Le « mode de vie soviétique » en tant que manière de sentir : émotion et influence sur la télévision centrale soviétique sous Brežnev

Abstract

This article describes the emergence of “the socialist way of life” as a central category in Soviet propaganda during the late 1960s and 1970s, one that put emotional and spiritual qualities forward as the defining features of both the new Soviet person and Soviet socialist civilization in the era of “developed socialism.” While recent research has emphasized the importance of material promises to the Soviet population in the post‑Stalin era, the case of Central Television suggests the centrality of affective and moral appeals in Soviet broadcast communications. By looking at “emotion talk” across Central Television’s programming desks and at the television show most associated with the “socialist way of life” and Brezhnev‑era emotionality, Valentina Leont´eva’s melodramatic talk show, Ot vsei dushi, the author shows how affective management, including the creation and preservation of a “good mood” among Soviet TV viewers, became one of Central Television’s most important mobilizing strategies. Central to the new, state‑sponsored “structures of feeling” produced on this and other Brezhnev‑era television shows (and still highly relevant on contemporary Russian state media) were strongly gendered roles for women, intense state surveillance, memories of shared suffering in a heroic past, and a circumscribed, pan‑Slavic nationalism.