Song of the Year' and Soviet Mass Culture in the 1970s

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, 3 (Summer 2011): 617–45.

Articles

Song of the Year and Soviet Mass Culture in the 1970s

CHRISTINE EVANS

“Song is a country / where the people choose their kings.” —Poet and lyricist Sergei Ostrovoi on Song-72, 1 January 1973

We have long drawn conclusions about late Soviet society based on its televised ceremonies. Images of the parades on Red Square and the interminable applause of Brezhnev-era party congresses, broadcast by national evening news services across Western Europe and the United States during the Cold War, have played a central role in the Western scholarly and political imagination. Anthropologists have used them to construct typologies of modern ceremony that distinguish between the closed, hegemonic rituals of totalitarian states and the disputatious contests of democratic ones.1 Within Soviet studies, they have served as key evidence for Mikhail Gorbachev’s characterization of the 1970s as an era of “stagnation,” exemplifying the way that late Soviet public or “o!cial” culture had aged along with the state’s leadership, becoming hopelessly rigid, hierarchical, and formalized, preparing the way for the collapse of Soviet ideology in 1991.2

Research for this article was funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the University of California, Berkeley, Department of History. For helpful comments on earlier versions of this article I thank Alexis Peri, Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, Yuri Slezkine, the organizers and participants of the Midwest Russian History Workshop and the “Soviet TV Night” panel of the 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies annual meeting, and Kritika’s editors and anonymous reviewers. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 1 See, for example, Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 23–44. On the contrast between to-talitarian and democratic “media events,” see Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: !e Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), vii–xi, 21–22. 2 Christel Lane’s !e Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society. !e Soviet Case (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), the only full treatment of post-Stalin ritual, predates the Gorbachev era and treats the parades as part of a larger Soviet system of “cultural management.”

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But Soviet Central Television had another set of televised ceremonies that were at least equally important: the high-pro"le and high-stakes musical variety programs that accompanied all major Soviet state holidays.3 #ese shows were part of a group of new television holiday “traditions” invented during the Brezhnev era, many of which are still a prominent part of current Russian television’s holiday programming. Among the most important of these new television holiday rituals were those linked to the New Year, the Soviet holiday most clearly associated with domestic spaces and relationships, and least clearly with 1917 or 1945.4 #e fact that Boris Yeltsin chose, in 1999, to announce his resignation and introduce his little-known successor, Vladimir Putin, during the New Year’s Eve presidential address to the people, a tradition launched by Leonid Brezhnev in 1970, is but one indication of the continued importance of these television rituals in post-Soviet Russian political and cultural life.5 Nonetheless, Lane’s "rst-person account of the 1977 Revolution Day parade gives us a sense of how these events have been remembered: “the general impression of unimaginative uniformity was further reinforced by the prevalence of canned music… . #e street decorations, too, were standardized and uninspiring” (Rites of Rulers, 185–87). Perhaps as a result of impressions like these and a disproportionate focus on public festivities and the ceremonial of the political elite, studies of post-Stalin Soviet ritual have been very limited in number and scope, particularly in comparison with the rich literature on Soviet festivity in the early postrevolutionary years and the Stalin era. See Christopher Binns, “#e Changing Face of Power: Revolution and Accommodation in the Soviet Ceremonial System,” part 1, Man, New Series 14, 4 (1979): 585–606; and part 2, Man, New Series 15, 1 (1980): 170–87; Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives: !e Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Tumarkin, !e Living and the Dead: !e Rise and the Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994). For two excellent deconstructions of “stagnation” and its historical origins, see Edwin Bacon, “Reconsidering Brezhnev,” and Mark Sandle, “A Triumph of Ideological Hairdressing? Intellectual Life in the Brezhnev Era Reconsidered,” in Brezhnev Reconsidered, ed. Bacon and Sandle (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2002), 1–21, 135–85; and Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: !e Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4–8. 3 On television in the Soviet Union, see Ellen Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public (New York: Praeger, 1981); Mickiewicz, Split Signals: Television and Politics in the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire !at Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); and Roth-Ey, “Finding a Home for Television in the USSR, 1950–1970,” Slavic Review 66, 2 (2007): 278–306. See also Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: !e Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 149–54. 4 On the Soviet New Year, see Lane, Rites of Rulers, 137–40; and Svetlana Adonéva, Kategoriia nenastoiashchego vremeni: Antropologicheskie ocherki (St. Petersburg: Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 2001), 57–62. See also Alyssa DeBlasio, “#e New-Year Film as a Genre of Post-War Russian Cinema,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 2, 1 (2008): 43–61. 5 “Pozdravleniia naroda s Novym godom: Putin ubral bokaly El´tsina i vyshel na ulitsu,” News.ru, 28 December 2007 (www.newsru.com/russia/28dec2007/last_song.html, accessed 25 April 2011). #e tradition of a New Year’s greeting from the Soviet state to its people

SONG OF THE YEAR AND SOVIET MASS CULTURE IN THE 1970S 619

#is article considers one of these new, Brezhnev-era New Year’s traditions, a national song contest—part Eurovision, part Grammy awards—called Song of the Year (Pesnia goda, 1971–present) that was broadcast every year on the evening of New Year’s Day. Song of the Year, I argue, o$ers us a much more dynamic view of Brezhnev-era culture than that suggested by the label “stagnation”: it reveals how the state-controlled mass media could become a site of signi"cant cultural innovation and experimentation aimed at "nding new ways of engaging and unifying the Soviet populace during the Cold War. Rather than exclusively o$ering a display of state power, Song of the Year sought to delight viewers by providing popular entertainments and creating a “good mood” for the holidays.6 Far from being closed and formalized, it emphasized audience participation, created suspense, and changed dramatically from year to year.

Song of the Year also unsettles our usual narratives about the evolution of Soviet culture after Stalin.7 First, it highlights the continuities in Soviet cultural policy from Khrushchev to the Brezhnev era. Television was central to several aspects of Nikita Khrushchev’s “thaw,” particularly the renewed emphasis on leisure, the Cold War rede"nition of competition with the West in terms of “ways of life” de"ned morally and materially, and the ambitions of Soviet journalists to lead the revitalization of the socialist project.8 All these

originated earlier, on Soviet radio. In 1935, M. I. Kalinin delivered New Year’s congratulations to Soviet polar explorers. #e "rst address to the entire Soviet people, again delivered by Kalinin, took place in 1941, in the "rst winter of World War II. #ese addresses continued through the war years but then ceased, only to resume in 1953, with an o!cial holiday message from the Party and state delivered not by an o!cial but by radio’s newsreaders. Brezhnev’s personal delivery of the message was unprecedented. 6 At a 1972 party meeting at Central Television, “a!rming the mood of cheer, optimism, and energy, and facilitating the leisure [otdykh] of Soviet people” was named as an explicit objective of musical programming: Tsentralńyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Moskvy (TsAOPIM) f. 2930 (Partiinyi komitet Gosudarstvennogo komiteta Soveta ministrov SSSR po televideniiu i radioveshchaniiu), op. 2, d. 247, l. 146 (Protokoly partsobranii i zasedanii partbiuro pervichnykh partorganizatsii Tsentralńogo televideniia: Glavnoi redaktsii literaturno-dramaticheskikh programm; Glavnoi redaktsii muzykalńykh programm). At holiday times, the need to create a “good mood” or a “holiday mood” was frequently invoked internally and in viewer letters to Central Television. See, for example, “Obzor pisem telezritelei za sentiabr´ 1972 g.,” Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 6903 (Gosudarstvennyi komitet televideniia i radioveshchaniia pri Sovete ministrov SSSR), op. 36, d. 11, l. 64. 7 On the origins and limitations of the two problematic metaphors for this period, “thaw” and “stagnation,” see Stephen Bittner, !e Many Lives of Khrushchev’s !aw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 1–13. 8 On the ambitions of thaw journalism, see Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 150–51; and #omas Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism: !e Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

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dimensions of the television “thaw” continued to shape Central Television’s content in the 1970s. Indeed, the problems of leisure, of cultural competition with the West, and of identifying new ways to engage the population only gained importance under détente and “developed socialism.”9

