Which term best describes the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War collaborative?

Abstracts

This article describes the emergence of “the socialist way of life” as a central category in Soviet propaganda during the late 1960s and 1970s, one that put emotional and spiritual qualities forward as the defining features of both the new Soviet person and Soviet socialist civilization in the era of “developed socialism.” While recent research has emphasized the importance of material promises to the Soviet population in the post‑Stalin era, the case of Central Television suggests the centrality of affective and moral appeals in Soviet broadcast communications. By looking at “emotion talk” across Central Television’s programming desks and at the television show most associated with the “socialist way of life” and Brezhnev‑era emotionality, Valentina Leont´eva’s melodramatic talk show, Ot vsei dushi, the author shows how affective management, including the creation and preservation of a “good mood” among Soviet TV viewers, became one of Central Television’s most important mobilizing strategies. Central to the new, state‑sponsored “structures of feeling” produced on this and other Brezhnev‑era television shows (and still highly relevant on contemporary Russian state media) were strongly gendered roles for women, intense state surveillance, memories of shared suffering in a heroic past, and a circumscribed, pan‑Slavic nationalism.

Cet article décrit l’émergence du « mode de vie socialiste » en tant que catégorie majeure dans la propagande soviétique à la fin des années 1960 et pendant les années 1970, catégorie qui place au premier plan les qualités émotionnelles et spirituelles, caractéristiques essentielles de la nouvelle personne soviétique et de la civilisation socialiste soviétique à l’ère du « socialisme avancé ». Alors que les recherches récentes mettent l’accent sur l’importance des promesses matérielles faites à la population soviétique à l’époque poststalinienne, le cas de la Télévision centrale suggère la centralité des attraits affectifs et moraux des émissions soviétiques. En regardant la programmation d’« émissions émotion » de la Télévision centrale et Ot vsei duši, le talk show mélodramatique de Valentina Leont´eva, show télévisé le plus représentatif du « mode de vie socialiste » et de l’émotivité de l’ère brejnévienne, l’article démontre comment le contrôle affectif, incluant la création et la préservation d’un climat de bonne humeur chez les téléspectateurs soviétiques, est devenu l’une des stratégies mobilisatrices les plus importantes. Au centre des nouvelles « structures de sentiment » subventionnées par l’État et produites pour ce show et pour d’autres shows télévisés de l’époque brejnévienne (et toujours très présents dans les médias publics contemporains) se trouvaient des rôles féminins fortement genrés, une intense surveillance de l’État, le souvenir de souffrances collectives situées dans un passé héroïque et un nationalisme pan‑slave circonscrit.

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Notes

1 Viktor Khelemendik, “Vtoroe otkrytie [A Second revelation],” Zhurnalist, N° 6 (June, 1971) : 16. I would like to thank the participants in and organizers of the panel “Life‑worlds of Late Soviet Socialism” at the ASEEES annual convention 2013 in Boston, MA and the conference “Television in Europe beyond the Iron Curtain – National and Transnational Perspectives since the 1950s”, Friedrich‑Alexander‑Universität Erlangen‑Nürnberg, December 5‑7, 2013 for their incisive comments on an early version of this article.

2 Ibid., 17. Khelemendik’s account of experiencing a television portrait of a model worker bears a certain resemblance to the ways that artists, critics, and regular viewers described creating or experiencing portraits of Stalin. As Jan Plamper has demonstrated, there too, detailed visual attention to Stalin’s face yielded enormous political meaning, some of which was conveyed via emotional expression—Stalin’s “calm confidence,” for example. See Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult : A Study in the Alchemy of Power, The Yale‑Hoover Series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2012), 88, 112‑116.

3 On the socialist “way of life” see Alfred B. Evans, Soviet Marxism‑Leninism : The Decline of an Ideology (Westport, CT : Praeger, 1993), 132‑143 ; Tony Shaw and Denise Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War : The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence : University of Kansas Press, 2010), 47‑50, 112‑124. See also Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and his TV : The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2010), 207 ; Neringa Klumbyte, “Soviet Ethical Citizenship : Morality, the State, and Laughter in Late Soviet Lithuania,” in Neringa Klumbyte and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, eds., Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964‑1985 (Lanham, MD : Lexington Books, 2013), 92. For more on the centrality of morality and ethics in the Khrushchev era see Deborah Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York : Peter Lang, 2007). On emotions and moral complexity in late Soviet literature see Polly Jones, “Fiery Exchanges and Heated Debates : the emotions of reader response to late Soviet historical literature,” conference paper presented at the ASEEES annual meeting in Boston, MA, November 23, 2013.

