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

Due to the previous inaccessibility of the Soviet Union to Western scholars, the history of mass media in the postwar USSR has been written largely by people connected to the industry itself. Our understanding has been filtered through the perspective of parties with stakes in their own portrayal, and methodologies that dominate historical inquiry in America have made fewer inroads. Kristin Roth-Ey’s Moscow Prime Time fills in gaps on both accounts, treating film, television, and radio as interrelated industries through a cultural studies lens and revising a few taken-for-granted truths about the period. For obvious reasons, narratives of failure dominate Soviet historiography of the present day, but Roth-Ey gives one a new twist by characterizing Soviet media as “a successful failure” (1): the party-state developed a large-scale industry that rivalled Hollywood in many respects, paradoxically resembling it in ways that did not sit easily with accepted ideology. If the Soviet industry’s ability to entertain audiences paled in comparison to Hollywood, this deficiency was a reflection not on its practitioners’ competence so much as on their values and agendas.

Seeing mass media as a reflection of how the Soviets defined culture generally has advantages. Not only does it help the historian extrapolate in areas where documentation is inaccessible or unreliable, but it can also shed light on official policies and decisions that seem incoherent or outright irrational—as they so often did. Roth-Ey’s most innovative move is to depart from the conventional periodization, which marks eras by changes in the leadership of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. As the story goes, the death of Stalin and ascension of Nikita Khrushchev brought massive changes in Soviet life, especially in the cultural sphere, where the so-called Thaw (ottepel’) granted more freedom of expression relative to the preceding eras. The ascension of Leonid Brezhnev marked an end to this brief period of optimism and ushered in the film industry’s Stagnation (Zastoi), an appellation that no doubt has contributed to the scholarly neglect of the era. In contrast, Roth-Ey argues that the death of Stalin brought about no fundamental change in the film industry, nor the end of Khrushchev’s term, nor even the reforms of 1968. The same structures for oversight—“[t]he term ‘censorship’ does not begin to capture the intricacy of the dance” (30)—existed in kind, if not degree. With more charitable treatment, the Stagnation becomes the period of stability for a mature, if flawed, culture industry.

If the scope of investigation seems large, it is. The account weaves together a few large-scale strands of Soviet culture as a plausible explanation rather than providing a blow-by-blow history. Despite the USSR’s purported repudiation of the past, European and Russian “high” culture (kul’tura), along with the intelligentsia well versed in that culture, retained the Soviets’ esteem. Roth-Ey mobilizes Vera Dunham’s notion of “the Big Deal” from her studies of contemporary literature to explain how a politically radical regime and a more conservative and artistic elite class maintained a stable and mutually beneficial relationship throughout the period—the intelligentsia accepted the status quo in exchange for a privileged status. Soviet mass culture hoped to bring high culture to the population at large; it was inherently edifying, hierarchical, and elitist, designed to inculcate appropriate values and enhance the populace’s intellectual (even moral) faculties. The result was an entertainment industry in which “the bread was chewy and copious; the circuses never trumped political education and cultural uplift” (278). Moreover, the effort to create a cultivated population also supported the international mission of the Communist Party, which attempted to make the case for Soviet values to proletarians abroad and prove its superiority to its Cold War rival. Moscow Prime Time therefore considers Soviet media...