how TV replaced politics for viewers

The UFO publishing house published a book by the American Sovietologist Christine Evans, “Between “Truth” and “Time”” – the history of Soviet television from reports about steelworkers-shock workers and the show “Come on, guys!” before the intercontinental teleconferences of the perestroika era.

Text: Igor Gulin

Originally published in 2016, Christine Evans’s book is not quite the study in media history that its subject matter might suggest. This is not a story about those people – theorists, producers, presenters – who created Soviet television. Although individual figures appear on its pages, they rarely come into focus. First of all, “Between “Truth” and “Time”” is a good Sovietological work. The task here is to fit television into the history of the entire Soviet project, to present it as part of a long-term search for the technology of social mobilization, ideological indoctrination, and education of the ideal Soviet man. Hence the analogies that sometimes look somewhat curious. Thus, Evans traces the genealogy of the simple “Song of the Year” competition to the revolutionary festivals of the 1920s, and seriously compares the work of the KVN jury with the functioning of the Politburo. Nevertheless, the very perspective of this book is curious.

Soviet television is practically the same age as the Thaw, and in Evans’ description it logically appears as a medium for the renewal of the communist utopia. By the 1950s, cinema, subordinated to socialist realist dogmas, had long lost the utopian potential that the avant-garde artists of the 1920s saw in it – Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov (Evans most often appeals to the theories of the latter). For a short time, this charge of utopia managed to be reborn, as it were, on television. It seemed to its theorists and enthusiasts that the television camera could directly capture life itself and also directly influence it. In their view, it was supposed to become a democratic instrument – to radically reduce the distance between the audience and the heroes, so that every Soviet person could turn out to be both.

Hence the emphasis of Khrushchev-era television workers on live broadcasts and street reporting (they usually cited the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students as the point of their greatest success, the first major event to receive massive television coverage). During the Brezhnev era, after the introduction of tanks into Czechoslovakia and the collapse of the soft reformism of the 1960s, these formats were abandoned as too unpredictable. However, the experiments are not over yet. On the contrary, in the cramped conditions of stagnation on television, according to Evans, there was an intense search for forms of mass participation – impossible in big politics and everyday social life.

Throughout the 1970s, especially during the era of Gosteleradio chairman Sergei Lapin, a close ally of the conservative Politburo ideologist Mikhail Suslov, political programs became less and less inventive and allowed less and less improvisation. Real life was lived in TV games – KVN, “What? Where? When?”, “Artloto”, “Come on, girls!”, “Come on, guys!” And so on and so forth. This entertainment format was borrowed by television people from their Western colleagues and, at first glance, fit rather poorly into Soviet ideology. Idle excitement, the pursuit of prizes – all this required whimsical legitimation. Particularly interesting in this sense was the Auction game, launched in 1969 and enjoying enormous popularity. Its format was invented by the future creator of “What? Where? When?” Vladimir Voroshilov, however, in essence, the game was an advertising project of the Ministry of Trade: the task was to popularize goods produced in large quantities, but not in demand among the population. Participants had to demonstrate their familiarity with tea, canned food or a vacuum cleaner and, after participating in a number of competitions, received often expensive prizes. Thus, consumption was curiously intertwined with education, and gambling compensated for the oversights of the planned economy.

For the successor programs to “Auction,” the moment of presenting prizes faded a little into the shadows, but the competitiveness became even more pronounced. In KVN, players competed in wit and talent, in “What? Where? When?” — in intelligence and knowledge, in “Come on, girls!” – in different kinds of female skills, but the effect of all these programs was similar. Evans’ key idea: Soviet game shows provided viewers with a kind of palliative for democratic politics that was missing in real life. In all these games, the process of selecting the winners was usually extremely opaque: a professional jury, some kind of expert councils, spectators in the hall, spectators voting by mail; it was often obvious that the result was known in advance, and the on-screen voting process presented a decorative façade. However, all this caused active public controversy. By watching the participants and judges of the game shows, Soviet viewers, Evans believes, discovered the idea that significant decisions could be made not by the wise, eternal and monolithic Politburo, but by people who were in a conflict visible to the public, redefining the very principles of struggle.

A particularly striking contrast with the public life of the late USSR was the game “What? Where? When?”. Competitions among experts were supposed to demonstrate the intellectual mobility of Soviet people and serve as evidence of the educational successes of the state. However, the atmosphere of intense debate that reigned in the game, as well as its surroundings (filming took place in the bar of a television center, and roulette played an important role – an object originally from a bourgeois casino) undermined this mission, turning the program from a showcase of socialist achievements into an attractive and slightly vicious picture of a not entirely Soviet image life. It was from there, Evans believes, that perestroika television grew with its provocative discussions on pressing issues. So, at first glance, apolitical fun turned out to be a school of politics – both for the participants and for the mass observer.

Christine Evans. Between Pravda and Vremya: the history of Soviet Central Television. M.: UFO, 2023. Translation: Vladislav Tretyakov.

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