4 Evans, Soviet Marxism‑Leninism : The Decline of an Ideology, 132‑133. On the connection between ethics and emotions in pre‑Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia thought, see Victoria Frede, “Radicals and Feelings. The 1860s,” in Mark Steinberg and Valeria Sobol, eds, Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (DeKalb, IL : Northern Illinois University Press, 2011).

5 On the political, technological, and aesthetic debates about television in the Soviet Union, see Kristin Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time : How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 2011), especially 176‑280. For an overview of socialist television in Eastern Europe, particularly entertainment genres see Sabina Mihelj, “Television Entertainment in Socialist Eastern Europe. Between Cold War Politics and Global Developments,” in Imre, Havens, and Lustyik, eds, Popular Television in Eastern Europe During and Since Socialism, Routledge Advances in Internationalizing Media Studies, ed. Daya Thussu (New York : Routledge, 2013).

6 The notion that emotions offered a higher form of evidence than speech about inner states was not, of course, original to this period. As Glennys Young has shown, from 1936 Soviet party tribunals “interpreted emotions as a way of diagnosing the underlying political essence of the self.” See Glennys Young, “Bolsheviks and Emotional Hermaneutics. The Great Purges, Bukharin, and the February‑March Plenum of 1937,” in Steinberg and Sobol, eds, Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe, 132.

7 On this problem in the early years of Soviet television, see also Simon Huxtable, “The Problem of Personality on Soviet Television, 1950s‑1960s,” View : Journal of European History and Culture, 3, 5 (2012) : 119‑130. On private apartments see Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street : Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Baltimore : Woodrow Wilson Center/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

8 On the anxiety about television technology and its place in the home in the Soviet context, see Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 199‑208. On the problematic question of “privatization” of political life in the 1960s and 1970s, see Sabina Mihelj, “The Politics of Privatization. Television Entertainment and the Yugoslav Sixties,” in Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane Koenker, eds, The Socialist Sixties : Crossing Borders in the Second World (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2013) ; and Kirsten Bönker, “Depoliticalisation of the Private Life ? Reflections on Private Practices and the Political in the Late Soviet Union,” in Willibald Steinmetz, Ingrid Gilcher‑Holtey, and Heinz‑Gerhard Haupt, eds., Writing Political History Today (Frankfurt : Campus Verlag, 2013).

9 See for example “Godovoi obzor pisem telezritelei za 1968 g. [Annual survey of television viewers’ letters for 1968],” GARF (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii – State archive of the Russian Federation) f. 6903, op. 10, d. 79, l. 21 ; “Obzor pisem telezritelei [Survey of television viewers’ letters],” August 1973, GARF, f. 6903, op. 36, d. 22, l. 40‑41 ; “Obzor pisem telezritelei za Sentiabr´ 1976 [Survey of television viewers’ letters for September 1976]” GARF, f. 6903, op. 36, d. 62, l. 3. On the meaning and history of “dushevnost´” see Mikhail Epshtein, “O dushevnosti,” in Zvezda, 8 (2006), accessed online via Zhurnalnyi zal, http://magazines.russ.ru/zvezda/2006/8/epsg.html

10 See for example, “Stenogramma II otchetno‑vybornoi partiinoi konferentsii goskom SM SSSR po radioveshchanie i televidenie [Transcript of the second electoral and reporting party conference of the State Committee of the Soviet of Ministers for radiobroadcasting and television],” March 31, 1964, OKhDOPIM (Otdel khraneniia dokumentov obshchestvenno‑politicheskoi istorii Moskvy – Division for the preservation of documents on the social‑political history of Moscow), f. 2930, op. 1, d. 144, l. 142 ; “Godovoi obzor pisem telezritelei za 1968 g.” GARF, f. 6903, op. 10, d. 79, l. 10. Central Television also addressed the perceived social problem of ravnodushie in its programming in the early 1970s. See for example, “Protokol No. 28 zasedaniia Goskomiteta ot 21 oktiabria 1971 g., [Protocol No. 28 of the State Committee meeting of 21 October 1971]” GARF, f. 6903, op. 32, d. 13, l. 33. Soviet atheist activists also discovered “indifference” as a problem when they began to conduct sociological research about religious belief. See Victoria Smolkin, “Sviato mesto pusto ne byvaet : ateisticheskoe vospitanie v Sovetskom Soiuze, 1964‑1968 [A sacred space is never empty : atheist education in the Soviet Union, 1964‑1968],” Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 3, 65 (2009). For reactions to “indifference” as a problem and threat, see Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls : National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2008).