#e response to these continued pressures during the 1970s was a group of television ceremonies that experimented constantly with new ways to stimulate viewer participation and to direct and satisfy audience demand, foregrounding the con%icts and negotiations that had long characterized Soviet popular culture. Created at the height of Central Television’s “era of stagnation,” Song of the Year was part of what I call a “procedural shift” that took place across Central Television’s musical and youth programming after 1968.10 In a number of prominent musical and youth programs, Central Television’s writers, editors, and directors borrowed the methods and tactics of advertising, market research, and electoral politics to create programs that would engage viewers actively.11 Contest-based programs %ourished on Central Television. #ese shows featured audience “voting,” lotteries, and write-in contests that acknowledged the existence of generational and social con%icts within the Soviet audience, while playfully seeking to resolve them.12 In doing so, they proposed new methods for public decision making in the sphere of culture that did not refer directly to the Communist Party’s role as cultural vanguard. Song of the Year and similar shows created a framework that could rapidly be "lled with new content once censorship weakened in the second half of the 1980s, and which could (and did) transition quite seamlessly to post-Soviet Russian television. #ey thus deserve our attention not only as television shows but as political rituals in their own right—rituals that were far more dynamic and unpredictable than their counterparts on Red Square. 9 On developed socialism, see Mark Sandle, “Brezhnev and Developed Socialism: #e Ideology of Zastoi?” in Brezhnev Reconsidered, 165–87.10 #is term owes an obvious debt to Alexei Yurchak’s “performative shift.” See Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 24–26. #e arrival of “stagnation” at Central Television is usually dated to the arrival of the ideological conservative and Central Committee member Sergei Lapin as chair of the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting (henceforth, Gosteleradio) in 1970. For more on Lapin’s legend, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 216–22.11 #ese programs included, in addition to Song of the Year, the musical programs Artloto (created in 1971), Po pis´mam telezritelei (By TV Viewers’ Request [1973]), and Allo! my ishchem talanty (Hello! We Are Looking for Talents [refocused on audience judging in 1969]); the youth programs Auktsion (Auction [1969]), A nu-ka, devushki! (Let’s Go, Girls! [1970]), A nu-ka, parni! (Let’s Go, Guys! [1971]), and Molodtsy! (Well Done! [1973]).12 All the programs above were structured as contests or featured contests for the TV audience at home or in the studio, or all three. Dayan and Katz describe contests as a genre of media event best suited to democratic political systems (Media Events, ix–x, 43–46).


Television as Ritual We are not accustomed to thinking about entertaining television shows as political rituals comparable to inaugurations, state funeral processions, and party congresses. Yet what is most remarkable about Song of the Year is how directly it paralleled those more solemn Soviet ceremonies. Both gathered representatives from the most politically meaningful groups in Soviet society—model workers and farmers, the military, the intelligentsia—and engaged them in a highly symbolic, choreographed set of activities and rituals that o$ered an idealized portrait of the relationships governing Soviet society. Like a party congress, Song of the Year was intended to convey a set of crucial political messages from state to population, not only through direct statements but via the whole visual-ceremonial arrangement of persons and decorations in the hall. Like a state funeral, Song of the Year dramatized the reproduction of state power across a potentially dangerous threshold—not the death of a leader but the passage of the old year and the arrival of the new. Like the other televised ceremonies, Song of the Year aimed to demonstrate the Party’s successes, but in a far more prosaic register: the existence of an authentically popular Soviet musical tradition, the responsiveness of Soviet cultural authorities to popular tastes, and the spiritual (as opposed to material) superiority of Soviet life vs. life in the capitalist world.

By analyzing Song of the Year in this way, I am taking an approach that emphasizes the ritual, rather than transmission, aspects of communication. A ritual view of communication focuses not on the extension of messages across space for purposes of social control, but on the “maintenance of society in time … [and the] representation of shared beliefs … manifesting an ongoing and fragile social process.”13 #e usefulness of this approach goes beyond its obvious relevance for a television program that was explicitly ceremonial and aimed to bring viewers together; it also raises a fresh set of questions that emphasize the forms and genres that Song of the Year employed and the symbolic work they were to accomplish. What was the “fragile social process” the show was to manifest and mediate? How could the success of the show’s ritual action be authenticated? How was all this symbolic work and meaning conveyed spatially and visually?

To answer these questions, this article draws on a variety of sources, including internal discussions about the production of the show from Central Television’s administrative and party archives, program scripts marked up by the censors, audience responses recorded in Central Television’s reports on

13 See James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 13–23, quotation on 18–19.

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viewer letters, and, most importantly, recordings of all of the show’s broadcasts in its "rst decade, 1971–80. Although the particular songs and musicians that appeared on the show, and how that lineup changed over time, are important, they are not the central focus here. By looking at Song of the Year as ritual, I argue, we can shift our attention away from evaluating the show’s musical content. Song of the Year featured mainstream songs and performers who had individual con%icts with the authorities but who mostly received the full bene"ts of the o!cial Soviet pop industry—radio and television airtime and record contracts with the Soviet record label, Melodiia. As such, the show has been an easy target for fans of Western rock and the Soviet musical underground who dismiss this licensed Soviet popular music as largely devoid of either musical or historical interest.14 Richard Stites and David MacFadyen, among others, have already amply demonstrated the signi"cant historical and cultural meaning to be found in these songs and singers, not least because they were extremely popular with a large part of the Soviet audience.15 By focusing on Song of the Year’s form, however, we can approach the popularity of the show’s musical content as a question—one that was the show’s central theme and problem.

#e origins of this problem are to be found a decade earlier, however, in the "rst half of the 1960s. To understand where Song of the Year came from, and why it took the form it did, we "rst have to look at how Central Television’s holiday programming emerged as a solution to the problem of television entertainment.

How Little Blue Flame Became a Holiday Show#e expansion of popular leisure time in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a centerpiece of Khrushchev-era propaganda. Khrushchev shortened work hours and emphasized competition with the West in the arena of consumer lifestyles and modern domestic technology, rather than heavy industry, 14 See for example, Artemy Troitsky, Back in the USSR: !e True Story of Rock in Russia (London: Omnibus, 1987), 36–37. See also Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 236–37. 15 Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–2. David MacFadyen’s three-volume series on Russian and Soviet popular music is a particularly detailed response to this criticism. See MacFadyen, Songs for Fat People: A"ect, Emotion, and Celebrity in Russian Popular Song, 1900–1955 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002); MacFadyen, Red Stars: Personality and Soviet Popular Song, 1955–1991 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001); and MacFadyen, Estrada?! Grand Narratives and the Philosophy of the Russian Popular Song since Perestroika (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002). In the Brezhnev era, MacFadyen argues, the stars of Soviet estrada were laying the groundwork for the transformation of the stage into a “podium from which to e$ect—not re%ect—glasnost´” in the mid-1980s (Red Stars, 242–43).


explicitly encouraging popular expectations that Soviet life would "nally become more comfortable after so many decades of hardship.16 Yet the increase in leisure time for Soviet citizens was also a source of great anxiety for the party leadership and cultural authorities—leisure time had the potential to put Soviet citizens beyond the reach of state institutions, particularly when it took place in the private apartments that the Khrushchev-era state was constructing at great expense.17 Traditional leisure pursuits, such as drinking with friends, had also proved quite enduring.18 How could the state ensure that new leisure-time budgets were spent in a way that contributed to the Party’s goals—economic productivity, social control, and the creation of new Soviet persons?

