What Was Socialist Television and What Came Next?

Cuba: Spectacles of modernity

Although Britain, Germany and the Soviet Union made strides in developing a television infrastructure before World War II, it was only after 1945 that it became a truly popular medium. ³ With the exception of East Germany and the Soviet Union, the new socialist states had to create a television service from the ground up. ⁴ In doing so, they drew on the domestic examples of radio and the press but also on the guiding example of the Soviet Union, which provided a repository of formats and messages which could easily be copied. To the extent that they were built from the ground up, television across Eastern Europe can be said to have been born socialist. ⁵ The Cuban trajectory, as media scholar Yeidy Rivero shows in her fascinating account, was somewhat different. Her account is not reducible to a history of socialist television but rather shows how television transmitted different ideas of modernity across the 1950s. Having been ‘born in a democracy, matured during a dictatorship … and … born again when the nation-state began to adopt a socialist perspective’ (p. 3), the story of television in Cuba exposes the competing political and social visions that animated Cuban history during that tumultuous decade.

At the heart of Rivero’s account is the vexed question of what it was to be modern and how television was implicated in the search for answers. Cuban elites saw their nation as more cultured than the rest of Latin America; television, as a new and advanced technology with the capacity to transplant visions of modern life into the public’s homes, was a powerful means for the country to prove its superiority. In Rivero’s astute reading, these competing visions manifested themselves in different ‘spectacles’ of modernity. For the country’s democratic leadership (lasting until the Batista coup of 1952), television provided a spectacle of progress which showcased the country’s consumer prosperity and technological modernity. Under Batista, however, television showcased a different kind of modernity centred around spectacles of decency. The regime instituted a regime of censorship not just to control political messages but also to ‘cleanse’ Cuban screens of morally ‘dubious’ material. Not only were well-known drag artists banned, but also elements of the country’s Afro-Cuban heritage, epitomised by dances like as the Rhumba, were considered to be too sexually provocative to be screened. To be modern, then, was to adhere to powerfully gendered, racialised and sexualised norms of propriety. As the old regime unravelled, however, the magnetic power of Fidel Castro offered new spectacles. In contesting Batista’s claims to political legitimacy, television became a battleground for spectacles of democracy, before shifting to the spectacle of revolution, as Castro used the medium to talk directly with the public and offer a new set of values, centred around ‘people, homeland, nation, independence, and social justice’ (p. 170).

One of the great strengths of Rivero’s fascinating account is her attentiveness to the geographies of modernity and, in particular, the looming presence of the United States in Cuba’s history. Cuba’s elites, as Rivero shows us, saw their country ‘marching ahead of the most successful and civilised nations of the world’, as one commercial programmer wrote in 1950 (p. 45). However, not even the most one-eyed observer would have denied that the United States remained well ahead of Cuba in its exploration of the medium. As a consequence of geographical proximity, political interference and technological necessity, Cuba’s experience of tele-modernity was heavily intertwined with the United States’ example. The US provided technological expertise, equipment and – especially after Batista’s coup – popular programming. For Cuban elites, the US example was a charm but also a curse. While programming from the United States was popular and helped networks to fill schedules and gain viewers, it also crowded out locally produced programmes and challenged national identity.

Over the course of the 1950s, however, audiences began to question Cuba’s ‘blind admiration’ (p. 100) for the United States: Batista-era regulators sought to challenge the dominance of Hollywood and temper its partiality for ‘immorality’. But Rivero shows that traffic could also move in the other direction. It was through US television networks and the popular press that Fidel Castro became a ‘celebrity’ whose every move was touched with what José Quiroga called ‘revolutionary glamour’ (quoted on p. 124). Commercial television’s preoccupation with all things Cuban did not always meet with the approval of local audiences, who were offended by US media’s exoticising portrayals. Nevertheless, the popularity of Cuban revolutionaries on US screens demonstrates Fidel Castro’s powerful allure – a magnetism which was heightened for domestic viewers. Rivero shows how in the crucial revolutionary year of 1959, Castro was able to harness the power and reach of commercial television to disseminate his messages and to put forward a new vision of progress which, over time, replaced the notion of US hegemony with a new vision of communist modernity, notionally centred around the Soviet Union.