11 See for example excerpts from viewer letters in “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1972 g. [Survey of television viewer letters for 1972],” GARF, f. 6903, op. 36, d. 2, l. 60 and “Materialy k zasedaniiam kollegii (povestki dnia, doklady, spravki i dr.) [Materials for meetings of the board (agendas, speeches, reference materials etc.],” GARF, f. 6903, op. 32, d. 493, l. 147. See also quotations from producers and viewers in “Ot vsei dushi” Televidenie i radioveshchanie 1 (January 1973), 1‑3.

12 On Leont´eva’s emotional persona as an example of model late Soviet subjectivity, see Huxtable, “The Problem of Personality on Soviet Television, 1950s‑1960s,” 130. As I argue below, the precise pathways by which emotional influence was to take place were never clearly specified, but relied on the assumed power and authenticity of emotion as distinct from and prior to reason. A great deal of recent historical and literary critical writing has lately attempted to engage the concept of emotion. Within Russian studies, see Steinberg and Sobol, eds, Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe ; Jan Plamper et al, eds, Rossiiskaia Imperiia Chuvstv : podkhody k kul´turnoi istorii emotsii [Russian Empire of Feelings : approaches to the cultural history of emotions] (M. : Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010) ; and a special issue on “Emotional Turn ? Feelings in Russian History and Culture,” ed. Jan Plamper, Slavic Review, 68, 2 (2009) : 229‑334. See also Ilya Vinnitsky’s review article, “Zagovor chuvstv, ili Russkaia istoriia na ‘emotsional´nom povorote.’ Obzor rabot po istorii emotsii [Conspiracy of feelings, or Russian history in the “affective turn.” Review of work in the history of emotions],” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 117, 5 (2012), available at http://www.nlobooks.ru/node/2639#_ftn21. For this article, my objective is not to assess whether Soviet Central Television’s approach to emotion was or was not effective in influencing viewers in the ways intended, or to contribute to theoretical debates about the actual workings of emotion in relation to ideology and political persuasion. Instead, I want to demonstrate that emotions were seen as an essential part of television’s power to influence and to give one account of how and why emotion became important to ideas about television’s influence precisely at this historical moment.

13 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York : Oxford University Press, 1977), 132‑134. Thanks to Lars Lundgren and the other participants in the conference “Television in Europe beyond the Iron Curtain – National and Transnational Perspectives since the 1950s,” Friedrich‑Alexander‑Universität Erlangen‑Nürnberg, December 5‑7, 2013 for suggesting that I incorporate this concept.

14 Evans, Soviet Marxism‑Leninism : The Decline of an Ideology, 141‑143.

15 Ibid., 141. However, Tony Shaw and Denise Youngblood identify an era of what they call “positive legitimation” in Cold War film that stretches from 1953‑1978, and builds on the traditions of Stalinist‑era cinema featuring the Soviet good life. Shaw and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War, 47‑50,112‑124.

16 The GDR show Gumbert describes, entitled With Open Hearts, seems so close in format to Ot vsei dushi as to be a direct influence on the later Soviet program, but I have not found acknowledgment of this in Soviet memoir accounts. Heather Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism : Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2014), 148‑152.

17 Bren, The Greengrocer and his TV, 207.

18 Victoria Smolkin‑Rothrock, “Ticket to the Soviet Soul : Science, Religion and the Spiritual Crisis of Late Soviet Atheism, The Russian Review, 73 (April 2014) : 171‑197. See also Malte Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals, 1917‑1991, trans. Cynthia Klohr (Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 188‑193.

19 Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 18‑19. For an engaging account of one aspect of the French response, see Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind : French Philosophers on Television (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2007).

20 Bren, The Greengrocer and his TV, 148‑149. For a critique of an oversimplified distinction between “public” and “private” in the socialist context, see Mihelj, “The Politics of Privatization,” and Bönker, “Depoliticalisation of the Private Life ?”

21 Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses : Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2004), 27‑29.

22 Peter Holquist, “‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work’ : Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan‑European Context,” The journal of modern history (1997) : 415‑450.

23 I take this definition of “mood” from Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping : Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2008), 12, 19‑24.

24 Jonathan Flatley, “How a Revolutionary Countermood is Made,” New Literary History, 43 (2012) : 503‑525, 504.

25 Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals, 45.

