youth tastes accommodated in, 102–4, 109, 112–14 Sovetskaia kul’tura, 170 Soviet culture, hierarchies of, 204 Soviet empire, legitimacy of, 19 Soviet people economic productivity of, 45 glorifying the work of, 87, 145, 202, 204, 209, 211–12 having a good time, 50 revealed via television, 24, 27, 31 social unity of, 30, 102–3, 105, 109, 113, 114, 182, 252–53 superiority of, 19, 24 transformation of, 32, 45, 190 Soviet Radio and Television [Sovetskoe Radio i Televidenie], 135, 203–4, 205 Soviet Union competitions in, 184–85, 194, 198–99, 225–26, 229, 261n41 Czechoslovakia invaded by, 4, 94, 201 economic production in, 140 as first socialist revolutionary state, 153 gambling in, 218, 222–23, 298n5 hierarchical cultural values in, 239–40

Shipilov, Andrei, 242 Shirokov, Evgenii, 224 Shklovskii, Viktor, 34 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 174 Shumiatsky, Boris, 279n34 Simonov, K., 137, 270n96 Siniavsky, Andrei, 4, 127 Siniavsky-Daniel trial, 127 Sinitsin, Evgenii, 250 Sinitsyn, Roman, 205, 207 Six Hundred Seconds, 243 Slavkin, Victor, 199 Sobchak, Anatolii, 302n37 socialism, 58, 68–69, 120, 240–41 socialist realism, 116, 121, 149, 252, 279n34 socialist reform movements (1967–68), 3, 60, 94, 153. See also Prague Spring Social-Political Programming Desk, 73, 79, 271n101 sociological research abandonment of, 77 audience surveys, 48–49, 54, 58–63, 82, 87, 205–6 criticism of, 101 findings of, 58–63 introduction of, 48 rise of, 54 suppression of, 17 solidarity, sources of, 3 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 240 Song of the Year [Pesnia goda], 85, 98–114, 241, 252 audience voting in, 18, 214, 245 camerawork on, 111, 112 censorship of, 223 comparisons with, 221, 223, 245, 246 evolution of, 105, 109–14 experimentation in, 83 jury for, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105, 109

335

INDEX

depicted in miniseries, 165, 169–75, 176, 177–78 mass repressions in, 236 news focus in, 119, 126–27 post-Stalin era, 23, 55, 119, 150, 172, 174, 177–78, 189, 215, 229 professional unions in, 38 re-Stalinization, 5 Stanislavsky method, 43 Starovoitova, Galina, 302n37 Stars Smile for You, The [Vam ulybaiutsia zvezdy], 113 Stas Namin Group, 113 State Committee for Radio Broadcasting and Television. See Gosteleradio Steinberg, Mark, 6 Stepakov, V., 137, 270n96 Stetsenko, Natalia, 249 Stirlitz character, 151, 157, 159–61, 162–67, 169–82 Suri, Jeremi, 6 Surkov, Vladislav, x Suslov, Mikhail, 94, 137, 281n75, 295n114 Sutton-Smith, Brian, 8 Sviridov, Georgii, 115 Svobodin, Aleksandr, 199, 200

Soviet Union (continued) imperial dominance of, 170, 173, 229 Olympic Games in, 229 as one-party state, 148, 238, 253 post-Stalin period in, 2–3, 251–53 shifting from coercion to persuasion in, 23 social and cultural shifts in, 2, 6–7, 118, 233 state funerals in, 233 striking miners in, 236 superior way of life in, 117, 124, 134, 135, 149, 151, 182, 253 time zones in, 91 spiritual qualities, 18–19 Sportloto, 218, 220, 222 sports competitions in, 184–85, 191, 194, 198–99 and game shows, 190, 191–93, 200, 202 live broadcasts of, 36, 37, 185 popularity of, 61 programming of, 57 questions of fairness in, 194 Spotlight of Paris Hilton [ProzhektorPerisKhilton], 242 Spotlight of Perestroika [Prozhektor perestroiki], 235–36 “Spring, The,” (protest), xi Sputnik, 47 stagnation culture, aspects of, x, 5–6, 182, 233, 238 Stalin, Joseph cult of, 19, 172 de-Stalinization reforms, xi, 2–3, 21, 22, 30, 64, 169 final years of, 171 political enemies unmasked by, 33–34 and Terror, 34 Stalin era

