Television has been a problematic object of study for Slavists, just as it was a problematic medium for socialist-era cultural administrators. On the one hand, its arrival in the 1950s indicated progress, new technology, and competitiveness in the Cold War; on the other, with its domestic consumption and entertainment-filled schedule, socialist television, as Kristin Roth-Ey points out in Moscow Prime Time, did not fulfill the promise of great socialist culture, always conceived as high culture. Aniko Imre's TV Socialism and Christine Evans's Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television join the few but growing number of studies examining socialist-era television cultures. Among them are such influential volumes as Paulina Bren's Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (2010), Kristin Roth-Ey's Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War (2011), and Heather Gumbert's Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic (2014). These monographs excel at overcoming Cold War-era stereotypes of socialist television as crude propaganda, unworthy of scholarly analysis, and examine them within the frameworks of transnational media history, social history, and history of everyday life.
Imre notes that “television has been a bad object in academic fields focused on Soviet and Eastern European cultures” (189). Within the binary vision of socialist societies neatly “divided” between the official state culture and dissident underground culture, dissident literature was a convenient object for analysis of high-culture texts that challenged the official ideology. Not only was socialist television the realm of official culture, it was also exoticized by Cold-war era scholars as fundamentally different from west European and North American broadcasting systems. Herein lies the true importance of the new wave of monographs that reintegrate socialist television and media into transnational historical narratives of the post-WWII electronic media boom. Neither monograph denies that mobilization and enlightenment of the population were important agendas of east European and Soviet media. It is rather that they see these agendas as shared by other public broadcasting systems in western Europe. In this respect, the examination of the continuities and ruptures between socialist and postsocialist television formats gives us a valuable insight into the processes that are prominent today in Europe, Russia included.
Thus, both monographs historicize rather than exoticize television cultures of the region. Imre and Evans depict socialist television industries not as Borat-like backward relatives of rich older brothers but as equal participants in the negotiation of European and transatlantic program flows. For example, many formats developed in socialist television predate reality formats later developed in the west (Imre 81–82). This refreshing and polyphonic vision of media history does not necessarily imply the post hoc ergo propter hoc logic, so familiar from the Cold War; rather it provides a powerful incentive for comparative, cross-cultural studies of media formats and social reality. Kristin Roth-Ey, for example, remarked on similar developments in the USSR and western Europe in the 1950s and 60s, such as a shared concern over American media imperialism.
Imre and Evans also challenge another common rhetorical device in monographs examining twentieth-century socialism, namely the narrative of “rise and fall.” Imre and Evans take a very different and unorthodox road of analyzing socialist television as the field of experimentation and successful implementation of many ideals of the ethos of public broadcasting. As Imre succinctly states, socialist TV's forgotten successes remind us “of the viability of visions that diverge from current monopoly of neoliberal capitalism on what constitutes the good life” (2). Both books provide rich and nuanced analysis of social practices that emerged on socialist television, went beyond official state policies, and provided an arena for rehearsing public discourses that came into full fruition after the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent democratic revolutions in eastern Europe. This line of thinking draws on Alexei Yurchak's scholarship, above all Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, which examines how the late socialist generations negotiated public and private discourses and practiced “styles of living that were simultaneously inside and outside the system” (128). Both scholars contend that television formats of late socialism became a major arena where this cultural experimentation and production of new social practices took place.
Finally, both monographs use new archival research to overcome the notorious problem of empirical studies of socialist television: very slim and often unreliable sources for audience research. Evans analyzes correspondence sent by viewers to the shows and data from some sociological studies in order to demonstrate how audience feedback shaped the formats of the programs that presumably were authored only by state institutions. One of very telling and insightful conclusions Evans makes is that audience letters from all walks of life helped to democratize the rather elitist model of Soviet television proposed by the Soviet intelligentsia in the 1950s and early 60s (Chapter on Programmnaia politika/Scheduling Policies). If in the 1950s and 60s Moscow and Leningrad television centers determined programing for the entire USSR, by the 1970s television became the most popular form of popular culture for a truly mass audience.
