BOOKS & ARTS
The great Soviet gameshow
Will Nicoll
Between Truth and Time: A History
of Soviet Central Television
by Christine E. Evans
Yale, £65, pp. 360
In the opening chapter of her history of Sovi-
et Central Television, Christine E. Evans
observes two Russian televisual displays of
- February saw the opening ceremony of
the Sochi Winter Olympics — which sought
to depict a millennium of national histo-
ry using glitter and gameshow grandiosity.
April brought the stern, but no less theat-
rical, Direct Line with Vladimir Putin — an
annual phone-in — during which the presi-
dent celebrated Crimea’s annexation with
an orgy of televisual patriotism. Although
more glitzy than their Soviet-era equiva-
lents, both can be seen as displays of con-
tinuity in Russian broadcasting, rather than
incidences of invention. As Evans explains:
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 sec-
ond half of the 1960s, and realised its multi-
ple, 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, legitimising authority, and per-
forming the state’s responsiveness to its citi-
zens — all without recourse to either shared
belief in a single ideology or to genuinely
competitive elections.In the aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953
— and the thaw which accompanied Nikita
Khrushchev’s denunciation of the late Sovi-
et leader — Central Television embarked
on a flurry of creativity. Well aware of light
entertainment’s ‘ostensibly pathological
commercial role in the capitalist West’, TV
pioneers sought to create programming
that had a Soviet value system. As Evans
explains,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.A divergent Soviet TV schedule
emerged where ‘foreign news was high
status, as in the West, [but] so were game-
shows, a genre near the bottom of prestige
hierarchies in the capitalist world’. Rus-
sia’s interest in these genres should not be
derided. Light entertainment brought the
notion of ‘play’ to a strictly censored media.
Russia’s first attempt at the gameshow
genre, Evening of Merry Questions (Vecher
veselykh voprosov) was broadcast in May- It was hoped that putting ‘unvar-
nished, unmediated ordinary people and
everyday life on screen could convey the
revolutionary transformation of Soviet
life’. In fact, VVV primarily served to high-
light the dangerously subversive conse-
quences of live broadcasting. The show was
dramatically axed on 29 September 1957,
when
an excessively easy audience contest led to
the arrival of an unruly crowd of nearly 700
poorly dressed Muscovites — some drunk,
one carrying a live chicken — who flooded
into the theatre, overwhelming the stage and
tearing down the curtain.In the aftermath of VVV Central Televi-
sion’s staff were momentarily terrified, but
continued to push televisual ideas. Reforms
to Stalin-era legislation saw Khrushchev cut
the official working week from 48 hours to- The USSR was still a young entity — with
new holidays, and new ideological reasons
to celebrate them — so variety shows, which
drew on the traditions of the Russian stage,
became a cornerstone of programming.
Little Blue Flame — a variety show that
hit screens in April 1962 — continued to
push the limits of ‘experimentation’. It was
named after a popular Moscow café which
attracted educated young people, and the
creators hoped to replicate the atmosphere
by hosting evening chats with free-think-
ing performers, cosmonauts and foreign
celebrities. Unfortunately, their portrayal
of Soviet society as ‘a relatively non-hier-
archical, voluntaristic, international com-
munity’ didn’t chime with the spirit of
Red Square military parades during public
holidays. Management soon brought pres-
sure to include more ‘conventional’ Sovi-
et heroes ‘whose presence was not always
as spontaneous or friendship-based as the
show’s format would require’.
Little Blue Flame was at its lowest
ebb when Stalin’s austere personal radio
announcer, Yuri Levitan, was included in
the line-up — to read the macabre war-
time radio addresses he’d made to the
Soviet people. The television pundit Ser-
gei Muratov was furious. He didn’t dispute
that Levitan’s speeches had been rousing,
but concluded that when delivered ‘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’.
Soviet television was addled with the
same kitsch happenings as its western
counterparts. Imagine the comedians Lev
Mirov and Mark Novitskii greedily tear-
ing open gifts beneath a studio Christ-
mas tree — to discover a cassette of the
Ukrainian child singer Boris Sadulenko
singing ‘O Sole Mio’ in Italian. Picture the
same duo approaching robots and call cen-
tres crewed by singing operators to decide
their show’s line-up. A project of the same
era entitled The Club of the Merry and
Resourceful (Klub veselykh i nakhod-
civykh or simply KVN) was a blockbuster
gameshow. Intended to be a truly egalitar-
ian and talent-led antidote to equivalents
in the West, KVN degenerated into a sys-
temic, nationwide cheating extravaganza.
Evans wryly notes KVN’s flaws while
contextualising its merits. Leonid Brezh-
nev’s 1964–1982 premiership of the Soviet
Union would later be defined by Mikhail
Gorbachev as ‘an era of stagnation’. This cri-
tique now defines our view of the USSR’s
latter decades, but Evans finds a very differ-
ent story in the archives of Soviet Central
Television.
Anna Shilova and Aleksandr Masliakov on ‘Song of the Year’, 1977