Tabakov, Oleg, 165, 167 talking heads, 57, 58, 80 Tankov, Vadim, 220, 223 Tariverdiev, Mikhail, 287n65 telemost satellite linkup, 246–47 television aesthetics of, 45 affective power of, 85 as art form, 26, 32 ascendance of, 136–38 boring content of, 15, 18, 57 and censorship, 1, 2, 14–15, 17, 63, 91, 97, 105, 111, 189, 218, 223, 233, 237, 258n54

336

INDEX

time limits in, 48 too much, 136 transformational potential of, 17, 21–22, 23–24, 28, 31–32 transnational television history, 9–11 travel programs on, 272n20 visual content of, 14–15, 33, 36, 64 weekend viewing, 70–71, 74–76 women’s careers in, 12–13. See also audiences; live broadcasting; portraits Television and Radio Broadcasting, 46 Television and Us [Televidenie i my] (Sappak), 23 television enthusiasm, 22–24 accomplishments of, 43–46 intelligentsia on screen, 34–36, 121 journalists on screen, 36–40 mass action [deistvo], 28, 29–31, 251 model persons on screen, 31–34, 42 and Moscow Youth Festival, 23, 24–27 party intervention in, 40–43 VVV, 27–31 Television Journal “Art” [Televizionnyi zhurnal “Iskusstvo”], 35 Television News, 116, 125, 126, 131, 134, 136, 139, 146 Television Schedule: An Essay in the Theory of Propaganda (Boretskii), 48 Teplov, Yuri, 122 Thälmann, Ernst, 173 Thaw, 2–3 audience research in, 52 Brezhnev era and, 45, 120, 238 crackdown of 1968 and, 97 and festival broadcasts, 26–27, 38, 85 game shows and, 215 heroes of, 85, 174 and holiday programming, 91 and honesty, 177 KVN and, 189, 190, 191–92

communication potential of, 36 in controlled studio settings, 24, 30, 32 credibility of, 144 cultural status of, 13 culture presented via, 1, 6, 17 direct-line broadcasts, 9 entertainment via, 14, 17, 233 era of, 2 experimentation on, 7, 15, 17, 18, 223, 253 in the home, 2, 12, 29, 32–33, 43, 244 influence of, 130–31 international exchange of programs, 9, 153–55, 239 local studios, 41 as luxury, 49, 62 as magnifying glass, 22, 35, 40, 46 mass action of, 29–31 as mass medium, 2, 47 as medium of control, 1, 23 misuse of, 66–67 morality presented in, 28 movies made for, 155, 271n103 nature of, 90–91, 187 numbers of sets, 4, 41 political influence of, 2, 17, 20, 23–24, 31, 49, 81 powers behind, 194–95, 218 prime time, 49, 55, 70, 71, 72, 74, 79–81, 131, 146, 252 programming, 48, 49, 71–76 public goals of, 14, 49, 81, 140–41 quality, 12–13 retrospectives, 248 Russian system of, 251, 252 schedules, 48, 54–58, 72–74, 77–81, 252 social and political roles of, 2, 11, 14, 17, 21, 22, 45, 73–74, 75 Soviet distinctiveness in, 10–16, 250, 252–53 state investment in, 10