26 Karen Petrone, Life has Become More Joyous, Comrades : Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2000), 6.

27 On postwar emotions, see Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone : Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (New York : Penguin, 2002) ; on the Thaw and sincerity see Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War : Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957 (New York : M.E. Sharpe, 1998) ; Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children : The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2009). See also the essays in Polly Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of De-stalinization : Negotiating cultural and social change in the Khrushchev era, BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies (Abingdon : Routledge, 2006) and Eleonor Gilburd and Denis Kozlov, The Thaw : Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2013).

28 For the classic account of postwar materialism, see Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time : Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, 2nd ed (Durham : Duke University Press, 1990). For this dynamic in relation to Soviet television, see Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 200‑201.

29 See Polly Jones, “Breaking the Silence : Iurii Bondarev’s Quietness between the ‘Sincerity’ and ‘Civic Emotion’ of the Thaw,” in Steinberg and Sobol, eds., Interpreting Emotions, 152‑176. On pre‑Revolutionary connections between mass media, sincerity, and strong feelings, see Anna Fishzon, “The Operatics of Everyday Life, or, How Authenticity was Defined in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review, 4 (Winter 2011) : 795‑818.

30 Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 223‑261 ; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 140‑149 ; see also Thomas Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism : the Press and the Socialist Person After Stalin (Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 2005).

31 Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 185, 201. See also Kirsten Bönker, “‘Dear television workers…’ : TV consumption and political communication in the late Soviet Union,” in this issue.

32 As Roth‑Ey has argued, Soviet cultural and political authorities were quite uncomfortable the idea of a Soviet “couch potato.” Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 201.

33 Gosudarstvennogo Komiteta SM SSSR po televideniiu i radioveshchaniiu, Partkom [State Committee of the Soviet of Ministers for television and radio broadcasting, Party committee], “Stenogrammy sobranii partiinogo aktiva [Transcripts of meetings of the Party aktiv],” January 12, 1972, OKhDOPIM, f. 2930, op. 2, d. 234, l. 49.

34 Gosudarstvennogo Komiteta SM SSSR po televideniiu i radioveshchaniiu, Partkom, “Stenogramma IX otchetno‑vyborochnoi partiinoi konferentsii [Transcript of the 9th general party conference],” November 27, 1974, OKhDOPIM, f. 2930, op. 2, d. 635, l. 49.

35 As Ellen Mickiewicz has documented, letter writers belonged to the Communist Party in far higher percentages than the Soviet population as a whole. See Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public, 121. For examples of this kind of letter, see “Obzor pisem telezritelei Ianvar´ 1973 g. [Survey of television viewers’ letters for January 1973]” January 1973, GARF, f. 6903, op. 36, d. 15, l. 64 ; Gosudarstvennyi komitet soveta ministrov SSSR po televideniiu i radio-veshchaniiu, otdel pisem Tsentral´nogo televideniia, “Obzor pisem telezritelei, [Survey of television viewers’ letters]” 1975 January, GARF, f. 6903, op. 36, d. 40, l. 73. For more on Soviet letter‑writing practices see Denis Kozlov, “‘I have not read, but I will say’ : Soviet Literary Audiences and Changing Ideas of Social Membership, 1958‑66,” Kritika, 7, 3 (2006) : 557‑597 ; see also Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants and Citizens : Public Letter‑Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s,” Slavic Review, 55, 1 (1996) :78.

36 For more on “emotion talk” see Peter Heelas, “Emotion Talk across Cultures,” in R. Harre, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford, 1986), cited in Polly Jones, “Breaking the Silence,” 154.

37 On emotion and the problem of personality on Soviet television in the 1950s and 60s, see Huxtable, “Problem of Personality.”

38 For this in early debates about television, see Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 236‑245. On the rehabilitation of the avant‑garde during the Thaw, see Stephen Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw : Experience and Memory on Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2008), 105‑140. On “novoe zrenie” and the avant garde, see Katerina Clark, Petersburg : Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1995), 30‑38.

39 Vladimir Sappak, Televidenie i my : chetyre besedy [Television and us : four conversations] (M. : Iskusstvo, 1963), 50. For more on the connection between television enthusiasm and Vertov, see Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 236, 244‑245. Vertov himself was presumably drawing on pre‑Revolutionary discussions of “living life” in Dostoevskii and in pre‑Revolutionary literary criticism of his work.