State provision of pleasure-giving mass culture was one answer, but a highly problematic one. Competition with the West took place on many di$erent grounds, including not only consumer pleasures but also the cultural level of citizens.19 #e objective of Soviet leisure culture, therefore, was not only to reward Soviet citizens and encourage them to enjoy themselves but to facilitate the pursuit of “cultured leisure”—a phrase that implied culture with an underlying enlightening, constructive purpose and imagined Soviet citizens using their free time to attend the theater, concerts of classical music, or, at worst, a movie.20 #e Soviet state’s massive investment in the television network during the 1960s thus had at least two partly contradictory purposes. On the one hand, television in the home was presented as a key attribute of the Soviet “good life,” appearing almost without exception in images of 16 See Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 122–24; Roth-Ey, “Finding a Home for Television,” 279; and Susan Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” in Slavic Review 61, 2 (2002): 211–52.17 See Roth-Ey, “Finding a Home for Television,” 281. On the construction of separate apartments, see Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 124. See also Stephen E. Harris, “Moving to the Separate Apartment: Building, Distributing, Furnishing, and Living in Urban Housing in Soviet Russia, 1950s–1960s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2003); and Christine Varga-Harris, “Forging Citizenship on the Home Front: Reviving the Socialist Contract and Constructing Soviet Identity during the #aw,” in Dilemmas of Destalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones (London: Routledge, 2006). 18 John Bushnell, “Urban Leisure Culture in Post-Stalin Russia: Stability as a Social Problem,” in Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham, ed. Terry L. #ompson and Richard Sheldon (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1988), 58–86. 19 On similar debates about enlightening the masses via Soviet newspapers, see Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 29–36. On the Cold War’s cultural arenas, see David Caute, !e Dancer Defects: !e Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3–6. 20 On “cultured leisure,” see David Ho$mann, Stalinist Values: !e Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 31–37.

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Soviet citizens moving into new private apartments.21 On the other, television was imagined, like existing Soviet media, as a medium of enlightenment and mobilization—a comparatively inexpensive way to transform Soviet people with high culture and direct political messages. What remained uncertain was how contradictory these visions were, and how enlightening television could be while remaining a source of pleasure in the Soviet Cold War home.

#e tension between television as a medium for entertainment and television as a medium for enlightenment worsened with the expansion of Central Television’s broadcasting hours and of the television audience in the late 1950s and early 1960s.22 As Central Television’s signal reached provincial cities and rural areas for the "rst time, viewers wrote in to demand more entertainment programming, citing a right to “cultured leisure” that included the right not to be bored.23 As Kristin Roth-Ey has demonstrated, however, many within the Soviet intelligentsia and the party leadership were quite ambivalent about the vision of Soviet citizens glued to their sets.24 Television threatened to displace more desirable forms of leisure, such as reading or going to the theater. A Soviet television system that delivered large amounts of popular entertainment was also very di!cult to distinguish from American commercial television, which sought to attract the largest possible audience and glue them to the tube for as long as possible.25 By the mid-1960s, as Central Television’s leadership planned for the commencement of satellite broadcasting and the opening of the Ostankino television center, o!cials in charge of designing the TV schedule were calling for a schedule designed to discourage “excessive,” uncritical TV viewing. In 1967, the Central Television o!cial responsible

21 See the collection of TASS and Sovinformbiuro photos under “Semía, zhilishche, otdykh,” Moskovskii arkhiv dokumentov na spetsialńykh nositeliakh, photos l-18660 (1959), l-20459 (1957), l-20738 (1959). See also Roth-Ey, “Finding a Home for Television,” 293–94, 302–5.22 In 1954, there were 225,000 televisions in the three cities with television broadcasting: Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev; by 1957, the number was 1 million (Aleksandr Iurovskii, Televidenie—poiski i resheniia: Ocherki istorii i teorii sovetskoi telezhurnalistiki (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975), 79. In 1965, there were 24 television sets per 100 families in the Soviet Union; by 1970, there was 1 set for every 2 families, or about 35 million sets total. By 1975, there were over 55 million television sets in the Soviet Union with another 6.5 million being produced annually. See B. A. Miasoedov, Strana chitaet, slushaet, smotrit (statisticheskii obzor) (Moscow: Finansy i statistika, 1982), 64, 70; Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public, 18–19.23 See, for example, “Obzory pisem radioslushatelei (sovetskikh i zarubezhnykh) i telezritelei za ianvar´–mart, iiul´–dekabr´ 1964 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 58, l. 29. 24 Roth-Ey, “Finding a Home for Television,” 296–306.25 For Central Television’s mid-1960s e$ort to de"ne “socialist” audience research, see “Itogovaia spravka o rezul´tatakh sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia populiarnosti radio i televizionnykh programm, provedennego na predpriiatiiakh g. Moskvy,” GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 277, l. 17.


for programming, Anatolii Bogomolov, published an article in the Union of Journalists’ professional journal titled “Watch Less Television!” in which he noted that “there is such a thing as too much entertainment.”26

#e story of another famous holiday television program, the musical variety show Goluboi ogonek (Little Blue Flame [1962–present]), broadcast in the evening of all major Soviet holidays, including the New Year, illustrates how these competing visions of the place of televised entertainment in Soviet life led to the emergence of holidays as the key occasions for providing viewers with popular entertainment. First broadcast in April 1962, Little Blue Flame was a variety show modeled on the “youth café” that opened on Gor´kii Street in Moscow in 1960.27 Combining this new café setting with the humor and musical traditions of the Russian variety stage, Little Blue Flame gathered actors, musicians, poets, television professionals, foreigners, cosmonauts, and representatives of the national republics around café tables set with tea, fruit, and other treats; participants engaged in light banter in between performances by musicians and comedians.28 Little Blue Flame was originally conceived as a weekly variety show and broadcast every Sunday night from 10pm to midnight.29

#e show’s focus on light music and humor, as well as the very prominent place on screen that it gave to the musical and other celebrities, immediately raised the problems outlined above. #e show quickly came under pressure from Central Television’s party leadership for lacking clear political messages, and from audiences for featuring too many direct political messages for what purported to be an entertaining show. Already in 1963, barely a year after its "rst broadcast, Central Television was receiving complaints from viewers that the show had lost its initial charm. Little Blue Flame “only rarely lives up to its name: it is neither interesting, nor lively, nor warm,” wrote one employee of the Ministry of Trade on a Central Television survey form. “It features the strangest conversations about achievements in production … boring, long reports of various kinds. It would be nice to hear more good music, more songs, more witty humor.”30

26 Anatolii Bogomolov, “Pomen´she smotrite televizor,” Zhurnalist, no. 6 (1967): 39–41.27 Valentina Shatrova, “Rozhdenie Golubogo ogon´ka,” Virtualńyi muzei televideniia i radio (www.tvmuseum.ru/catalog.asp?ob_no=10536, accessed 25 April 2011).28 On the history of the Russian and Soviet variety stage, see MacFadyen, Songs for Fat People. For a discussion of Little Blue Flame’s connections to the intellectual and social currents of the thaw, see Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 123–25.29 Shatrova, “Rozhdenie Golubogo ogon´ka.” 30 “O subbotnikh i voskresnykh radio- i teleprogrammakh (itogi anketnogo oprosa radioslushatelei i telezritelei) (1963),” GARF f. 6903, op. 3, d. 211, l. 18.

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A 1965 viewer letter complaining about Little Blue Flame summed up these problems and, unwittingly, proposed the solution that Central Television soon identi"ed. “Millions of people anticipate [Little Blue Flame],” the viewer wrote, “often giving up the chance to go to the theater or cinema… . But from week to week, with the exception of your holiday shows [emphasis added], you don’t improve your work and don’t provide us with the great joy that you are supposed to provide.”31

Little Blue Flame’s editors and directors decided, in 1965, to cease production, since they felt the show had lost its original spirit and become outmoded.32 But permission to cancel the show was denied by Nikolai Mesiatsev, the chair of the State Committee for Radio Broadcasting and Television.33 Mesiatsev reminded the Musical Programming sta$ that viewers judged Central Television’s holiday broadcasting on two grounds: the live parade broadcast from Red Square, a signi"cant technical feat; and the quality of that evening’s Little Blue Flame.34 Beginning in 1965, Little Blue Flame ceased to be weekly; by 1970, it was almost exclusively a holiday program.