337

INDEX

truth, ideological, 157 Tsfasman, Aleksandr, 223 TsNP [Tsentr nauchnogo programmirovaniia, Center for Scientific Programming], 77 Tsvik, Valerii, 251 Turbin, Vladimir S., 127, 128, 142 TV6, 249, 250 Tvardovskii, Aleksandr, 240 tvoriugi (creatives), 8, 187 TV Rain channel, xi Twelfth Floor [Dvenadtsatyi etazh] alumni of, 249, 250 audience engagement in, 245, 247 creation and origins of, 234, 235–36, 237, 300n2 influence of, 20 live broadcasting of, 237–38, 243, 247 and music, 238 and perestroika, 237, 242, 249 setting of, 242

Thaw (continued) Little Blue Flame and, 86, 97 and live broadcasting, 237–38, 241 optimism of, 3, 26–27, 45, 215 Seventeen Moments and, 152, 174, 177, 178 television journalism and, 38, 42, 45, 120, 128, 129 Thaw, The (TV program), xi theater, 24, 29, 42, 185, 190 Theatrical Encounters [Teatral’nye vstrechi], 35 13 Chairs [Kabachok 13 stul’ev], 219, 245, 271n103, 299n47 Tikhonov, Viacheslav, 151, 175, 284n8 Time [Vremia], 115–19, 131–40, 150 audience response to, 134 and documentary programs, 159 domestic vs. foreign news on, 18, 116–18, 138, 139, 146, 148–49 durability of, 4–5, 244 experimentation in, 116, 117, 128 format of, 131–33, 134 hosts of, 12, 132 in Lapin era, 136–40 launch of, 81, 115, 122, 131 Party response to, 134–35 periodic updates in, 239 post-Soviet, 149 purpose of domestic news, 140–43 scheduling of, 73, 79, 136 statistical reports on, 77 symbolic importance of, 115–16, 136 timeliness in, 144 verisimilitude in, 144–45, 160, 228 Time Forward! [Vremia-vpered!] (movie), 115 Time Machine [Mashina vremeni], 228 Today in the World [Segodnia v mire], 146–47, 237 transparency, 17, 21, 22 and Artloto, 221–22 and KVN, 195–97, 198, 218 Truth. See Pravda

uncertainty, impossibility of, 148 United States audience research in, 61–62 early claims about television in, 27, 33 game show scandals, 184 “golden age” of television, 13, 21, 22 human interest stories in, 121 mass culture, 153 prime time in, 70 ratings systems, 59, 61 and telemost linkup, 246 TV movies in, 156–57 unmasking, political, 33–34, 168 Utesov, Leonid, 113 Vakulovskii, Oleg, 301n19 Varshavskii, Iakov, 199 Vartanov, Anri, 159, 161 VCRs, 235, 239

338

INDEX

political meaning of, 30–31 as precedent, 29, 225 as quiz show, 28, 51 Vysotsky, Vladimir, 247

Vedeneeva, Tatiana, 46 Vertov, Dziga, 25, 26, 46, 117, 134 VIA [vocal-instrumental ensembles], 223 videos, xi, 133, 235, 239, 240–41 Vietnam War, 132 View [Vzgliad] alumni of, 238, 249, 250 audience engagement in, 244–45, 247 creation and origins of, 234, 235–36, 237, 300n2 hosts of, 243–44 influence of, 20 live broadcasting, 237, 237–38, 242, 243 and music, 238, 239, 240–41, 247 and perestroika, 237, 241, 242, 245, 247, 248–50 satellite linkup, 247 setting of, 242–43 twentieth anniversary program, 244 viewers. See audiences Viktorov, A. V., 80 Village Hour, 74, 75, 76 Vladimirov, Boris, 220, 223 “Voice of the Motherland, Voice of Russia,” 96 Voinovich, Vladimir, xi Voroshilov, Vladimir, 242, 248, 249 and Auction, 203, 204, 207, 237 and Let’s Go, Guys!, 237 and What? Where? When?, 19, 202, 224, 225–33, 237, 241 Vremia. See Time VVV [Vecher veselykh voprosov, Evening of Merry Questions], 27–31 audience participation, 28–29, 30–31, 104 cancellation of, 28, 29, 31, 187 creation of, 11, 28, 30 improvisation in, 29 and KVN, 188 and mass action, 28, 29–31