40 Subsequent critics noted that Sappak’s account of television’s power in fact depended on Sappak’s own “aesthetically and socially active vision,” rather than being a feature of the technology itself. See Iu. Bogomolov, “Sud´ba kontseptsii priamogo TV [The fate of the concept of live TV]” in Vl. Borev and S. Furtseva, eds., V zerkale kritiki : Iz istorii izucheniia khudozhestvennykh vozmozhnostei massovoi kommunikatsii [In criticism’s mirror : From the history of the study of mass communications’ artistic possibilities] (M. : Iskusstvo, 1985), 118.

41 “Stenogramma II otchetno‑vybornoi partiinoi konferentsii goskom SM SSSR po radioveshchaniiu i televideniiu [Transcript of the second general party conference of the state committee of the Soviet of Ministers for radio broadcasting and television],” March 31, 1964, OKhDOPIM, f. 2930, op. 1, d. 144, l. 17.

42 Comments by Nikolai Biriukov, “Stenogramma zasedanii televizionnoi sektsii vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia po problemam radio i teleinformatsii g. Moskva, 23‑26 Nov. 1966 [Transcript of the meetings of the television section of the all‑Union conference on problems of radio and television news in Moscow, 23‑26 November 1966],” GARF, f. 6903, op. 1, d. 105, l. 10‑11.

43 Of course, this emphasis on the person as the chief subject of art extends back to the 19th century Russian intelligentsia ; Leont´eva recalls being given a medal inscribed with a famous quotation from Belinskii, that “for art there is no more noble or honorable subject than man.” Valentina Leont´eva, Ob´´iasneniie v liubvi [Declaration of love] (M. – SPb. : ACT/Sova, 2007), 74.

44 On the encounter between television staff, enthusiast rhetoric about liveness, and the limitations of Soviet broadcasting, see Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 230‑261.

45 See Huxtable, “The Problem of Personality.” This problem was not at all exclusive to Soviet television. As John Corner has argued, Western discussions of television have suffered from a pervasive confusion between two meanings and projects described by the word “realism”—the project of being “like the real” and the project of being “about the real.” The conflict between these two forms of realism was especially problematic in the Soviet context, where socialist realism in art further intertwined these two, often contradictory, realist projects. See John Corner, “Criticism as Sociology : Reading the Media,” in Corner, Studying Media : Problems of Theory and Method (Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 70.

46 “Stenogramma IX otchetno‑vyborochnoi partiinoi konferentsii [Transcript of the 9th general party conference],” OKhDOPIM, f. 2930, op. 2, d. 635, l. 48‑49.

47 Roth‑Ey has made the crucial point that, by the early 1960s, Central Television staff had put their own cultural authority at the center of television’s aesthetic and political projects. Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 263‑273.

48 “Doklad i stenogrammy vystuplenii v preniiakh na sobranii partiinogo aktiva ob itogakh iiul´skogo (1970 g) plenuma TsK KPSS [Report and transcripts of statements during the discussion at the Party aktiv meeting on the findings of the July (1970) plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union],” July 28, 1970, OKhDOPIM, f. 2930, op. 1, d. 1097, l. 18.

49 See for example, “Stenogrammy zasedaniia sektsii telereportazha vsesoiuznogo tvorcheskogo soveshchaniia po voprosam reportazha v radioveshchanii i televidenii [Transcripts of meetings of the television reportage section of the all‑union creative conference on questions of reportage in radio broadcasting and television],” March 1‑2, 1961, GARF, f. 6903, op. 1, d. 712. This was far from a new debate for Soviet broadcasting. Stephen Lovell has traced very similar debates among Soviet radio broadcasters about the appropriate style of broadcast speech in the pre‑television era. See Stephen Lovell, “Broadcasting Bolshevik : The Radio Voice of Soviet Culture, 1920s‑1950s,” Journal of Contemporary History 48, 1 : 89.

50 Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 267‑268.

51 “Stenogramma zasedanii televizionnoi sektsii vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia po problemam radio i teleinformatsii g. Moskva, 23‑26 Nov. 1966, [Transcript of the television section meeting of the all‑Union conference on problems of radio‑ and television news in Moscow, 23‑26 Nov. 1966],” GARF, f. 6903, op. 1, d. 905, l. 18.

52 Elena Gal´perina, “Iskusstvo emotsional´nogo obnazheniia mysli [The art of revealing thought through emotion],” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, No. 3 (March, 1970) : 33.