#e decision to turn Little Blue Flame into a holiday special was quite practical. As in other spheres of Soviet economic and cultural production, holidays provided a way for Central Television to create the experience of bounty in an environment of limited resources.35 Holidays acted as focal points for the Musical Programming sta$’s creative and logistical e$orts. At the same time, a musical variety show like Little Blue Flame o$ered the Soviet state a very good way to celebrate the holidays on television. Popular music on the variety stage o$ered a highly e$ective and politically %exible way of engaging the entire Soviet audience.36 #e lineup of stars could be adjusted to re%ect particular political messages, such as the desire, on the 50th anniversary of 1917, to represent the importance of the revolutionary anniversary for all Soviet people, regardless of nationality. #e 7 November 1967 broadcast of Little Blue Flame featured famous Russian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Lithuanian, 31 “Obzor pisem zritelei, poluchennykh tsentralńym televideniem v aprele 1965 goda,” GARF f. 6903, op. 10, d. 66, ll. 21–22.32 Shatrova, “Rozhdenie Golubogo ogon´ka.” 33 Musical Desk sta$ reminded themselves of Mesiatsev’s intervention on the show’s behalf at another time of crisis in early 1969. “Protokol partsobraniia Glavnoi redaktsii muzykalńykh programm ot 9 aprelia 1969,” TsAOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 911, l. 17. 34 Ibid.35 Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 16–18.36 In this, the variety stage resembled the Soviet circus. See Miriam Neirick, “When Pigs Could Fly: A History of the Circus in the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007), 1–2.


Armenian, and Uzbek vocalists, singing in Russian but also in other Soviet and foreign languages, mostly on patriotic themes but with much lighter music mixed in, including a frivolous French song called “#e Girls of My Country” performed by the Uzbek singer Batyr Zakirov.37

Yet the policy of linking Central Television’s most popular content to the holiday calendar raised new problems. Holidays o$ered a clear way to structure negotiations between the television audience and censors and ensure that even the lightest entertainment retained a clear connection to state myths. But they also raised the stakes of these negotiations, by limiting them to a set number of occasions per year. As one disappointed viewer, a veteran and hero of labor from Uzhgorod, explained in 1978, “there was a time when we saw Little Blue Flame on our screens every week, but now it’s only on major holidays. For that reason, we have much greater expectations.”38 As a result of this higher pressure, explanations of how exactly the show’s particular lineup of performers had been determined were a motif on holiday Little Blue Flames in the 1960s—why these singers and not others? Who exactly had made those decisions, and how?

On New Year’s Little Blue Flame, the answers given were most often playful and obfuscatory, meant as part of the entertaining show. #e evening’s entertainments were presented as an exchange of gifts—a useful device, since one cannot decide what gifts one will receive from others, but also a natural choice for the New Year’s holiday. #e device of gift giving was often quite explicit. #e 1967 New Year’s Little Blue Flame, for example, was broadcast from Seventh Heaven, the restaurant atop the newly completed Ostankino television tower.39 An opening animated sequence revealed that the tower had been turned into a Christmas tree, posing the problem of how to decorate it. A group of pilots was assigned to “hang the presents,” which they accepted from guests arriving from afar (including three hockey players who had been to Poland and brought back a “gift” from a Polish singer, Irena Santor). #e pilots also delivered presents directly to representative citizens watching at home, such as a couple in Azerbaijan who were celebrating their platinum wedding anniversary.

#e device of gift giving was not, however, always seen as su!cient explanation for the appearance of certain performers rather than others on Little Blue Flame. #e "rst New Year’s Little Blue Flame, in 1962, used a 37 Videos of their performances are available on Youtube (accessed 25 April 2011). Search in Cyrillic for !"#$%"& "!"'() 1967 '"*%+,.38 “Obzor pisem telezritelei Mai 1978 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 84, l. 63.39 Novogodnyi ogonek “Samaia vysokaia,” 31 December 1967. See Goluboi ogonek 1967 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording.

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lottery-ball machine on air to “determine” which performances from the past year would be rebroadcast that evening. Later on, the hosts unveiled a call center that took viewer requests, half in jest (the telephone operators also sang and danced) and perhaps half seriously, since in these early years Central Television was accustomed to receiving immediate viewer feedback by phone.40 In 1963, the comedians Lev Mirov and Mark Novitskii performed a sketch at the beginning of the broadcast, pretending to determine the lineup with the help of a giant robot with buttons on his body devoted to di$erent genres and performers. Of course, with the telephone call center the program’s producers did not really cede editorial control to viewer requests, nor did the use of a lottery-ball machine or a giant robot mean that decisions were made by chance, or automatically. But it is indicative of the importance of the question of responsiveness to audience taste that Central Television felt the need to appear to take requests (the call center) or externalize decision-making power to a “neutral” authority, like pure chance.

Little Blue Flame’s cosmopolitan café atmosphere su$ered a number of blows in 1968–70. Foreign guests had always been one of its key features; in the 1968–69 New Year’s Little Blue Flame, the "rst after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, they were entirely absent. After his arrival at Gosteleradio in April 1970, Sergei Lapin attacked the show’s second pillar, the artistic intelligentsia, arguing that television had promoted actors and musicians who aped Western modes at the expense of the Soviet Union’s “real heroes, those who create material wealth, those who feed, dress, shoe, and arm the country.”41 Little Blue Flame remained on the air—as in 1965 it was too prominent to cancel, and in any case its variety format was %exible enough to bend to new political winds. A 1972 report on viewer feedback about the show was grim, however: “interest in the program is declining. #e reason, in our opinion, is the poorly assembled program. #e songs are old, and are performed by the same singers over and over. [#e show] lacks humor and satire.”42 Remarkably, no complete recordings of Little Blue Flame between 1971 and 1979 seem to have survived.43 Little Blue Flame did, however, regain

40 Novogodnyi goluboi ogonek 1962 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording; Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 123.41 “Rech´ Sergeia Georgievicha Lapina,” in “Doklad i stenogrammy vystuplenii v preniiakh na sobranii partiinogo aktiva ob itogakh iiul´skogo (1970g) plenuma TsK KPSS,” TsAOPIM f. 2930, op. 1, d. 1097, l. 18. 42 “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1972 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 2, ll. 124–25. 43 #e preair scripts, or e#rnye papki, of these programs are, however, available in GARF f. 6903, op. 35.


viewers’ interest later in the decade, in part by borrowing from the format of a new New Year’s show, created in 1971.

Song of the Year Song of the Year responded directly to Lapin’s call for the exclusion of foreign music and the inclusion of nonelites: it was a national song contest that made the relationship between audience tastes and the show’s lineup its central subject, the basis for all the show’s action. Song of the Year’s premise was the selection, on the basis of “votes” by Soviet television viewers, of the best Soviet songs of the past year. Beginning in the spring of 1971, the program ran preliminary broadcasts, referred to internally as “advertisements” (reklamy), roughly once a month throughout the year, featuring a few carefully selected performances and reminding viewers to write to Central Television to nominate their choices.44 TV viewers’ "rst encounter with the show in 1971, therefore, was not with the already accomplished fact of a holiday concert, but the invitation to participate in putting such a concert together. #e "nal concert that resulted, broadcast in the evening on New Year’s Day, featured performances of the selected songs and awards for the performers, composers, and authors of the songs’ lyrics. Each of these New Year’s "nal concerts was referred to by the name of the year that had just passed: for example, Song-74 was broadcast on 1 January 1975. Each annual "nale thus purported to review and usher out the old musical year and welcome the new. In the show’s "nal minutes its hosts, a male–female pair of Central Television newsreaders, pronounced the ceremonial phrase “Farewell, Song-75 [for example], hello, Song-76! ”

It would be easy to miss the innovation that Song of the Year’s format represented if we focused on the show’s rather formal style and setting in its early years, particularly in contrast to the friendship around the café tables on Little Blue Flame in the early 1960s. Song of the Year o$ered a far more strati"ed picture of Soviet society. #e arrangement of people on stage and in the audience was hierarchical: in 1971, a jury made up of the hosts of television and radio musical shows sat on stage, well above the audience in the hall. #at audience was organized into professional groupings, identi"able by their uniforms as factory workers or military o!cers (Figure 1). #e composers

44 #e show’s ads were intended to direct viewers’ votes. As Sergei Lapin told the show’s sta$ in 1977, “of course, you all know, everything is done purposefully, everything is organized; you can make any song … you can elicit a stream of letters for any song… . It’s how you present them, which songs you suggest—on that, let’s say, a great deal depends” (“Stenogramma otchetnoi partiinoi konferentsii, postanovlenie ot 22 dekabria 1977 goda,” TsAOPIM f. 2930, op. 3, d. 223, l. 86).