Weaver, Pat, 22, 264n2 Western countries competition with, 13, 18, 22, 62–63, 102, 117, 135, 146–48, 239, 253 famous journalists in, 38, 39 formats borrowed from, 9, 11, 206, 252 international exchange of programs, 9, 153–55, 239 mass culture in, 153, 183, 239 music in, 97, 223, 239–40 television in, 9–11 What? Where? When? [Chto? Gde? Kogda?], 224–34 ambitions of, 227–28 boundaries blurred in, 232–33 changing rules in, 226–27, 231–32, 248 creation of, 224, 237, 297n1, 299n46 guide for local productions of, 226–27 ideological changes reflected in, 216–17, 225, 231–33 influence of, 234, 242, 248 “intellectual ratings” calculated on, 232 intelligentsia youth on, 19, 202, 224, 225, 227, 230–31, 244 international matches, 231 live broadcasts, 9, 231, 241–42 “minute of reflection” in, 225, 227, 231 parallels with political world, 228, 229–32 prizes in, 229, 231, 233 questions evolving in, 231–32 roulette wheel, 226, 227, 228 selecting contestants for, 230

339

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Yakovlev, Alexander, 95, 242 Yeltsin, Boris, 251 You Can Do It [Eto vy mozhete], 202 Young Voices [Molodye golosa], 245 Youth on the Air [V efire molodost’], 61 Youth Programming Desk [Glavnaia redaktsiia molodezhnykh programm], 85, 111 and Auction, 204, 205, 207 and audience connectivity, 246–47 creation of, 186 as “constructors of play,” 8, 215 and deistvo, 251 and KVN, 185, 186–93, 224 and Let’s Go, Girls!, 209–11, 213–15 and perestroika, 235–37, 248–49 prizes won by, 277n90 and Twelfth Floor, 235, 237, 242 and What? Where? When?, 19, 224 Yurchak, Alexei, 143, 216–17

What? Where? When? (continued) structure of, 225–26, 229 uncensored freedom of, x–xi, 253 Winter Palace, reenactment of storming of, 30 With All My Heart [Ot vsei dushi], 159, 237 With a Song Through Life [S pesnei po zhizni], 109, 111–12 women appeal to audiences of, 66 careers in television, 12–13 clothing and hairstyles of, 32, 210 housewives, 41, 212 and Let’s Go, Girls!, 209–14, 216, 296n125 as television announcers, 32, 34, 127 traditional roles of, 210, 212 working-class, 209–10, 216 workers amateur theater of, 30 in expanded television audience, 41, 51 focus on, 14, 35, 36, 66, 121, 129, 130–31, 138–40, 141–42, 143 and game shows, 204, 209–10, 212, 216 as heroes, 87, 202, 204, 209 inner qualities of, 129, 145, 148 innovation contests for, 70 male youth, 202, 215 model workers, 110, 120, 129, 212 productive, 155 propaganda programs targeted to, 75 surveys of, 61 working class, loss of hope for political role of, 9 World War II, 21, 23 citizen sacrifices in, 3, 120, 173, 176, 253 Writers’ Union, 240

Zaitsev, Mikhail, 210 Zakharov, Dima, 244, 301n19 Zakirov, Batyr, 90 Zhdanov, Andrei, 240 Zhil’tsova, Svetlana, 109, 113, 188, 279n43 Zhurnalist, 129, 141 on authoritative journalists vs. diktory, 126–27 on credibility in television, 144, 145 editors of, 136 and Izvestiia, 60 Lapin’s writings in, 79, 138 roundtable (1968), 195, 196, 199, 202 “Watch Less Television” in, 66 Zhvanetskii, Mikhail, 223 Zitrone, Leon, 40 Zolotarevsky, Leonid, 123 Zolotov, Andrei, 115–16 Zweynart, Joachim, 8

340