Overall, Broadcasting Modernity is an engaging account which illustrates how television was intertwined with discourses of modernity in this formative decade – both for the medium and for Cuban history. By combining a range of historical sources with a keen eye for how global politics, gender, race and nation intersected on Cuban screens, Rivero has written an important account which will interest a range of scholars with an interest both in the history of television and in Cuban history and culture.

Soviet Union: Negotiating socialism’s paradoxes

Rivero’s account ends in 1960, at the point where the new leadership began to harness the medium for its own ends. Socialist television offered tantalising new opportunities for the transmission of revolutionary messages to viewers. As the commercial broadcasting system was dismantled, Cuban television shifted from a means of profit-making to a tool for the education of the masses. As Rivero observes, under Castro, television’s function was to show communism in construction, from revolutionary political structures to the economic base of a new society. Rivero’s account ends at the point where Cuban state broadcasters would have had to work out how best to use the medium. But across the Atlantic in socialist Eastern Europe, the question of how television could be used as a means for social transformation was no less vital. Christine Evans’ Between Truth and Time offers a lucid and engaging exploration of those debates within the world of Soviet television. Working with a range of archival materials ranging from internal editorial debates to documents from the Party’s Central Committee, Between Truth and Time offers us a history of Central Television, the Moscow-based broadcaster whose messages were disseminated throughout the nation. Evans’ account offers us a multi-dimensional view of the network’s development from the 1950s until the 1980s which is at home discussing game shows and dramas as it is dealing with the internal dynamics of the television world.

At the heart of Evans’ story is the idea that Soviet television was a site of creative experimentation. Television professionals were deeply invested in how they could harness the new medium of television to create a new form, seeing in it the possibility of a radically new experience of engaging with the world. In the earliest period of tele-enthusiasm, which ran from the early 1950s until the late 1960s, there was great hope both for critics and TV professionals that television viewing would be something akin to a celebration: a deistvo (mass action) that would break viewers out of their normal routines and offer the opportunity to participate in something extraordinary. It is conventional to suggest that this creative impulse came to an end after the Czechoslovak invasion of 1968 and the appointment of the conservative Sergei Lapin as Chairman of Gosteleradio in 1970. Yet Evans convincingly challenges the established view of the 1970s as an era of stagnation. In her account, the Soviet television of that decade was a dynamic site where pressing social tensions were negotiated. At a basic level, those tensions were about balancing political imperatives, creative desires and viewer preferences. How could television be entertaining for viewers and satisfy the creative impulses of TV professionals while remaining within the bounds of the politically acceptable? Those tensions were encoded in the very DNA of TV programming. The key problem for Central Television’s professionals, Evans claims, was to find ‘new ways of unifying a diverse public, legitimising authority, and performing the state’s responsiveness to its citizens – all without recourse either to a shared belief in a single ideology or to genuinely competitive elections’ (p. 2). Creativity was thus a prerequisite if television was to successfully negotiate the paradoxes of Soviet social, economical and political life.

Evans analyses a range of programmes and genres, ranging from the notoriously dull news bulletin Vremia (Time, 1968 to date) to Central Television’s most iconic production: the spy thriller 17 Moments of Spring (Semnadtsat’ mgnovenii vesny, 1972). In doing so, she subtly demonstrates both the innovative nature of Soviet television and also the difficulties it faced in producing a compelling picture of the Soviet way of life. While in the case of Vremia, TV professionals failed to create a picture as ‘dynamic’ and ‘saturated’ as they had hoped, Between Truth and Time is best characterised as a book about negotiation rather than failure. In a more relaxed post-Stalinist political conjuncture, television offered new opportunities for viewers to become involved – whether as critics, heroes, interviewees or contestants. Popular quizzes, such as Let’s Go, Girls! (a game show that tested women’s skills as housewives and exemplary workers) or KVN, which rewarded the wit and improvisational skill of students and exemplary workers, offer an insight into the cultural values of the age. Such broadcasts were wildly popular with viewers but raised fundamental questions in a country where liberal democratic procedures were not enshrined. What qualities should game shows promote? Who should be the contestants? Who had the authority to judge the winner? What should the criteria be? These questions may seem innocent, but in an authoritarian society, where questions about the country’s governmental arrangements brokered no discussion, these apparently innocent aspects took on a political colouring.