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and lyricists whose songs had been nominated likewise sat together in a few rows, a demotion from their place at center stage on Little Blue Flame.

Yet, from its "rst broadcast in 1971, Song of the Year’s focus on justifying the selection of particular songs for inclusion in the "nal concert problematized this hierarchical re%ection of Soviet society, o$ering multiple accounts of how the show represented popular tastes and opinions, precisely whose tastes were being represented, and what exactly was being selected: #e best songs of the year? Or the most popular? Exactly how the selection of the show’s roughly 20 "nalists took place remained rather vague, or was, rather, extremely overdetermined. #e advertisements throughout the year proposed multiple ways for viewers to understand the task at hand, and the New Year’s broadcasts justi"ed the selection of the included songs in a dizzying number of ways.

To get a sense of this surprising openness, let us consider the case of the show’s "rst year, the "nal concert Song-71. Over the course of the preceding year, the show’s preliminary broadcasts had o$ered contradictory accounts of how viewers were to make their selections, and what exactly they were choosing. In one November 1971 promotional spot, viewers were invited to submit not one but three songs that “they would include in a show called

Figure 1. A mixture of choirs and professional groups in matching uniforms sit in the audience on Song-73


‘Best Song of the Year.’ ” “Ideally,” the ad’s hostess told viewers, “these three songs would be di$erent in character and theme.”45 But another “ad,” just four days later, simply showed a reporter asking Muscovites on the street what their favorite song was.46 Song-71’s preliminary broadcasts also posed some of these questions directly to viewers, including the politically sensitive question of how or whether to include older, patriotic songs from the Civil War era or, most important, World War II. As the host of a preliminary broadcast in November put it, “of course, our marvelous songs from years past are still alive, still sung … are we to say that they aren’t popular, that we have forgotten them, don’t sing them, they no longer bring us joy? So what is the ‘best song of the year’? How do you understand that de"nition? A song written yesterday? Or created several decades ago, but still living and resonant?”47

#e Song-71 "nal concert was similarly ambiguous about whether viewers were expressing personal preferences or judgments of quality, whether the songs that were selected were the most popular or the best (if there could be a di$erence), and how precisely decisions were made. Indeed, the show’s whole status as a contest was constantly downplayed; the show was referred to on air as a “festival” rather than a “contest” (konkurs), and no single winner was selected from among the twenty “laureates” that made it into the "nal concert. #e show’s hosts, the television newsreaders Igor´ Kirillov and Anna Shilova, began the broadcast by announcing that viewers would hear 20 songs that had been “named by viewers as the best songs of 1971.”48 After introducing the performers, Kirillov and Shilova turned to the question of how exactly the show had selected these songs on the basis of viewer letters. Shilova began by quoting one viewer letter that described the di!culty this had presented. “#is was very hard for television viewers,” the author, a farm worker from Krymskaia oblast´ wrote. “We have to choose the best song of the year. How can this be done? It is a problem.”

Kirillov told the letter’s author that indeed she was right—it had been a very pleasant but very complicated problem. He announced that Central Television had received 30,000 letters from viewers, each listing three songs. Moreover, he explained, many letters were signed by large collectives—although this remained unspoken, Kirillov implied that the letters themselves 45 “Pesnia-71 peredacha-reklama. No. 3 ot 21 noiabria 1971,” GARF f. 6903, op. 26, d. 1368.46 Ibid.47 Ibid.48 Pesnia-71, 1 January 1972 (Bomba Music, 2005), DVD recording. In 2005, Bomba issued a set of Pesnia DVDs. All other references in this article to Pesnia DVDs are to this set, with the date of the original broadcast indicated on "rst mention.

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could not be counted as individual household votes.49 Kirillov then unfurled one such letter that dangled all the way to the ground because it contained, he explained, 150 signatures.50 He noted that only a computer could have done the necessary calculations, but that since “song is a delicate matter, a spiritual one,” they decided “not to turn to modern technology,” but rather to the “most passionate propagandists of song,” radio and television musical program hosts.51

Despite Kirillov’s espousal of a socialist-realist approach to representing audience tastes, whereby the opinions of experts and certain model audience members better represented the “true” tastes of the Soviet populace than numerical measurements of their actual preferences, the remainder of the show referred frequently to more direct measures of audience opinion. #e radio and television musical-show hosts on the jury mentioned the numerous requests each song had received on their show, as well as for Song-71—these were not only musical experts but also people with their own sources of information about audience tastes. One song was prefaced by a testimonial from a representative of Melodiia, the Soviet record label, who stated that the song had caused the album it was on to sell particularly well. Some songs were not performed live but shown in "lm clips from the movies in which they had originally appeared, linking the success of the song to the success of the popular movie. Later in the show, Kirillov and Shilova made reference to an explicit count of viewer votes—the giant collective letter they had shown at the beginning of the show, they explained, had supported one song by a particular composer, but another song by that same composer had in fact received more viewer votes, so it was included in the program instead.52

#e show’s "rst broadcast thus raised a number of important problems inherent in conducting a song contest in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s. Of these problems, the most di!cult was the question of how to re%ect the

49 #e show’s mail increased sharply after the program’s "rst year; Pesnia-72 received roughly 100,000 letters. “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1972 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 2, l. 125. #is number was dwarfed by the viewer mail to another musical program, Artloto, also created in 1971, which received an unprecedented 900,000 letters in 1971. Artloto, however, o$ered prizes to viewers for entering the show’s “lottery,” including record albums and players, signed celebrity photos, and color televisions.50 Pesnia-71 DVD.51 Kirillov’s observation that “pesnia delo ton´koe” (song is a delicate matter) echoes the famous line from the 1969 Soviet “Eastern” Beloe solntse pustyni (White Sun of the Desert), “vostok delo ton´koe” (the East is a delicate matter), suggesting the extent to which Song of the Year was engaged with other popular cultural forms and delivered its political messages with a bit of levity. 52 Pesnia-71 DVD.


musical tastes of Soviet young people in the show’s lineup. As memoirists and scholars have documented, the consumption and underground circulation of Western jazz and rock music and Soviet guitar poetry and rock increased rapidly throughout the post-Stalin period.53 Viewers understood that much of what was genuinely popular, at least with many Soviet young people, could not be shown on Soviet television; as a result, as we have seen, the question of how exactly audience preferences were being measured was highly fraught. #e second, related challenge the show faced was to mediate generational con%icts of taste within the set of music that could be broadcast on television, in order to appeal to as wide an audience as possible and successfully convey the unity of the Soviet people. Song of the Year, a national song contest that explicitly excluded foreign composers and performers, aimed to provide a Soviet alternative to Western popular and rock music for Soviet young people, while also demonstrating that youth tastes were not so strange after all—that in fact they were intimately connected with the same Soviet song tradition that had moved their parents and grandparents during the revolution and the Great Patriotic War, and which still, as the refrain of the show’s theme song put it, helped Soviet people “build and live.”54

On Song-71, Kirillov and Shilova stressed the unity of viewer opinion—claiming that viewers had supported a given song “unanimously”—and the agreement of the professional jury with the viewers’ selections. But they also referred to generational con%ict among viewers. Between musical numbers, for example, Kirillov read aloud a letter suggesting that the program create a separate category for songs preferred by people under the age of 23. Kirillov laughingly dismissed this letter—what would happen to those unfortunate people who had just turned 24, not to mention 55? Would they have to wait, he asked incredulously, for their own shows? Kirillov quickly countered this troubling letter with one from a family who said that their three generations all loved a particular song.55 #is problem could not, however, be so easily dismissed. In a move that hinted of things to come, Song-71 concluded with exactly the kind of separate category for older songs that the viewer in favor of 53 Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 181–95. See also Sergei Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: !e West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). For a "rsthand account by a Soviet rock musician, see Troitsky, Back in the USSR. On guitar poetry, see Gerald Stanton Smith, Songs to Seven Strings: Russian Guitar Poetry and Soviet “Mass Song” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). For a lucid overview of popular music genres and milieus in the Brezhnev era, see Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 154–67.54 Song of the Year’s theme was “Pesnia ostaetsia s chelovekom,” composed by A. Ostrovskii, lyrics by S. Ostrovoi. 55 Pesnia-71 DVD.