53 L. Dmitriev, “Dokumental´noe iskusstvo. IV. Chelovek televideniia [Documentary art. IV. The person of television],” Sovetskoe radio i televidenie, No. 8 (August 1967), 19.

54 Ibid., l. 19‑20. An article by Sergei Muratov, one of the creators of KVN, suggests that hidden cameras were actually used on the provincial level at least once. Sergei Muratov, “Razmaskirovannyi mir […],” Zhurnalist No. 4 (April 1968), 27.

55 On the importance of a tiny elite audience in shaping Soviet television, see Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 211‑222, 279.

56 “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1972 g. [Survey of television viewers’ letters for 1972],” GARF, f. 6903, op. 36, d. 2, l. 60.

57 See for example Lapin’s comments on working class heroes in “Doklad i stenogrammy vystuplenii v preniiakh na sobranii partiinogo aktiva ob itogakh iiul´skogo (1970 g) plenuma TsK KPSS [Report and transcripts of statements during the discussion at the Party aktiv meeting on the findings of the July (1970) plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union],” July 28, 1970, OKhDOPIM, f. 2930, op. 1, d. 1097, l. 18. Lapin explicitly mentioned Ot vsei dushi as part of Central Television’s response to criticism of its youth programming from the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party, contrasting the show with KVN. See “Stenogrammy sobranii partiinogo aktiva 15 noiabria 1972 g. [Transcripts of the Party aktiv meeting of 15 November 1972],” OKhDOPIM, f. 2930, op. 2, d. 234, l. 142.

58 On Central Television as “court tv” and the Lapin era , see Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 211‑222.

59 Stephen Hutchings and Natalya Rulyova, Television and Culture in Putin’s Russia : Remote Control, BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, Richard Sakwa, ed. (Abingdon, UK : Routledge, 2009), 91‑95.

60 Bernard Timberg, Television Talk : A History of the Television Talk Show (Austin : University of Texas Press, 2002), 3.

61 Ibid., 3‑4.

62 Jane M. Shattuc, The Talking Cure : TV Talk Shows and Women (New York : Routledge, 1997), 3‑9.

63 While some variety and social‑political programs, such as Little Blue Flame (Goluboi ogonek) or Sergei Smirnov’s Feat (Podvig) had featured informal talk, this was usually limited either to cultural celebrities ; audience voices were generally heard only via their letters, read aloud by celebrity hosts.

64 See for example Kathleen S. Lowney, Baring Our Souls : TV Talk Shows and the Religion of Recovery, Social Problems and Social Issues Seres, ed. Joel Best (New York : Aldine de Gruyter, 1999) and Kathryn Lofton, Oprah : Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2011).

65 The administrative and economic organization of its production were, of course, very different from that of U.S. talk shows. For more on the objectives and institutional structure of Soviet television see Ellen Mickiewicz, Split Signals : Television and Politics in the Soviet Union (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1988), 27‑29 ; and Reino Paasilinna, Glasnost´ and Soviet Television : a study of the Soviet mass media and its role in society from 1985‑1991 (Helsinki : YLE Finnish Broadcasting Co, 1995), 37‑45. From the perspective of viewers, television ownership was a mass phenomenon by the early 1970s. In 1965 there were 24 television sets per 100 families in the Soviet Union ; by 1970, there was one set for every two families, or about 35 million sets total. By 1975, there were over 55 million television sets in the Soviet Union with another 6.5 million being produced annually See B.A. Miasoedov, Strana Chitaet, Slushaet, Smotrit (statisticheskii obzor) [The Country Reads, Listens, and Watches (statistical survey)], Statistika dlia vsekh series (M. : Finansy i Statistika, 1982), 64, 70 ; Ellen Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public (New York : Praeger, 1981), 18‑19.

66 Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, Picturing Russia : Explorations in Visual Culture (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2008).

67 On the need for a transnational approach to the study of socialist television, see Timothy Havens, Aniko Imre, and Katalin Lustyik, “Introduction,” and in Imre, Havens, and Lustyik, eds., Popular Television in Eastern Europe During and Since Socialism.

68 Cited in Lofton, Oprah : Gospel of an Icon, 4.

69 Aniko Imre argues that the broader genre of “reality television” was created first by socialist television. See Aniko Imre, Television Socialism (forthcoming, Duke University Press) ; Sabina Mihelj makes a similar point about the socialist origins of the idea of the active media consumer. Sabina Mihelj, “Audience History as a History of Ideas : The ‘Active Audience’ of the Socialist Sixties,” forthcoming in European Journal of Communications, 29 (2014).

