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Free Style: How did the Aesthetics of Perestroika TV Fuel the Rise of Yeltsin's Russia?

Thu, November 5, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 4

Abstract

This paper is part of a lightning round, "The Post-Soviet Public Sphere: Assembling a Digital Multimedia Sourcebook of the Russian 1990s." It has often been claimed that the loosening of censorship in Soviet media caused Perestroika to spiral out of control and brought about the fall of USSR and the rise of Yeltsin’s Russia. However, what “freedom of expression” actually entailed for Soviet views is a more complicated question. I will argue that due to late Soviet cultural developments, “freedom” was often understood more as an aesthetic, a sincere style of self-presentation, rather than the process of sophisticated intellectual deliberation. As a result, late 1980s- early 1990s Russian media in general (and TV programs like Vzgliad in particular) were able to convert Soviet mass audiences into Yeltsin’s political constituency without necessarily defining what the politics of the new era would be about, and what role a genuinely “free” media would play in them.

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