Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cold War (review)

Kristin Roth-Ey's Moscow Prime Time interweaves an analysis of Soviet cinema "as an industry" with the much-less-studied phenomena of Soviet radio and television. Her story of the USSR's mass-media explosion after Stalin provides technology and culture scholars with a complex understanding of how a socialist regime used media in some remarkably similar ways to Western capitalist countries, though there also were distinct differences. As Roth-Ey argues, post-Stalinist elites created a "media empire" that "was, on its own terms, a very successful failure" (p. 1).What she means by this is that the Soviet Union attempted to compete on the international stage using the same tools as Western mass culture, while remaining committed to a uniquely "socialist" project that foregrounded the pedagogical and high-cultural mobilization of cinema, radio, and television. By the 1980s, Soviet mass media found itself straddling the boundary between this ambitious project and that of entertaining Soviet citizens.

When its elites invented a distinctly Soviet culture in the early 1930s, raw propaganda was only a minor motivation; rather, a conception of "cultural uplift" stood at the foundations of socialist realism. "Backward" Russians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, etc. needed the cinema (along with theater and literature) to transform them into modern socialist citizens. As Roth-Ey argues, this principle remained a core function of Soviet media culture until the collapse in 1991. The modern multiplex with comfortable seats and a cafe, widescreen viewing technology, glossy film magazines that highlighted global celebrities, televised quiz shows, and shortwave broadcasts of the Beatles, however, all emphasized personal pleasure and consumerism over collective education and overcoming cultural backwardness. These new forms of mass media eroded traditional mechanisms of exerting cultural power in the Soviet Union.

Roth-Ey successfully connects the history of post-Stalinist mass media to the broader struggle for power and influence during the cold war. The Soviet Union had to develop methods to woo both domestic and foreign audiences because American cultural power began to penetrate the socialist world after World War II: Hollywood movies were screening throughout the Soviet Union, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America were aiming their signals eastward, and television strove to remain interesting to Soviet viewers by adapting American-style programming.

Soviet culture, something usually imagined as exceptional, now found itself in competition with Western mass culture, not only because of the larger political tensions between global superpowers, but also due to the reality of postwar globalization and the new technological possibilities of broadcasting. As Roth-Ey demonstrates, the post-Stalin Soviet Union was no longer the isolated cultural and economic system that he had created during the 1930s. The post-Stalinist leadership, ever enthusiastic about modernity and socialism's preeminent role in "overcoming backwardness," could not justify circulating antiquated wired radio sets to the citizenry, releasing only twenty to thirty films annually while cutting off foreign imports, or restricting television technology to the political elite. Soviet leaders had to make good on their assertion that its citizens were the most advanced, cosmopolitan, and cultured peoples in the world. But with the exponential growth of Soviet mass media from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s came diversification of cultural production and professional interests, increasing expectations, and thus demands, from citizen-consumers, and the economic necessity to turn a profit.

Thus the Soviet "media empire," as Roth-Ey calls it, found itself playing a game it could not win. Soviet mass media were able to compete with the West, but only if they played according to rules that were unacceptable: hence Roth-Ey's description of this military and cultural empire as a "successful failure" (p. 23).When they played by Soviet rules, they were plagued by the same problems as the Soviet economy as a whole: inefficiencies, resistance to innovation, the conservatism of party leaders, and an economic model...