70 On the distinctiveness of the post‑Soviet tok shou, see Hutchings and Rulyova, Television and Culture in Putin’s Russia, 89‑113.

71 Ibid., 94.

72 Ot vsei dushi. Kaluzhskie vstrechi [From the bottom of my heart. Meetings in Kaluga] (1975). Viewed at the Russian Ministry of Communications State Television and Radio Archive (Gosteleradiofond) November 10, 2006.

73 Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals, 3. For more on Soviet rituals in the post‑Stalin era, see Victoria Smolkin‑Rothrock, “‘A Sacred Space is Never Empty’ : Soviet Atheism, 1954‑1971” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California Berkeley, 2010) ; Christel Lane’s The Rites of Rulers. Ritual in Industrial Society : The Soviet Case (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1981), Christopher Binns, “The Changing Face of Power : Revolution and Accommodation in the Soviet Ceremonial System,” Part I, Man, New Series 14, 4 (1979) : 585‑606 ; and Part II, Man, New Series 15, 1 (1980) : 170‑187 ; Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives : The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1983) and The Living and the Dead : The Rise and the Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York : Basic Books, 1994).

74 For more on the connections between television and festivity, see Christine Evans, Between Truth and Time : A History of Soviet Central Television (New Haven : Yale University Press, forthcoming 2016).

75 Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals, 192‑193.

76 Ibid., 192.

77 Smolkin‑Rothrock, “Ticket to the Soviet Soul : Science, Religion and the Spiritual Crisis of Late Soviet Atheism,” 171‑197, 176.

78 Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals, 190.

79 On the evolution of lifecycle rituals in the post‑Stalin period see Victoria Smolkin‑Rothrock, “Problema ‘obyknovennoi’ sovetskoi smerti : Material´noe i dukhovnoe v ateisticheskoi kosmologii [The Problem with the ‘Ordinary’ Soviet Death : Material and Spiritual in Atheist Cosmology],” Gosudarstvo, religiia i tserkov´ v Rossii i za rubezhom [State, Religion, and Church in Russia and Abroad], no. 30, 3‑4 (2012) : 429‑462.

80 Video available online at http://tv‑80.ru/informacionnye/ot‑vsey‑dushi/. Last accessed October 5, 2015.

81 Victoria Smolkin‑Rothrock, forthcoming book manuscript.

82 Leont´eva names M. Krasnianskaia, V. Tuliakova, K. Proshutinskaia, Z. Vasil´eva, and G. Sverchevskaia. Ob´´iasneniie v liubvi, 48.

83 I thank Antje Kley of Friedrich‑Alexander‑Universität Erlangen‑Nürnberg, for pointing this out in her response to my paper in Erlangen in December 2013.

84 On socialist soaps and serials, see Bren, The Greengrocer and his TV, 112‑200 ; Elena Prokhorova, “Fragmented Mythologies : Soviet TV miniseries of the 1970s” (PhD dissertation : University of Pittsburgh, 2003) ; Anikó Imre, “Television for socialist women,” Screen 54, 2 (Summer 2013) : 249‑255 and “Adventures in Early Socialist Television Edutainment,” in Imre, Havens, and Lustyik eds, Popular Television in Eastern Europe During and Since Socialism. Jakub Machek, “The Counter Lady as a female prototype : prime time popular culture in 1970s and 1980s Czechoslovakia,” Media Research : Croation Journal for Journalism and Media, 16, 1 (2010) ; Katja Kochanowski, Sascha Trültzsch and Reinhold Viehoff, “An Evening with Friends and Enemies : Political Indoctrination in Popular East German Family Series,” and Ferenc Hammer, “Coy Utopia : Politics in the First Hungarian TV Soap,” both in Imre, Havens, and Lustyik eds, Popular Television in Eastern Europe.

85 Imre, “Television for socialist women,” 253‑255.

86 Sappak, Televidenie i my, 48

87 Leont´eva, Ob´´iasnenie v liubvi, 1.

88 This anecdote has circulated widely, including in a 2008 documentary film, “Pamiati Teti Vali [In remembrance of Aunt Valia],” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v =tS3fegpH9gA. Last accessed April 7, 2014.

89 In the show’s 22nd broadcast, in the revolutionary anniversary year 1977 (and also the show’s fifth anniversary year), Leont´eva opened a broadcast in Moscow, featuring an audience of past guests of the show by talking about how she was usually very nervous before each broadcast, because she would be talking about and meeting people “whom I had never seen, with whom I was not acquainted, but about whom I knew a great deal.” Ot vsei dushi “Iubileinye vstrechi [Anniversary meetings],” 1977, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v =xOozLM8O5W0 (last accessed April 8, 2014).