Thus, what Evans reveals in Between Truth and Time is that socialist television – at least in its Soviet iteration – was a dynamic site upon which fundamental social antagonisms could be worked through. While this ‘working through’ was partial, and to some extent unsatisfactory, it, nevertheless, offered viewers an opportunity to participate, whether they were casting their votes for the Song of the Year, debating the moral ambiguities of Iulian Semenov’s Seventeen Moments of Spring or sharing in the festive ritual of watching Little Blue Flame with friends and family. This helps to explain why viewers, who were rightly wary of the excesses and omissions of Central Television’s programmes, were simultaneously captivated by the ‘blue screen’. In watching, they were partaking of a social ritual that arguably strengthened Soviet power – at least until the period of ‘glasnost’, when an avalanche of negative revelations sent the whole edifice tumbling down. In analysing so perceptively the possibilities and paradoxes of Soviet Central Television, Between Truth and Time helps us to understand how socialist television could simultaneously serve as a site upon which the difficulties of ‘developed socialism’ were laid bare and an institution that fostered collective belonging.

TV socialism and its legacies

While it is conventional to draw a clear dividing line between socialism and post-socialism, the books under review suggest that the two eras are closer than might be thought. Evans argues that the Putin era is merely the continuation of a Soviet and Russian ‘era of television’ (p. 2) that began in the 1950s with the arrival of Soviet television as a mass medium and continues into the present. The traces of that long era of television are still visible today. Russian television offers not only a cable channel called Nostalgia, which broadcasts old Soviet films and TV programmes, but its leading channels continue to broadcast modern-day versions of iconic Soviet programmes. ⁶ For Evans, continuities between socialist past and post-socialist present are also evident in the medium’s guiding goals. Programmes like Putin’s annual ‘Direct Line’, in which the President takes stage-managed calls from across Russia, promising to respond to viewers’ complaints, illustrate the role of television in manufacturing an image of responsiveness in the absence of adequate democratic mechanisms.

The connecting threads between past and present are pulled even tighter in Anikó Imre’s TV Socialism. Her book brings together much of the new research into socialist television, combining this with a path-breaking new interpretation of socialist and post-socialist television. As with Prokhorov and Prokhorova’s recent discussion of late-Soviet television, TV Socialism is structured around genre in four sections tracing the progress of diverse genres from socialism to post-socialism. ⁷ Through analyses of ‘genres of realism and reality’, ‘genres of history’, ‘genres of fiction’ and ‘genres of humour’, Imre challenges regional stereotypes and finds unexpected resonances across the 1989 divide. These resonances take a variety of forms, sometimes displaying similarities in terms of values, and others in terms of form as is the case with satirical US programmes like The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, each of which derive their humour by playing with the same ‘hypernormalisation’ of public discourse that characterised the wooden language of state socialism.

As this latter example shows, Imre’s sensitive analysis seeks to shed light on our political present. As the book’s introduction states, ‘Socialism is a globally shared legacy. If we forfeit this story to Cold War stereotypes, we also enable the naturalization of neoliberalism as an economic logic that does not have alternatives’ (pp. 21–22). Imre is alive to the many ways that socialist television failed to live up to its values but, nevertheless, makes a spirited argument that, among the military parades and agitational documentaries, there existed a positive kernel that deserves our attention. The central arguments of TV Socialism thus mirror those made by Evans – namely, that socialist television involved an intelligent and entertaining working-through of social, economic and even political, questions, even as it was mired in socialism’s contradictions. The core values of socialism – equality, humanism and education for all – informed its television output, perhaps offering better opportunities to engage and involve viewers than its post-socialist variant.

