Russia’s Blue Glow

Early in the movie Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, Rudy tells Katerina, while wooing her at a dinner party, that television is the future:

In time TV will change mankind.
There’ll be no movies, books, theaters, newspapers,
nothing but TV.

Rudy turned out to be a heel of the highest order, but his statement about television is more than glibly amusing. It’s glibly prophetic. The film, though released in Russia in 1980, is set in 1958, the inaugural year of Khrushchev’s reign as Premier of the Soviet Union – something of a subtext that was probably not lost on the average Muscovite. Like the three young women who are the protagonists of MDNBIT, Khrushchev was born in a small village, had an underabundance of schooling and was regarded, frankly, as a bit of a rube. William Taubman, in his 2004 biography Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, writes in the preface:

Ask many Westerners, and not a few Russians, and they’re likely to recall Nikita Khrushchev as a crude, ill-educated clown who banged his shoe at the United Nations.

What is it about clowns and their shoes? Khrushchev’s granddaughter, Nina, has some ideas. In an October 2000 piece in the New Statesman, she put it this way:

As a good performer, Khrushchev needed a strong, convincing exit, true to the role he chose, and that is what happened: in the excitement of fist banging, his watch fell off. Meanwhile, his shoes, made of durable Soviet leather in a special shoe atelier for the Soviet nomenclature, were too new and too tight, and he removed them. He bent down to pick up the watch and saw his empty shoes. How lucky!

Peasant or not, you don’t tunnel your way up the Communist party system at the height of the Cold War without learning a bit about the power of a world stage. And it was about the time that Khrushchev brandished his shoe – a few years earlier in fact – when he learned that the world stage was relocating to living rooms everywhere, powered by a cathode ray tube. That relocation is now virtually complete, and nowhere more so than in Russia. As reported last year in Spiegel International:

More than 80 percent of Russians get their news from national television networks – all of which have come under Kremlin control in the past five years.

In a 2006 BBC/Reuters/Media Center poll of more than 10,000 Russians, 67% named Channel One, NTV or RTR as their most trusted media brand. All are television networks and all are either majority or entirely state-owned.

Rudy may have been wrong about the fate of books and newspapers, but for most Russians there’s "nothing but TV."


P.S. What's your must-see Russian movie?