Evans shares with Imre the approach to media history as a study of transnational flows and format exchanges. She, however, focuses on a particular case—Soviet Central television—to reveal its “real distinctiveness … in its socialist and non-socialist European contexts” (10). As opposed to east European TV industries that came into being in the 1960s, when socialist ideology was waning, Soviet television still “sought to mobilize citizens towards construction of socialism” (Evans 11). Soviet television targeted its audiences first and foremost not as consumers but as objects for enlightenment. Evans contends that “Central Television's ambitious workers remained committed to the view that … television was high-status, masculine, experimental, transformative culture that addressed the state's most pressing political and economic concerns” (13). Among other things, this vision resulted in limited uses of domestic settings and domestic serial formats. Finally, Evans notes that even entertainment formats, such the annual contest Song of the Year functioned within the annual cycle of centralized festivities that created an illusion of a unified and homogeneous audience.
While Evans does not explicitly use the term “socialist empire,” her discussion of the industry defined by the relations of center and periphery implies an imperial model of centralized media and its increasingly fragmenting audiences. The relationship between center and periphery of the socialist empire defined both programming decisions and the development of infrastructure. One of the recurring motives of central television's internal correspondence is the defense of the Soviet empire's cultural and political borders against western radio and television broadcasts. For example, Evans claims that such shows as Seventeen Moments of Spring embodied Soviet fantasies of superior imperial identity, which determined their ideology and slow epic style (Evans 152).
Defying the received wisdoms that, in their utopian drive, socialist culture and television replaced any realist discourse with the artifice of socialist realism, Imre opens her study with a section—the longest in the book—on genres of realism and reality and the continuities between socialist and postsocialist formats. She covers both the more familiar educational programming, inspired by enlightenment ideologies common to both western and eastern European public broadcasting, and such diverse reality formats as crime television shows, game, and quiz programs. Imre ends this section of her monograph with a chapter about post-socialist reality television. Her case study here is a Hungarian celebrity docusoap, The Győzike show (2005–2010), centered on the life of a Hungarian Roma performer and his family. The show, modeled after the MTV's The Osbournes, triggered a major controversy in Hungarian society. Imre contends that a standard dismissal of this highly popular reality show has less to do with its perceived low cultural values and more with postsocialist anxieties about what constitutes normalized “Hungarianness,” imagined in terms of white normativity. Methodologically, this section is perhaps the most groundbreaking. Imre argues, for example, that western media's orientalization of eastern Europeans is echoed in the local media's performance of their own anxiety about being perceived by the west “as so many Eastern European Borats” (117). In response, as Imre points out, eastern Europeans displace their insecurities of relative inferiority onto the ethnic and racial others, such as Roma and other racialized celebrities.
The section dedicated historical formats makes very unusual choices. After examining more familiar genres of nationalist-historical adventure series of the 1960s and 70s, Imre looks at post-socialist uses of history and memory. Chapter 7 deals with the pan-European phenomenon of period-historical dramas in the 1990s and 2000s. She writes about similarities and differences of these formats’ functioning in various national contexts, the east European ones having their idiosyncrasies but also participating in pan-European exchange of formats and ideas. Chapter 8 engages with late socialist commercials, the majority of which were produced in the most market-oriented economies of Yugoslavia and Hungary but traveled across national borders. While commercials were an ideological and economic oddity on socialist television screens, Imre dedicates the entire chapter to them because of the affective power these texts had and still have over viewers’ memories. Specifically, these commercials have been an important vehicle for softening and feminizing late socialist culture, paving the ways for the transition to democratic capitalism (182).
In the section on genres of fiction, Imre focuses on the socialist soap opera and gender politics of late socialist television. Much of this politics draws on the agenda of state feminism—a set of government policies that recognized women's special needs but viewed them primarily as an additional workforce, with a mandatory second shift on the homefront. The socialist state, in fact, used soaps to promote an idealized image of a “socialist superwoman” who can do it all both at work and at home, and somehow remain desirable (214–15). Imre contends that much like western soaps, socialist soaps presented the nuclear family as the metaphor of modern society with a female protagonist at its center. The Cold War competition of lifestyles put consumption at the center of the television drama, with women being the primary audience and targets for ideological messages. Paradoxically, east European soaps allowed for feminized discourses of late socialism but without letting any feminist politics in. As a result, as Imre points out, these pseudo-feminist narratives paved the way for a “postfeminist, postsocialist landscape” where feminism is somehow perceived by the viewers as not necessary or already “overcome” (200).
