This study focuses on Soviet television audiences and examines their watching habits and the way they made use of television programs. Kirsten Bönker challenges the common misconception that viewers perceived Soviet television programming and entertainment culture as dull and formulaic. This study draws extensively on archival sources and oral history interviews to analyze how Soviet television involved audiences in political communication and how it addressed audiences’ emotional commitments to Soviet values and the Soviet way of life. Bönker argues that the Brezhnev era influenced political stability and brought an unprecedented rise of the living standards, creating new meanings for consumerism, the idea of the “home,” and private life among Soviet citizens. Exploring the concept of emotional bonding, this study engages broader discussions on the durability of the Soviet Union until perestroika.

Television has changed drastically in the Soviet Union over the last two decades. Ellen Mickiewicz's compelling volume challenges us to consider how television has become Mikhail Gorbachev's most powerful instrument for paving the way for major reform. Offering an insider's view into the world seen on Soviet TV, Mickiewicz explores the changes in programming that have occurred as a result of glasnost. Containing a wealth of interviews with major Soviet and American media figures and eye-opening accounts of Soviet TV shows, 'Split Signals' also compares over one hundred hours of Soviet and American television news programs broadcast during both the Chernenko and Gorbachev governments.

Presenting original research from a number of well-known international specialists, this book is a detailed investigation of the development of mass media in Russia since the end of Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

From the mid-1950s onwards, the rise of television as a mass medium took place in many East and West European countries. As the most influential mass medium of the Cold War, television triggered new practices of consumption and media production, and of communication and exchange on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This volume leans on the long-neglected fact that, even during the Cold War era, television could easily become a cross-border matter. As such, it brings together transnational perspectives on convergence zones, observations, collaborations, circulations and interdependencies between Eastern and Western television. In particular, the authors provide empirical ground to include socialist television within a European and global media history. Historians and media, cultural and literary scholars take interdisciplinary perspectives to focus on structures, actors, flow, contents or the reception of cross-border television. Their contributions cover Albania, the CSSR, the GDR, Russia and the Soviet Union, Serbia, Slovenia and Yugoslavia, thus complementing Western-dominated perspectives on Cold War mass media with a specific focus on the spaces and actors of East European communication. Last but not least, the volume takes a long-term perspective crossing the fall of the Iron Curtain, as many trends of the post-socialist period are linked to, or pick up, socialist traditions.

In From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television, Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable delve into the fascinating world of television under communism, using it to test a new framework for comparative media analysis. To understand the societal consequences of mass communication, the authors argue that we need to move beyond the analysis of media systems, and instead focus on the role of the media in shaping cultural ideals and narratives, everyday practices and routines. Drawing on a wealth of original data derived from archival sources, programme and schedule analysis, and oral history interviews, the authors show how communist authorities managed to harness the power of television to shape new habits and rituals, yet failed to inspire a deeper belief in communist ideals. This book and their analysis contains important implications for the understanding of mass communication in non-democratic settings, and provides tools for the analysis of media cultures globally.

This collection will be the first volume to gather the best writing on socialist and postsocialist entertainment television as a medium, technology, and institution in Eastern Europe.

. . .Ganley has marshaled an extrodinary range and volume of information and presents the story with bolth clarity and drama. Unglued Empire offers a gold mine of case-study data for scholars analyzing the interplay of politics and modern communication technology. . . -^ITechnology and Culture There is no doubt that the growing availability of television and its technology, which made it possible to report scenes instantly, did have an impact on the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev decided that his country needed a dose of openness or Glasnost to modernize society and make the people more supportive of his efforts. In the end, more information about the outside world as well as the inside world helped to bring down the communist party and the Soviet government. This book documents this process, showing how the media's ready availability became such a divisive force in the Soviet Union. Instead of creating a more structured, rigid regime, it did just the opposite. The Soviet Union may well have collapsed of its own weight sooner or later, but there is no doubt that the media, technology and communications accelerated the process, a form of uskoreniie that Gorbachev never intended. Many of the events described in this study have application to other researchers and government officials. The study makes it possible to understand some of the new challenges that regimes wary of criticism will have to face in the future.

This report tests basic assumptions used by Western analysts in interpreting the Soviet media by bringing to bear new information, derived from emigre interviews, about the structure and inner workings of Soviet media and the political mechanisms by which the media are controlled. Section II reviews the mechanism of Party and state control over Soviet media, in which formal censorship in fact plays a secondary role. Section III looks at the crucial role of the chief editor and the editorial processes he presides over. Section IV analyzes types of discussions, debates, and controversies in Soviet media and considers their relationship to institutional, personal, and policy conflict. Appendix A contains a fuller description of the study approach. Appendix B provides a selective review of media-related assumptions in a variety of Western Sovietological writings. Appendix C examines a presumptive "doctored photograph" incident. Appendix D provides a profile of one of the seemingly unorthodox Soviet journals, Literaturnaia Gazeta.