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a special youth category had proposed: a contest of “knowledge of old songs” for the audience in the hall, ending with a rousing chorus of the thaw-era hit, “Evenings outside Moscow.”

By the time of its second season "nale, a year later, Song of the Year had developed an elaborate structure to help mediate these tensions—one that was based on dividing the show’s performances into separate thematic and generational categories. Kirillov and Shilova’s welcome to viewers was followed, as in the previous year, by the introduction of performers; this year, however, after the usual individual singers and vocal–instrumental ensembles, Kirillov and Shilova introduced a series of mass choirs—a military band and choir, a Russian folk choir, a Moscow choir of “youth and students,” and Central Television and Radio’s children’s choir—each of which performed a song.56 #is brief medley of songs foreshadowed the structure of the concert as a whole, which likewise contained segments directed at particular social groups, most visibly veterans and other fans of patriotic song, student youth, and young children. #is sense of representing the separate tastes of a socially divided audience was furthered by the continued prominent role on Song-72 of a jury made up of the hosts of radio and television musical programs, each of which had its particular audience and musical focus. Song-72 struck a similar balance regarding the inclusion of older songs on the show—the tension, that is, between the task of summing up current Soviet popular music trends and the classicism of Soviet culture, which sought to identify songs for all time. Song-72 made much of its status as a newly invented tradition and included performances of several songs that had won the previous year. At the same time, these songs were segregated from the main concert program as a separate medley; their titles and authors were not announced and no time was allowed for audience applause between them.

Song-72 also explicitly addressed the problem of youth tastes. Roughly midway through the broadcast, a jury member from the “Youth” radio station, which focused on popular music and aimed to compete with foreign radio broadcasts, announced a contest for the students of Moscow universities who were in the hall. He then introduced a young Central Television host, Iurii Kovelenov, who, after insisting that this was not a contest but a “little festival within our big festival,” introduced several groups of Moscow students, many of whom were foreign students from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. #ese teams sang several songs from their seats in the audience, then Kovelenov called some of them on stage to sing the “Hymn to the Democratic Youth of the World,” with the audience singing along. #en they were all given

56 Pesnia-72, 1 January 1973, DVD.


small tinsel New Year’s trees and ushered o$ stage.57 In this "rst attempt to acknowledge youth as a separate category within the viewing audience, Song-72 o$ered a highly circumscribed portrait of Soviet and international socialist youth, one limited to the kinds of songs and interactions directly sponsored by the Soviet state.

Song-73’s version of this contest, however, came closer to acknowledging actual youth tastes, even as it stressed their membership in the cohesive social world of Soviet song. #at year, Kovelenov’s “microfestival” included an initial round where students in the audience were asked to “prove that they really know and love [Soviet] song” by singing songs that had won at previous festivals and naming their authors and composers. But then Kovelenov asked the students to send up to the stage a member of their group who knew how to play an instrument; he then explained that they were about to form a little orchestra or, “as is now the style, a vocal–instrumental ensemble.” Kovelenov proceeded to ask each student which instrument he played, so that they could borrow them from the orchestra on stage. When all but a handful answered that they played the guitar, Kovelenov, the students, and the audience all laughed. Kovelenov reassured everyone that “we know that the guitar is probably the most popular instrument among young people,” and that the show had six guitars on hand for the students to use—enough for all those who wanted one.58

Song-72’s structure, featuring a jury, the division of the musical program into segments directed at particular social or professional groups, and various similarly targeted contests-within-the-contest for the audience at home and in the hall, proved quite enduring: it became the framework within which the show experimented for the next "ve years. Each year, the show o$ered a slightly di$erent approach to the problems of mediating potential con%icts of taste, representing a uni"ed Soviet public, and authenticating the show’s musical lineup as truly popular. After Song-72 the size and composition of the jury changed signi"cantly from year to year, with only Eleonora Beliaeva, the host of the TV show Muzykalńyi kiosk (Music Kiosk), representing TV and radio. Sometimes it was predominantly made up of musicians and choral directors; in other years it featured mostly heroes of socialist labor and cosmonauts. #e contests for audience members in the hall and at home multiplied: in Song-72, -73, and -74 there was a contest for the author of the 100,000th letter the show received that year, who was invited to the "nale and

57 Ibid.58 Pesnia-73, 1 January 1974, DVD.

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interviewed in the audience.59 #at contest made no demands on the nature of viewers’ participation; it simply encouraged letter writing and emphasized the show’s massive popularity. Yet Song-73 and Song-74 also had contests that asked viewers to predict the lineup of the "nal concert, a task that directed audience members to anticipate the judgment of the show’s producers and censors. #e precise process by which votes had or had not been counted also remained as ambiguous and overdetermined as it had been in Song-71. In a promotional program for Song-75 the host, appearing behind a table laden with viewer letters, referred to the audience as members of a “viewers’ jury” (zritel´skoe zhiuri ), but one performer who appeared on the same broadcast thanked viewers for “giving my songs your votes [ golosa].”60

Yet against this background of constant experimentation, we can see two patterns that resulted, by the late 1970s, in the breakdown of Song of the Year’s socially divided format. First, beginning on Song-72, the show began to question the generic and social divisions that structured both the way viewers were invited to nominate songs and the lineup of the "nal concert. On Song-72’s "nal broadcast, a jury member from the radio show Dobroe utro (Good Morning) reminded the audience that viewers had been asked to nominate three songs: one “song with civic resonance” ( pesnia grazhdanskogo zvuchaniia), one “popular song” (estradnaia pesnia), and one “folk song” ( pesnia v narodnom stile). “We received a lot of letters,” the jury member continued, “justi"ably questioning whether it is possible to di$erentiate songs in this way.” For example, she explained, “a song with civic resonance includes songs about labor, songs about great deeds, songs about your native land … isn’t that so? And when we "rst played a song on our show about our North, we received an enormous quantity of letters.” She then introduced a song, by the composer Mark Fradkin, titled “I Will Carry You O$ to the Tundra,” performed by the Nanai pop singer Kola Bel´dy and featuring an opening guitar hook reminiscent of the 1960s surf guitar at the beginning of the Batman theme song (Figure 2).61 #e implication was one that was familiar to young Soviet rock fans: that there need not be any contradiction between

59 Central Television did receive as many as 100,000 letters to the show per year in the early 1970s. #e letter division reported 109,000 letters received in 1972 for Pesnia-72, and 62,000 for Pesnia-73 in December 1973 alone. #ese numbers did decline over time, however. In 1976, Pesnia-76 received only 27,000 letters (“Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1972 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 2, l. 125; “Obzor pisem telezritelei 1973 g.,” ibid., d. 27, l. 168; “Obzor pisem telezritelei 1976 god,” ibid., d. 53, l. 120).60 “Pesnia-75 Reklama No. 1,” GARF f. 6903, op. 88, 218. 61 Pesnia-72 DVD.


appreciation for Western musical styles and belief in Soviet socialism.62 Why shouldn’t a good guitar hook have “civic resonance”? And if any popular song might be civic, why shouldn’t Song of the Year feature the songs that were most popular, without worrying about whether they could also be deemed the best by some external aesthetic standard?

#e second pattern that emerged on Song of the Year in its "rst "ve years was that some songs in the lineup seemed to require more justi"cation than others. From Song-73 through Song-77, the show used contests to encourage viewers at home to link their own life experiences to patriotic Soviet songs, both recent and from previous decades.63 On Song-74, for example, the show featured a new viewer contest for the coming year, titled “#e Song Sings about Me” (Pesnia poet obo mne). Eleonora Beliaeva announced the rules: viewers were to listen to several songs connected to great events in Soviet history, performed by groups of Moscow students who had been participating in work brigades all over the country. #en they were to write to the show, “interestingly, movingly [chtoby zakhvatilo dushu],” about some event from

62 Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 207–37. 63 #ese songs included “Komsomol´tsy-dobrovol´tsy” (1957); “Pesnia o BAMe” (1975); “Ne plach´, devchonka” (1971).

