Text 2 The golden years

The Soviet media were quick to act on the policy of openness declared by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. In 1986 a series of space bridges with US audiences let Soviet viewers see an entirely new America – and a Soviet population with opinions that were far from uniform. News from around the Soviet Union was not so good after all: newscasters showed the failure of local bosses to get the crops off the field before they rotted, dissent among leaders, poorly manufactured goods, roads and schools in criminal disrepair. Public affairs talk shows like “Viewpoint” kept viewers riveted to the TV on weekend nights with the young and hip hosts’ irreverent banter, interviews with scholars and political figures critical of the regime, and breaks for rock’n roll. At one point nearly 90 percent of the Soviet Union’s huge population was watching the show. And when the first Congress of People’s Deputies was aired live in 1989, it seemed that everyone was sitting in front of TV in every home, in every office, in every store. Never before or again will television in Russia have such dedicated viewers and such a plethora of viewpoints, information, and political discussion.

Text 3 The nineties

Television was always an instrument of political power in the Soviet Union, and by the 1990s, before the break-up of the Soviet Union and in the troubled timed afterwards, in continued to be a political battleground – complicated by commercial interests and big money.

Channel Two was transferred to the Russian government and provided an anti-Soviet (and anti-Gorbachev) perspective. A bit later other private channels like TV-6, NTV and Ren-TV appeared. Hundreds of local channels – first with nothing more than a couple of VCRs and a transmission point – appeared in the provinces, showing a variety of local news, translated Western news broadcasts and pirate films. Advertising, music clips, and finally MTV hit the airwaves.

Pensioners and housewives watched Santa Barbara with bated breath, game shows appeared, the first successful Russian serials were launched with the popular cop show “The streets of broken Streetlamps”, while everyone continued to watch a range of talk shows and public affairs programming.

And then came the elections of 1993 and 1994. TV coverage blurred and then dissolved the line between those who made politics and those who reported on them: the stations backed Yeltsin, a decision that is still hotly debated today. Meanwhile, television business practices were a page out of “gangster capitalism”: huge amounts of money were made and lost, stations cried poverty and didn’t pay producers for months (while the parking lot at the TV center Ostankino continued to look like a luxury car dealership), reporters made cash by airing paid-for reports and Channel One director (and popular TV talk show host) Vlad Listev, was murdered, presumably over money.

Text 4 Today

Although in recent years business practices in the TV industry seem to be cleaner, Russian TV viewers have had less and less choice in news and information. Many of the most talented reporters at NTV jumped ship when the channel was taken over by Gasprom Media, and many more disappeared from the screens in the last few months.

Although viewers could still see a difference during the Beslan tragedy (NTV was the only channel that provided live coverage, and its coverage afterwards continued to show what othet main channels did not), there is now little that distinguishes the nightly news on the three main channels. There is virtually no political debate. On the other hand, the airwaves are filled with a full range of entertainment fare, from and imported series to game shows galore. This may reflect the mood in the country and more sophisticated research on viewer preferences, but it also may reflect changes in the attitude and policies with regard to television among the powers that be.

“Who is to blame” for he television’s fall from the pinnacle of the Golden Years is the subject of endless arguments. It is still hard to judge how much the television industry was undermined by its own bad business practices, bad programming choices and bad policies (and to what extent those policies and choices, however unwise, were unavoidable or at least understandable); and how much it was undermined by a state that realized only too well (after the elections of 1993 and 1996) the power of this medium. Not all the evidence is in. In any case, by the 21^st century, Russian TV had turned into something else: a hybrid of managed Soviet media and Western-style entertainment broadcasting. (Passport, by Michele A. Berdy, Dec/Jan 2005)