The last two chapters examine genres of laughter in socialist and postsocialist television. Instead of the more familiar story of how communists censored comedy under socialism, Imre concentrates on the ways pre-socialist variety entertainment (cabaret), on the one hand, and political satire, on the other, influenced east European comedic formats. The concluding chapter offers an eye-opening and sobering parallel between the mechanisms of political satire under late socialism and late capitalism. According to Imre, both share an ironic aesthetic of stiob. As Alexei Yurchak defines it, stiob thrived under socialism as a response to ossified ideological discourses. Discussing such phenomena as Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's shows, Imre contends that stiob is also central for their carnivalesque performance of neoliberal corporate news formats. Stiob implies an overidentification with an idea or person, which erases the boundary between serious and sarcastic discourses, an aesthetic that Stewart and Colbert epitomized in their takedowns of mainstream media self-serving and monologic reporting. For Imre, such deafening monologism is a regrettable outcome of post-Cold War triumphalism of western media and politics (256).
While Imre focuses primarily on similarities and parallels between east and west European TV systems, Evans acknowledges the global nature of TV flows but centers on the distinctiveness of the Soviet case. Her examination of Soviet Central Television emphasizes such features as its aspiration to be a high(er) cultural medium whose primary function was to enlighten and transform its audiences. Unlike west and east European TV, as Imre demonstrates, Soviet TV and its audience were “never completely feminized” (12). Television remained elitist and had very limited use of domestic settings and serial formats—the bread and butter of western programming. Moreover, Evans contends that Central Television remained experimental in its ethos through the late-socialist period.
The book's organization is similar to Imre's, with one important difference: the first two chapters focus on the institutional history of Soviet television. The rest of the book examines various genre formats, such as news programs, drama series, variety show formats, and game shows. Evans roughly divides the history of Soviet television into an early period of experimentation in the 1950s–mid 1960s, when the practitioners’ believed that the intelligentsia should be the model hero of the small screen (34), and the mature broadcasting system of the 1970s and 1980s that became more realistic in its expectations and targeted mass audiences with a “layercake” of entertainment and political programming (79). In discussing Soviet scheduling politics, Evans notes that daytime programming, which traditionally targets female consumers, was notoriously absent on Soviet TV. Instead, the channels reran evening programs for those members of the audience who worked or attended school during the second shift (66). Evans also uses new archival sources to examine internal politics of Central Television. One paradoxical discovery is that, in the attempt to control the effects of television, Soviet administration and TV critics of the 1960s aspired to limit the consumption of TV viewing by Soviet audiences, instead of expanding the offerings.
Evans admits that the organization of the book is intentionally not chronological, disrupting the usual order of discussing Soviet television. She starts with entertainment programming rather than political. Chapter 3 discusses variety shows that aligned with the Soviet holiday schedule, specifically the most popular programs, Goluboi ogonek (Little Blue Flame, first broadcast April 1962) and Pesnia goda (Song of the Year competition, first broadcast 1971). Both shows evolved over time, reflecting the contested and negotiated ideas about what Soviet entertainment should be and what Soviet audiences allegedly wanted. Evans emphasizes two important features of the Song of the Year contest, which reflect broader, transnational-cultural trends, such as the fragmentation of the audience and the shift from a format of a variety show, where the audiences fulfill the passive role of viewers, to the interactive format of a contest. Indeed, there was little in common between the older Soviet generation of WWII veterans, who preferred more traditional Soviet and pseudo-folk performances, and younger viewers, who favored pop culture and who, as the administration rightly suspected, preferred the Beatles’ “Drive My Car” to the good old Soviet “Katyusha.”
Evans also reevaluates the legacy of the Brezhnev-era head of Soviet television Sergei Lapin, who is usually portrayed as a one-dimensional political watchdog. She compares Lapin to his predecessor Nikolai Mesiatsev's utopian and directly propagandistic vision on the uses of the new medium and argues that Lapin brought a much more nuanced and inclusive philosophy of programming, radically expanding audiences to include provincial viewers, older viewers, and the less-educated strata of Soviet society. As Evans shows, the new types of programs in the 1970s, including various contests, game shows, and historical melodramas, put a greater emphasis on the affective power of these formats, providing positive social models without resorting to crude propaganda.