Figure 2. Kola Bel´dy performing on Song-72

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their “personal life, your friends’ or families’ lives,” that they associated with these songs. Viewers responded: the show received over 1,000 letters within a few weeks, mostly from older viewers. #ese letters were then featured in the show’s advertisements for Song-75. Some viewers wrote in, however, to criticize the contest’s premise. I. G. Bardzilova, a pediatrician in Severomorsk, wrote that “song has been in my life like a best friend and trusted con"dante. But I cannot boast that even one of the songs selected for the contest is about me, about the di!culties I have faced in life, about the victories I have experienced.”64 When a similar contest was announced on Song-76, it was given a more neutral name, “Song Is My Love” (Pesnia moia liubov´ ).65

#ese new contests were part of a growing divide, on Song of the Year in the mid-1970s, between the ways of presenting songs with direct links to Soviet history and ideology and those without them. A pattern began to emerge, whereby lighter, poppier songs were presented without extensive reference to viewer letters or the speci"c individuals who had requested them. #is distinction had become extremely sharp by the time Song-77 was produced. #at year, there had been a kind of poster contest for viewers titled “#e Visual Image of the Song.”66 Viewers had submitted artistic renderings of the subject or meaning of particular songs, which were projected on a blue screen behind the show’s hosts as they introduced each song, usually with direct quotes from viewer letters about their emotional and personal connection to the events described in the song (Figure 3). #is treatment was mostly accorded to older songs and those that dealt with patriotic themes directly and exclusively. Songs about love or those from popular television "lms were usually not accompanied by these audience images or quotations. Instead, they were announced simply, with a phrase like, “the song ‘Moments’ continues our concert.” For these songs, the only thing projected on the blue screen behind the hosts was an image of a rotating New Year’s tree, covered in tinsel. Song-77 was also divided into two acts, and these audience images were missing in the more lyrical, poppy second half.67

64 “Obzor pisem telezritelei za ianvar´ 1975 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 40, l. 74. 65 Pesnia-76, 1 January 1977, DVD.66 Pesnia-77, 1 January 1978, DVD.67 On the very widespread Soviet strategy of dividing concerts into two acts, one devoted to direct political messages and the other to pleasing the audience, see V. D. Ivanov and L. P. Musakhanov, “Balans khudozhestvennoi kul´tury (na materiale ekspertnogo oprosa po sovetskomu iskusstvu 1970-kh),” in Khudozhestvennaia zhizn´ v Rossii 1970-kh godov kak sistemnoe tseloe, ed. Neia Zorkaia (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2001), 127.


#us, as Song of the Year worked increasingly hard, starting in the mid-1970s, to engage viewers with songs linked to key state myths and to justify the inclusion of those songs in the concert lineup, it also increasingly marginalized those songs and set them o$ from what was more and more clearly the concert’s main purpose, the provision of pleasure-giving entertainment. Indeed, the prizes for the various write-in contests for viewers, which asked them to link their life stories to songs about Soviet achievements, were albums with autographs and pictures of the show’s celebrity performers.

#e transformation of the show from a juried selection of the “best” Soviet songs that represented Soviet society as harmonious but hierarchically divided to a popular song contest aimed at a mostly undi$erentiated, primarily younger audience initially took place gradually, then all of a sudden. On Song-73 the jury was moved o$-stage and into the audience, where it remained; on Song-77 the jury members seated in the audience were not introduced by name and did not speak at all; the next year the jury had disappeared altogether, replaced by only a brief, silent scene, at the beginning of the second half, of editors and attractive young people looking through record albums and (apparently) discussing their merits (Figure 4). On Song-

Figure 3. Masliakov and Zhil´tsova in front of a viewer-created image for the song “Komissary”

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75 Kovelenov’s “microfestival” within the festival began to be called a contest; on Song-76 the show’s hosts repeatedly quoted from letters that included the phrase “we vote for this song”—language that had rarely been included in previous years.68

#e show likewise began to stress the suspense that viewers felt as they anticipated the show’s lineup. “It’s time to begin the show,” the host of Song-77 told viewers, because everyone at home was “rooting for their favorite song.” #is suspense was only enhanced by the show’s increasingly casual editing and camera work. For example, the very popular young songstress Alla Pugacheva was introduced during the opening minutes of both Song-76 and Song-77, but her performances were not included in those concerts; she was "nally included only on Song-78, when she performed twice.69 Her appearance at the beginning of the show on Song-76 and Song-77 was most likely the result of her numbers being cut from the show’s lineup, but the decision not to edit 68 Pesnia-75 and Pesnia-76 DVDs. 69 Ibid.; Pesnia-77 and Pesnia-78 DVDs.

Figure 4. A silent scene. Editors and young people appear to discuss selections for Song-78


her out of the opening introductions as well was both striking and typical of the show’s increasingly relaxed approach. Song of the Year’s camerawork had always been relatively informal by Central Television’s standards, but by Song-75 viewers were treated to the looks of skepticism and very faint applause among the composers in the audience during a speech by Kara Karaev, the head of the Union of Composers, as well as the surprise on the faces of two singers when they were hit in the knees by bouquets. On Song-76 viewers could see someone yawning, and on Song-77 they saw a woman putting her hands on her cheeks, mouth agape, eyes wide, as Soviet sex symbol Muslim Magomaev came on stage. #e camera’s focus on individual performers, at the expense of panoramic shots of the fully lit, hierarchically arranged hall, also became more marked—the use of closeups of individual performers and the darkening of the hall for particularly lyrical and intimate songs, or especially popular performers, increased greatly in the second half of the 1970s.

#is transformation was not, of course, complete—censorship continued to limit the show’s lineup; the didactic purpose of its contest form remained intact. Song-79 reintroduced contests for the 100,000th viewer letter and the “most active” correspondent that had been missing since Song-75, although they were gone again in Song-80. Youth also remained, to some extent, a distinct constituency on the show. In 1976, Central Television created another musical contest show, S pesnei po zhizni (With a Song through Life).70 #is program featured young professional musicians (a key quali"cation when unsanctioned but regularly performing rock bands were proliferating), and ostensibly based the selection of "nalists on votes from the studio audience and viewer letters.71 #e winners of this contest began to appear on Song of the Year as representatives of youth tastes. #is new show, like Song of the Year, was understood as an important means of engaging and educating viewers. “#e fact that television viewers participate in judging the contestants,” one television viewer wrote approvingly, “forces them to take responsibility, to be more attentive and demanding of performers and their repertoire as they grade them.”72 It was also, like Song of the Year, quite popular with viewers, who wrote in to praise the show’s less well-known, more youthful performers or to criticize the decisions of the studio audience.73

70 #e song’s title was drawn from the chorus of “Pesnia ostaetsia s chelovekom,” Song of the Year’s theme song. 71 “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1976 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 53, l. 121.72 “Obzor pisem telezritelei za 1978 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 79, l. 127.73 See, for example, “Obzor pisem telezritelei za aprel´ 1978 god,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 83, l. 63.

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#e creation of With a Song through Life was, however, also a symptom of a broader reorientation of Song of the Year toward youth. New genres were included for the "rst time: beginning with Song-77, Song of the Year began to include guitar poetry, often from the soundtrack of popular movies, like Ironiia sud´by (#e Irony of Fate [1975]).74 Perhaps the most visible sign of change, however, was in the show’s increasingly youthful hosts. Indeed, as the Brezhnev Politburo aged, Song of the Year grew younger. Kirillov (b. 1932) and Shilova (b. 1927) were replaced, on Song-76, by Aleksandr Masliakov (b. 1941) and Svetlana Zhil´tsova (b. 1936), who were strongly associated with student youth from their time as the hosts of the Central Television game show Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh (Club of the Merry and Resourceful, or KVN [1961–72]). On Song-80, Masliakov and Zhil´tsova were replaced by Muslim Magomaev (b. 1942) and Tatíana Korshilova (b. 1946), the host of With a Song through Life.