90 On “zhizn´ v rasplokh,” see Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 236‑237.

91 Leont´eva, Ob´´iasneniia v liubvi, 11‑12. On Zhdi menia see Hutchings and Rulyova, Television and Culture in Putin’s Russia, 77, 94, 96. Zhdi menia draws its title from a famous 1941 poem by Konstantin Simonov, evoking the long history of suffering and intimate relationships as cultural motifs reaching back, as Katerina Clark argues, into the late 1930s. See Katerina Clark “Wait for Me and I Shall Return ? The Early Thaw as a Reprise of Late 30s Culture ? in Gilburd and Kozlov, The Thaw : Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s, 85‑108.

92 Leont´eva, Ob´´iasneniia v liubvi, 35.

93 Ibid., 51.

94 Ibid., 32‑33.

95 Ibid., 88.

96 Ibid., 43.

97 Ibid., 42.

98 Ibid.

99 Leont´eva, Ob´´iasneniie v liubvi, 2nd ed, “Mastera iskusstv—molodezhi” series (M. : Molodaia Gvardiia, 1988), 213. The show did occasionally hint at traumatic Soviet pasts, without acknowledging them directly, but clearly enough that attentive viewers would understand. One example was a 1984 broadcast from a steel plant in Novokuznetsk, which featured a woman, with the symbolic name “Metallina,” whose parents had helped build the plant and who had been born, Leont´eva claimed, at the moment of its completion. She had, however, grown up elsewhere and had never been to the factory since leaving in infancy. The reasons for this sudden departure from the scene of her parents’ great achievement were never explained. Metallina was quickly dispatched from the stage on an audio tour of the factory, recorded for her by the workers there. Viewers were left to draw their own conclusions about why a family might have suddenly left a Stalinist construction site in the 1930s, never to return. Ot vsei dushi, “Novokuznetskie vstrechi,” 1984. Accessed via etvnet.com (paid internet television service).

100 The show’s older audience was apparent from the response to its first broadcasts. See for example GARF, f. 6903, op. 36, d. 2, l. 60. These older viewers seem to have seen the show as an ideal expression of the kinds of messages they felt young people sorely needed precisely because they did not already embrace them. See for example quotations from viewer letters in “Obzor pisem telezritelei Noiabr´ 1972 g.” GARF, f. 6903, op. 36, d. 13, l. 4‑5 ; two of which emphasize the show’s importance as a lesson or example for young people.

101 The one exception appears to have been a broadcast from the Estonian SSR in 1973. See the Gosteleradiofond catalog, available at http://gtrf.ru/product?q=От%20всей%20души

102 For example, the “Novokuznetskie vstrechi” broadcast in 1984 including a brief ceremony in which participants in a smelting competition appeared on stage. Participants from the Uzbek, Kazakh, and Lithuanian SSRs were introduced and said a few heavily accented and visibly memorized words in Russian, then left the stage.

103 On “the Friendship of the Peoples,” see Terry Martin, Affirmative Action Empire : Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923‑1939 (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2001), 432‑461.

104 Video of the promotional spots employing this phrase are available at https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v =yTqZ31v7B0E (last accessed October 5, 2015).

105 Hutchings and Rulyova, Television and Culture in Putin’s Russia, 94.

106 The broadcasts of this updated version were likewise focused on work collectives, featured Moscow institutions like the metro, MGSU (Moscow State University of Civil Engineering), and others.

107 On Putin and WWII, see Elizabeth Wood, “Performing Memory : Vladimir Putin and the Celebration of WWII in Russia,” The Soviet and Post‑Soviet Review, 38 (2011) 172–200. On the cult of WWII and its uses, see Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead ; Serguei Oushakine, “Emotional Blueprints. War Songs as an Affective Medium, in Steinberg and Sobol, eds., Interpreting Emotions.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Christine Evans, “The “Soviet Way of Life” as a Way of Feeling”, Cahiers du monde russe, 56/2-3 | 2015, 543-569.

Electronic reference

Christine Evans, “The “Soviet Way of Life” as a Way of Feeling”, Cahiers du monde russe [Online], 56/2-3 | 2015, Online since 17 November 2019, connection on 14 October 2022. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/8201; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/monderusse.8201

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