This argument comes through most clearly in the section on ‘genres of realism and reality’ (a term which encompasses a wide range of programmes, from documentaries and current affairs programming to detective shows and quizzes). Imre’s discussion lays bare continuities across time and space: she suggests that socialist ‘reality television’ emerged in dialogue with its western counterpart while also offering an alternative genealogy of today’s reality programming. Imre shows how crime and spy shows borrowed from western formats, as exemplified by the profusion of East German crime dramas on the model of West German shows like Case XY … Unsolved (1967 to date). Talent contests tread an awkward line between viewers’ desire to see Western performers and broadcasters’ need to promote national culture. Educational programming, meanwhile, allowed citizens to complain about present-day problems and debate current issues in a way that mirrored the public service ethos of television in parts of western Europe. As Rivero’s discussion of Cuba’s transition from capitalist to state socialist broadcasting suggests, this educational impulse is one of the key markers distinguishing socialist television from its capitalist variants. In an analysis of the Hungarian reality programme, the Győzike show (2005–2010), which follows the daily lives of a Roma family in a fashion similar to MTV show The Osbournes (2002–2005), Imre demonstrates not only that television’s educational goals had disappeared but foregrounds the programme’s importance for understanding how television serves to delineate a racialized ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the new post-socialist nation.

Imre’s book is based on the premise that ‘TV socialism’ constituted a series of ideals, traits and tendencies stretching across Eastern Europe. Given their similar socio-economic circumstances and the shared goals of socialist broadcasters, there is a strong basis for making such a claim. But while this attempt to ‘resist the power of the national’ is welcome, one might argue that it comes at the price of effacing differences. The relationship between the book’s case studies, which are nationally oriented, and the general tendencies the book seeks to identify, is not always clear. In a section on historical dramas, Imre shows how serials like Poland’s Janosik and Hungary’s Captain Tenkes propagated nationalist narratives that served as a rallying point for anti-Soviet resentment. But, are these two examples generalisable to the entire socialist world? Television’s relationship to the nation was different in Poland and Hungary than it was in multi-national republics like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, or in a divided nation like East Germany. Imre states that ‘[s]tate TV was a monopolistic institution of subtle resistance to Soviet imperialism’ (p. 107), but this formulation implicitly excludes the USSR. What, then, is the space of TV socialism? Ultimately, a transnational discussion of socialist television must account for differing modes of social management, religious values and historical experiences that divided socialist nations, as well as the constantly shifting centres and peripheries that characterised it.

This criticism notwithstanding, TV Socialism remains a hugely significant work that broadens the possibilities for scholars working in cultural studies, media studies and media history who are thinking about the multiple entanglements of television, culture and society. The book also corrects many of the blind spots of current scholarship, which has often effaced questions of race and national belonging just as socialist broadcasters did. As Imre’s sensitive treatment shows, television’s ability to interpellate viewers as citizens has so often been based on exclusion of those who did not conform. The forms of exclusion exemplified by today’s nostalgic historical dramas and reality television are merely an intensification of the invisible exclusions that existed during socialism.

The three books reviewed here illustrate the diversity of approaches to television in the socialist sphere and its connections across space and time. Encompassing national-centric narratives and transnational histories, they introduce us to significant social antagonisms which television both reflected and intensified. By incorporating the voices of critics, politicians and viewers, they demonstrate that television was a site of significant artistic and ideological tension, which TV professionals sought to negotiate in their everyday activity. In doing so, they show how tightly television was interwoven into the fabric of post-war European and South American societies, and how television was put to work in the service of competing visions of modernity, before, during and after socialism. Moreover, they reveal how the present continues to be haunted by state socialism’s legacies – and how we might negotiate its complex inheritance.