From Truth to Time: Soviet Central Television, 1957-1985 by Christine Elaine Evans a Dissertation Submitted in Partial Satisfact
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From Truth to Time: Soviet Central Television, 1957-1985 By Christine Elaine Evans A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair Professor Victoria Frede Professor Olga Matich Spring 2010 From Truth to Time: Soviet Central Television, 1957-1985 © 2010 By Christine Elaine Evans Abstract From Truth to Time: Soviet Central Television, 1957-1985 by Christine Elaine Evans Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair The Brezhnev era (1964-1982) was also the era of television. The First Channel of Moscow’s Central Television Studio began to reach all eleven Soviet time zones in the same years, 1965-1970, that marked the beginning of a new political era, the period of decline, corruption, and cynicism, but also stability, relative prosperity, and vibrant popular culture, that came to be called, retrospectively, the “era of stagnation.” Nearly all of the iconic images and sounds of this period were mediated by television: Brezhnev’s slurred speech and corpselike appearance, the singing of Iosif Kobzon and Alla Pugacheva, the parades and funerals on Red Square, and Olympic figure skating, to name just a few. Quotations and jokes drawn from specific TV movies and shows are ubiquitous in post-Soviet memoirs and the press. Most strikingly, several of the most important programs created during the 1960s and 1970s are still a prominent part of current Russian television. This dissertation analyzes the political and ideological dilemmas of the Brezhnev era through the lens of television, the medium with which that era is so closely associated. Seen from the perspective of its most famous television programs and their producers, Brezhnev-era cultural life appears far more fluid, experimental, and innovative than the binary categories of “official” and “unofficial” culture suggest, helping to explain the powerful nostalgia for precisely the “official” mass culture of this period in Russia today. Two changes in post-Stalin Soviet politics combined to encourage this experimentation. The first was the growing importance, after Stalin’s death, of persuasion, rather than coercion, in mobilizing the Soviet population, as well as the eagerness of a reinvigorated intelligentsia to participate in revitalizing the socialist project during the 1960s. The second key factor was intense pressure from Cold War competition with the West. In order to respond to foreign radio broadcasting and offer an appealing Soviet alternative to the Western popular culture that was penetrating Soviet borders, the Communist Party leadership encouraged Central Television’s staff to seek new styles and genres of television broadcasting. Far from being ritualized or formalized, therefore, some of the most popular and politically important programs on Central Television during the Brezhnev era were the site of significant cultural and political play. This experimentation began in the late 1950s, but it continued and in fact went further after 1968. At the height of the era of “stagnation,” a key group of television programs were involved in a search for new ways of engaging and uniting the Soviet population in ! 1 an unfamiliar ideological environment: one in which the universality of enthusiasm and participation in a common mission were no longer assumed, and that was focused primarily on the present, not the future. ! ! 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction: Television and Stagnation 1 Chapter 1 “Not a Mirror but a Magnifying Glass”: Defining Soviet 18 Television, 1957-1962 Chapter 2 Soviet Prime Time: Audience Research and the Creation 52 of the Channel 1 Schedule Chapter 3 The Cold War and the Making of Programma “Vremia” 86 Chapter 4 From Café to Contest: Soviet Central Television’s 115 New Year’s Shows, 1962-1985 Chapter 5 KVN? KVN...KVN! Understanding the Soviet game show 141 Epilogue: What? Where? When? 184 Bibliography 195 ! i Acknowledgments Like a good television program, the years spent researching and writing this dissertation have gone by in the blink of an eye and instantly become the object of my nostalgia. But without the help of many institutions and individuals, I could never have put on this little show. This dissertation was supported by generous grants from a number of external institutions, including the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund. At U.C. Berkeley, I am extremely grateful for the consistent and warm material and intellectual support of the Institute for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies and the Department of History. In Moscow, I was helped enormously by archivists at GARF, TsAOPIM, and RGANI. Particular thanks are due to Lidiia Sergeevna Naumova at TsAOPIM for taking me under her formidable wing. I am especially grateful to my friends Olga Kuz’mina and the Balashov family for making my time in Russia so full of wonderful