Television administrators embraced a similar vision when they dealt with the most ideologically- important formats, such as news programming. The pioneer of Soviet television criticism, Vladimir Sappak, saw encounters with “model” Soviet people on screen as the cornerstone of the new medium. By the 1970s, however, these Soviet-style newsworthy narratives turned into acts of hagiography. Even the Soviet television administration admitted in their internal correspondence that domestic news, unlike the unpredictable and conflict-driven international news, was boring. Evans claims that quasi-documentary television series, such as Tatyana Lioznova's Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973), offered a solution. Unlike Czech television's post-1968 contract with the audience, which called on the viewer to focus on family life and consumption, Soviet television continued to adhere to the male-centered, public sphere as the object of representation. In the new format, however, viewers were urged to accept the wisdom and authority of state power, which, via the show's protagonist Shtirlits, is presented as complex and humane. Evans argues, for example, that viewers were to identify with Pastor Schlag who, without fully knowing the true identity and noble goals of Shtirlits, trusts him nevertheless (169).
Evans devotes the last two chapters of her book to game shows. Produced by the Youth Desk at the Central Television, game shows were designed to target younger audiences and avoid direct propaganda, while providing wholesome “edutainment.” As with the Song of the Year, in planning such popular game show programs as KVN (Club of the Merry and Resourceful) and A nu-ka, devushki! (Let's Go, Girls!), Soviet television producers had to tackle difficult questions: is competitiveness a Soviet value? What kind of prizes can participants get that would not suggest capitalist consumerism? How to reach audiences that differed in their tastes, levels of education, and so on? Evans argues that the evolution of game shows from the 1950s to the 1970s, while often bearing traces of official interference and censorship, could also be seen as anti-elitist. Let's Go Girls!, for example, lacked the intellectual virtuosity of KVN; the show, however, developed a more democratic and inclusive format.
Perhaps Evans's most important insight is that the discussions of the shows’ format and the game procedures, both at the production stage and, in case of What? Where? When?, on the set, introduced and tested ideas and strategies of a more open debate. While Evans frames her argument of the elite player-viewer community of What? Where? When? with Yurchak's idea of living vnye (216)—as an alternative to the stifling political reality—her ideas have broader implications. As Evans convincingly demonstrates, the show's format was more important than the questions themselves. While the latter never touched on politics and in fact steered clear of anything topical or controversial, both the participants and the viewers in front of their TV screens were exposed to a glimpse of civil society: the practices of open-ended play, chance and meritocracy, the test of leadership skills, and especially the ability to negotiate the “rules of the game.”
Evans ends her book with an overview of the changes in the Soviet television industry during perestroika and into the 1990s, such as live broadcasts, the rise of television celebrities, and increased audience participation. These reviewers find that the latter feature deserves more analysis. The conclusion seems to overstate the degree to which perestroika and Putin-era television involve audiences. As was the case with Soviet-US TV bridges (and unlike the 1990s), Putin-era television uses studio audiences to imitate western formats rather than encourage true participation and open debate. A couple of factual errors do not affect this excellent study: the perestroika show 600 Seconds was an independent program produced by the Leningrad Studio, not part of Before and After Midnight (243), and the first TV Bridge (telemost) between Seattle and Washington took place in 1985, not 1986.
TV Socialism and Between Truth and Time are excellent contributions to the field, a must-read for scholars of Soviet and east European media, popular culture, and social history. Both monographs are well-written, avoid scholarly jargon and move the discussion along with humorous observations and an effective use of images. In their combination of new research and original insights, Imre and Evans further challenge Cold War ideas about socialist media and recover socialist audiences, analyzed through the prism of gender, education, and so on, as participants in the negotiation of cultural production. In this respect, these projects are greater than simply historical studies of regional media. As Daphne Berdahl argues, “socialism continues to have an active social life within postsocialism” (cited in Imre, 21), and thus a meaningful reflection on (post)socialism can provide means of critiquing global capitalism.
