Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War, by Kristin Roth-Ey

Abstract

In 1988, I took a train from West Berlin to Krakow. Much to my surprise, it was crowded with African medical students heading back to the Soviet Union, each hauling one or two enormous television sets with them. Profits made from selling the televisions on the black market were enough to enable them to live in luxury until their next vacation, when they said they would again go West to buy yet more televisions. Such was the demand in the Soviet Union. In the present book, Kristin Roth-Ey catalogues this quantitative—if not qualitative—triumph of television and media in the Soviet Union from Khrushchev to the 1980s. Roth-Ey’s topic is Soviet ‘mass culture’ but, as she writes in the opening pages, the term ‘served as a slur in the Soviet lexicon’ where it was understood as ‘the soulless and exploitative culture of the capitalist West’ (p. 2). The term ‘popular culture’ was no less problematic because ‘Soviet propaganda made much of the idea that there was no distinction between low and high or mass and elite cultures in the USSR’ (p. 3). Yet it is these very distinctions—between capitalist and socialist and high and low culture—which are at the core of Roth-Ey’s study. On the one hand, Soviet ideology insisted on their absence; on the other, Soviet media was built upon their existence.