adventures. The pirozhki baked by the employees of the Russian State Historical Library’s bufet sustained this project in a literal sense. Most importantly, I would like to thank my dissertation committee. Olga Matich provided me with a model of passionate and creative scholarship. Victoria Frede devoted herself enthusiastically to my cause, and provided detailed and insightful comments on very short notice—she is a true mensch. But most of all I would like to thank Yuri Slezkine, whose wisdom, tact, and intellectual and personal generosity (not to mention extraordinary knowledge of the contents of youtube.com), have often left me in awe. After Reggie Zelnik died, Yuri took on the impossible burden of carrying on and preserving the environment that Reggie had created for all of us. Insofar as such a task was possible, he succeeded. I have also benefited from the support of many scholars beyond Berkeley. I am extraordinarily grateful to Robert Edelman, who gave me enormous amounts of his time and wit, not to mention insightful comments. Aaron Retish and Joshua First welcomed me to Southeastern Michigan and have provided much camaraderie. I am particularly grateful to them and their colleagues at the University of Michigan Russian and Soviet history workshop and the Midwest Russian history workshop for their valuable comments and for making me feel at home. I hope I can claim that this dissertation is a product of its milieu—the unparalleled environment of friendship and scholarship in UC Berkeley’s Russian history program and the Institute for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies. I would like to especially thank the friends and colleagues whose generosity and sense of adventure made researching and writing both more productive and more fun. Eleonor Gilburd, Elizabeth McGuire, Knox Peden, Alexis Peri, Shawn Salmon, and Victoria Smolkin all read parts of this dissertation—often long parts on short notice—and offered invaluable suggestions along with much wisdom and encouragement. Stephen Brain, Molly Brunson, Nicole Eaton, Bill Goldman, Sarah Horowitz, Miriam Neirick, Kristin Romberg, Erik Scott, Regine Spector, Jarrod Tanny, Ned Walker, and Susanne Wengle offered important feedback, but also made my time in Berkeley and in Moscow a lot more fun. Finally, I would like to thank my family, particularly Lydia, whose colorful scribbles on rough drafts offered fresh interpretations, and Nick, who understood. ! ii I have a TV, give me the lectern I will holler so that it carries for miles It’s not a window—I wouldn’t even spit out of a window It’s as if they broke me a door to the whole world Everything delivered, the very widest selection Vacations in the Crimea, a hurricane, and Kobzon A movie, part seven—that could be the fix I didn’t see the previous six I turn on Channel 1—there’s some diving Well, that’s OK, but starting at eight “Let’s Go, Girls!”—what will they come up with! They’re all in aprons—you could lose your mind!1 --Vladimir Vysotsky, “Victim of Television,” 1972 Introduction: Television and Stagnation In April, 1965, a television viewer named P. K. Pakhomova from Kharkov oblast’ wrote a letter to Central Television about her favorite television program, a quiz and comedy show called Club of the Merry and Resourceful [Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh or “KVN”]. “When you watch KVN,” she wrote, “you try to answer all the questions, and that means you try to read more, to learn more about everything. Everything around you sort of takes on a new meaning.... My wish,” she concluded, “is for KVN to never cease to exist [chtoby “KVN” nikogda ne perestal sushchestvovat’].” P. K. Pakhomova got her wish, but in a way that was unimaginable in 1965. KVN, one of the most popular shows ever produced by Soviet Central Television, is indeed still on the air and very popular in 2010—it has not ceased to exist. But the revolutionary socialist state that created the show has. Pakhomova’s letter reflects a central paradox of late Soviet life. Since 1917, the Soviet Communist Party had sought to produce a culture that would enlighten its citizens and transform their perception of the world around them, just as Pakhomova described. By the 1960s and 1970s, it had succeeded, creating an enormously popular mass culture that was also designed to enlighten and mobilize the Soviet population. Delivering this vibrant mass culture was a compelling and wildly popular new medium, television. Yet the most popular programs on Central Television—those that were regarded as Central Television’s greatest successes by audiences and the Communist Party Central Committee alike—have long outlasted the Soviet Communist Party whose most important messages they were ostensibly designed to convey. Their main meanings and formal qualities were both ideally suited to the late Soviet state’s political and ideological dilemmas, and largely independent from the Marxist-Leninist ideology that collapsed or was abandoned in 1991, along with much of the multi-national Soviet empire.