Russian television in the era of managed media

2. Television has been through a revolution and back in the last three decades. We[1] get the inside story from veteran TV critic Irina Petrovskaya.

Moscow, 1979: You get home from a tiring day and turn on TV. On one of the four channels is a rather boring class in French; you move on. On another is a Chekhov play filmed for TV. The third is showing a documentary about the agricultural successes in the "Virgin Lands". You move on again until the fourth channel, where you settle down to watch a football match. At nine o'clockyou watch the news on Channel One— Время (Time). The newscasters begin with a description of the "businesslike and productive" meeting between the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the President of India, followed by a series of reports of excellent harvests, increased industrial output, and the anniversary of an Esteemed Artist of the USSR. There are no crime stories, except for the occasional cautionary tale about a "speculator" who sewed scarves into dresses until he got caught and sentenced to a penal colony. There are no advertisements or flashy graphics. News from the West is bad, as usual: riots, famine, hunger, injustice. You might suspect that things aren't quite as rosy in the USSR as they are portrayed (if the harvest was so good, why hasn't there been a single carrot in the stores for the last three months?), but, then again, perhaps that's just Moscow, and elsewhere the carrot situation is under control. In any case, you go back to watching your football game with a reassuring sense that all — or almost all — is right in your world. By midnight, the game and the broadcast day end.

That was Soviet television: total control of information, propaganda of the successes of the Soviet state and the failures of the capitalist world, and rather staid entertainment shows. But it was not all boring, and definitely not unprofessional. TV in the Soviet Union was made by well-trained people with a great deal of talent, expertise and experience — if limited opportunities. Series made then, like Место Встречи Изменить Нельзя (You Can't Change the Meeting Place), Семнадцать Мгновений Весны (Seventeen Moments in Spring) or Следствие Ведут Знатоки (The Investigation is Headed by Pros) still get high ratings when shown as reruns. They were masters at the difficult art of filming plays, ballets and concerts for television. And the variety shows were well-produced and performed, if as staid as the Ed Sullivan Show we in the US were watching at the time.

Soviet TV was transmitted through ground wires and then satellite transmission to virtually every home and hamlet in all eleven time zones and 16 republics. In addition to receiving central TV from Moscow, republican channels included local news and productions — and sometimes had more freedom: Armenia had the privilege of showing Western films virtually every weekend (presumably to keep the pot of dissent from boiling over). Holiday variety shows were a treat, as was Easter: to keep people home and away from churches, the stations traditionally broadcast pop concerts or foreign films. And so it was, from year to year.

And then came glasnost.

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