Culture and the Media in the USSR Today

Never before the Bolsheviks had any regime in history attributed such importance to the Word and the Image. Their mastery of mass propaganda contributed, perhaps decisively, to their victory over rival parties and movements in 1917–21,¹ and they have never abandoned the priority they accorded then to communication with the public. To this end they have made use of every means modern technology affords — newspapers, radio, cinema, television — to project information, outlook and ideology.

The controlling body of both television and radio in the Soviet Union is a committee called Gosteleradio SSSR. The Party Central Committee has its own committee with the special task of overseeing the work of the broadcasting media but the nature of the connections between Gosteleradio and the Party is not always clear. Suffice it to say that the Chairman of the Committee, A. Aksenov, is also a member of the Party Central Committee. The organisational structure of radio and television in the USSR has not yet received the detailed attention it deserves; this article will therefore cover the most immediate aspect of TV broadcasting — the actual output, the programmes.

In the two years after Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, there was much debate both in the West and in the Soviet Union about whether glasnost’ — variously translated as ‘openness’, ‘publicity’, ‘voicing opinions’ — was genuine and if it was, how far it would be allowed to go. In the third year, even some of the most sceptical analysts had begun to concede that the policy of glasnost’ had wrought profound change in the character of the Soviet media.¹ The official press had been in the forefront of that change.

Like Viktor Shklovskii’s evocation of Petrograd in 1921 — ‘poised between the present and the future’ — Soviet cinema stands today on the brink of a perilous experiment. For the first time since it was fully centralised and given heavy state subsidy under Boris Shumiatskii’s leadership in the early 1930s, it faces the daunting prospect of justifying its existence by paying its way — or rather, since the cinema has always been a net contributor to state revenues, of submitting itself to the disciplines of self-financing and consumer demand. In line with the same principles introduced by Gorbachev in other areas of the Soviet economy, the cinema henceforth has to recover its expenditure from domestic box-office receipts and any foreign sources of revenue it can tap, while showing itself responsive to the needs and interests of a no longer passive domestic audience.

To appreciate fully the changes and reforms that have occurred — and are still occurring — in the Soviet theatre since the ‘Gorbachev era’ began in 1985, some knowledge of its previous state, in particular the legacy of Stalinism, is essential. Under Stalin’s rule the innovative, avant-garde brilliance of the 1920s quickly faded into total extinction. Stalin’s method of controlling — or rather manipulating — the arts and sciences was to set up one person who represented his own views as his ‘dictator’ over each particular field, usually an elderly, respected but conservative figure, and the theatre was no exception. Because Stalin’s tastes were firmly middlebrow and Moscow Arts Theatre productions were his idea of what plays should be like, in 1934 Stanislavskii became Stalin’s appointed ‘dictator’ of theatrical art in the USSR. This had three main effects: first, the rapid disappearance of the Expressionist, non-realistic theatre of which the most brilliant exponent was Meierkhol’d, who was arrested in 1938 and imprisoned in a labour camp, where he died in 1940; second, the imposition of the Stanislavskii method as the only school of acting allowed throughout the USSR and of Moscow Arts Theatre naturalism as the obligatory style in all theatres, resulting in a uniformity and a stifling of all creative experiment that produced twenty years of what Soviet theatre veterans now recall with a shudder as ‘grey realism’.

At the highest level, Soviet musical life is overseen by the USSR Ministry of Culture and by the culture and propaganda department of the Central Committee of the CPSU. (Both the then Minister of Culture, P. N. Demichev, and the Central Committee secretary responsible for propaganda, A. N. Iakovlev, attended the Soviet composers’ congress in 1986.)

The most remarkable development in Soviet publishing over the last three years has been the breathtaking transformation of the majority of the literary journals. The two currently most exciting journals, Novy mir and Znamia, have been utterly rejuvenated by their new chief editors. The veteran writer, Sergei Zalygin, has been editor-in-chief of Novy mir since the issue for October 1986. At the beginning of 1987 he brought on to the editorial board the journalist and story-writer Anatolii Strelianyi, the poet Oleg Chukhontsev and others. Novyi mir (circulation in January 1988 1 150 000, up from 496 100 in December 1987),¹ has published Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1987, 6), Bulgakov’s To A Secret Friend (1987, 8), Bitov’s Pushkin House (1987, 10–12), Shatrov’s The Peace of Brest-Litovsk (1987, 4), Brodskii’s poetry (1987, 12) and Doctor Zhivago (1988, 1–4). Grigorii Baklanov, another writer-editor, in charge at Znamia since August 1986, has co-opted Vladimir Lashkin, a key figure on Tvardovskii’s editorial board at the old Novyi mir and the urban writer Vladimir Makanin to the board. Unlike Novyi mir, Znamia has no glorious traditions to look back to, and its sudden dynamism has taken readers by surprise. Its 1988 circulation of 500 000 is up from 175 000 in 1985. It has published Alesandr Bek’s A New Assignment (1986, 10–11), Platonov’s The Juvenile Sea (1986, 6), Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog (1987, 6), Pil’niak’s The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon (1987, 12), Shatrov’s Onward … Onward … Onward! (1988, 1) and Zamiatin’s We (1988, 4–5).