As Song of the Year’s producers reoriented the show toward a younger audience, they also began to acknowledge the limits of their own project: providing a harmonious and uni"ed picture of Soviet society and a show that could include every Soviet citizen’s tastes. With a Song through Life was not the only new musical program added to Central Television’s holiday lineup in the second half of the 1970s. A few of these new shows, such as Melodii i ritmy zarubezhnoi estrady (Melodies and Rhythms of Foreign Popular Music), created in 1976, were devoted exclusively to foreign music. In the early hours of New Year’s Day in 1978, Soviet TV viewers could hear “ABBA” and “Boney M.” on a special New Year’s broadcast of Melodies, titled Vam ulybaiutsia zvezdy (#e Stars Smile for You).75 Song of the Year, always in dialogue with the Little Blue Flame broadcast the night before, became just one among several di$erent shows o$ering music to meet di$erent tastes.

#is fragmentation of Central Television’s holiday musical programming began to be re%ected in Song of the Year’s own broadcasts. Beginning with Song-78, Masliakov and Zhil´tsova acknowledged, late in the show’s program, that everyone wished to hear his or her favorite song on Song of the Year, a sentiment that left open the possibility that the show had not met those expectations. #ey then expressed the hope that the songs performed thus far had ful"lled many of those wishes. On Song-80, however, the show seemed to have abandoned even that limited hope. Song-80 included several popular performers who had not previously appeared on the show, including the rock

74 Pesnia-77 DVD.75 “Protokoly Nn. 36–37 zasedanii kollegii Goskomiteta i materialy k nim,” GARF f. 6903, op. 32, d. 781, l. 60.


and disco-in%uenced Stas Namin Group (Figure 5). But, at the end of the concert, Korshilova acknowledged that Song-80 could not please everyone. “Maybe during our concert today not all of the songs that you wanted to hear were played,” she said. “But our evening of song continues, and the New Year is just beginning.”76 #at year, for the "rst time, Korshilova and Magomaev did not recite the show’s traditional closing incantation, “Farewell, Song-80, hello, Song-81! ” Instead, they simply wished viewers happiness in the New Year, and the performers gathered on stage as usual to sing the show’s anthem. #e Soviet jazz great Leonid Utesov, a special guest of the show in the year of his 80th birthday, sang lustily in the front row. Although the traditional closing phrase returned in subsequent years, it was a kind of goodbye.

ConclusionLittle Blue Flame, the other pillar of Central Television’s New Year’s programming, had undergone similar changes in the late 1970s. Like Song of the Year, Little Blue Flame came more and more to resemble a regular concert, with much less ceremony devoted to representing a uni"ed Soviet public that was either spontaneous and harmonious, as on Little Blue Flame in the 1960s, 76 Pesnia-80, 1 January 1981, DVD.

Figure 5. Stas Namin performs. !e hall is darkened, and the stage is in the round for the #rst time

644 CHRISTINE EVANS

or the result of a long, hard process of deliberation and negotiation, as on Song of the Year. For the 1977–78 New Year, Little Blue Flame abandoned the lengthy and stilted interviews with model workers that had characterized the show in the 1970s. Younger viewers (and some older ones) responded with great enthusiasm. “Fewer words, more action,” as Alexander Bulaev, a 37-year-old miner from Donetsk, put it. “Although I am already 28 years old,” another viewer from the city of Gor´kii wrote, “and have already left the age of uncritical praise for the ‘guitar’ trend, I vote with both hands for this development in our entertainment programs.”77 Many older or more conservative viewers, however, objected vigorously.78 Lapin was outraged. “#e entire 1977 Little Flame was a pop [estradnyi ] concert,” he railed to a meeting of Central Television party members after the holidays. “Of course, naked propaganda is not necessary in this case, but why can this not be done with talent… . Is it necessary to completely disarm [razoruzhat´sia] here?”79

Was it? Why indeed did Song of the Year abandon, in the late 1970s, some of the elaborate structure it had developed to balance the competing demands and viewpoints it aimed to bring together? One proximate explanation was the rise of a younger generation of executives within Central Television. Shortly after its broadcast, Eduard Sagalaev, the youngest member of Central Television’s executive body and the second in command of the Youth Programming Division, denounced Song-77 as having been produced “by people with an aging worldview,” calling it the “television of yesterday.”80 Sagalaev’s opinion could not be taken lightly; the Youth Programming Division won several state prizes under his direction, and he was rising very quickly.81

More broadly, however, Lapin’s excoriation of Central Television’s New Year’s musical shows as “disarmament” re%ected a growing paradox at the 77 “Obzor pisem telezritelei za ianvar´ 1978 g.,” GARF f. 6903, op. 36, d. 80, ll. 67–68.78 Ibid.79 “Stenogramma otchetnoi partiinoi konferentsii, postanovlenie ot 22 dekabria 1977 goda,” TsAOPIM f. 2930, op. 3, d. 223, l. 86. 80 “Protokol No. [illegible] otkrytogo partiinogo sobraniia Glavnoi redaktsii programm dlia molodezhi ot 10 ianvaria 1978 goda ‘o zadachakh partiinoi organizatsii redaktsii po sozdaniiu massovykh, razvlekatelńykh peredach,’ ” in “Protokoly partsobranii i zasedanii partbiuro pervichnoi partorganizatsii Glavnoi redaktsii programm dlia molodezhi Tsentralńogo televideniia,” TsAOPIM f. 2930, op. 3, d. 477, l. 7.81 #e prizes were for the documentary "lm series Nasha biogra#ia (Our Biography [1977]). Sagalaev went on to head Central Television’s Youth Programming Desk (1984–88) and News Desk (1988–90). #ese critical comments also foreshadowed Brezhnev’s criticism of formalism and clichés in ideological work at the Central Committee Plenum of November 1978. See #omas F. Remington, !e Truth of Authority: Ideology and Communication in the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), 3–5.


heart of Soviet television’s holiday programming by the late 1970s. #e circulation and consumption of Western rock and jazz—via every medium except television—was the norm by the late 1970s.82 In that context, providing Soviet audiences with genuinely popular music at holiday times was both a Cold War victory and an act of surrender. From the late 1970s, Central Television executives tentatively began to abandon the battle against bourgeois Western musical styles because a new generation of Soviet citizens did not believe that there was actually a war in progress.83

Yet New Year’s television programs also reveal how Cold War pressures could combine with growing ambiguity in the interpretation of Soviet ideology to create unpredictable and culturally innovative television rituals. Even at the height of “stagnation,” in an institution as closely controlled as Central Television, a show like Song of the Year could propose nonparty authorities for decision making in the sphere of culture, open up politically important questions to viewer “votes,” and expose the extent of generational con%ict within Soviet society. Despite their limitations, these shows o$ered something that no other popular music medium could—a moving image of beloved stars. As their continued relevance in the post-Soviet present suggests, Soviet television New Year’s shows created a framework that was later available for rapid changes of content and meaning. Not for nothing did the famous Soviet sports reporter, Nikolai Ozerov, appear on the 1972–73 New Year’s broadcast of Little Blue Flame and pretend to broadcast live from its unfolding action throughout the show.84 Like the unknowable future that the New Year’s holiday puts at center stage, Soviet New Year’s television shows could be watched like a sporting event, for surprise turns of events and unforeseeable outcomes.

Dept. of History University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee P.O. Box 413 Milwaukee, WI 53201 [email protected]

82 Indeed, it could also be heard on television, when it accompanied a foreign "gure skater’s routine, or on particular programs aimed at young viewers, like the news journal Mezhdunarodnaia panorama (International Panorama). 83 See Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 207–37. #is did not, of course, apply to all Western musical styles or all branches of the Soviet state. See Sergei Zhuk’s account of the KGB’s continuing battle against punk and metal in Rock and Roll in the Rocket City. 84 “Goluboi ogonek,” 31 December 1972, GARF f. 6903, op. 35, d. 40.

Documents

Song of the Year' and Soviet Mass Culture in the 1970s