Screening Socialism: TV and Everyday Life in Socialist Eastern Europe

Posted on: 8 January 2016

The Screening Socialism project is the first comparative, transnational study of television cultures in socialist Eastern Europe. Dr Sabina Mihelj, Reader in Media and Cultural Analysis, Loughborough University, provides an overview of this innovative project and discusses some preliminary results.

About the Author: Dr Sabina Mihelj is a Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis at Loughborough University and sits on the editorial boards of several international media and cultural analysis journals. Recent publications include Central and Eastern European Media in Comparative Perspective: Politics, Economy Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), Media Nations: Communicating Belonging and Exclusion in the Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), as well as contributions to the European Journal of Communication and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. Sabina is currently working on a major comparative project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which examines television cultures across five state socialist countries.

Screening Socialism was launched in August 2013 and is funded by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2013-025). Led by Sabina Mihelj from the Communication Research Centre at Loughborough University, the project team comprises three full-time Research Associates – Dr Alice Bardan, Dr Simon Huxtable, and Dr Sylwia Szostak – and draws on the help of local experts including Dr Marijana Grbeša, Dr Ivan Kozachenko, Dr Aleksandra Milovanović, and Mila Turaljić.

At the core of the Screening Socialism project lies a deceptively simple question: What is television? We often tend to think of television in universal terms, as if the simple existence of a shared technology means that its basic forms, content and uses were the same everywhere. Yet, do we know enough about the various forms of television globally, and through history, to offer a universally applicable definition? Being part of a political, economic and cultural system that self-consciously set out to develop an alternative form of modern society, socialist television offers a particularly apposite basis for addressing this question. Along with other modern media, socialist television was inevitably drawn into the Cold War contest between two rival versions of modern society: one premised on liberal democracy and market economy, the other on communist rule and planned economy. As a consequence, its formats, content and uses were different from those familiar from western television histories.

One of the key differences was, of course, the close involvement of the Communist Party, and its attempt to use television as a means of propagating its political vision, and vilifying its opponents both at home and abroad. Yet, as Screening Socialism seeks to show, the distinctiveness of socialist television cannot be reduced to propaganda. As the preliminary results indicate, explicit propagandistic content was extremely rare; the vast majority of socialist television programmes was aimed at entertainment and education, and only obliquely tied to ideological messages. Furthermore, the tastes and preferences of socialist audiences were often at odds with the intended uses of the medium envisaged by the elites. Socialist television therefore could not function as a seamless conveyor-belt for the dissemination of ideological messages; rather, the forms and content broadcast through the small screen gradually turned into an arena of negotiation, however unequal in terms, between communist leaders, television producers and audiences.

To understand the distinctiveness of socialist television, the Screening Socialism project therefore looks beyond its political uses and elite understandings, and considers the role of television in everyday life, taking into account the views and practices of both television professionals and audiences. This perspective allows us to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between socialist societies, television, and the Party-state. Instead of a media culture suffocated under the weight of a totalitarian Party-state, what emerges from the analysis is a more dynamic reality that allowed for multiple forms of appropriation and negotiation of official media policies, ranging from wholehearted embrace to circumvention and even localised resistance. What this approach also shows is the importance of tacitly accepted conventions, such as those engrained in the routines of television viewing, or in the taken-for-granted ways of structuring television schedules. It is precisely these ‘banal’ aspects of socialist television that help us understand how socialist television could sustain the communist project while also, paradoxically, undermining its mobilizing potential.

More precisely, the key questions addressed by the project are:

• How did the political and cultural elites conceive of television and its social and political role, how did their attitudes change over time and how did they vary transnationally?
• What were the dominant narratives and values promoted by television programming, especially with regard to understandings of time and history, the relationship between the public and the private domain, as well as perceptions of national community and its position in the global socialist project? How did these narratives change over time, and vary transnationally?
• What was the role of television in everyday life, both with regard to the role of television in structuring everyday temporal routines and perceptions of time, as well as in shaping a sense of domestic space and its relationship with wider, public spaces, at both national and transnational level? How did this change over time, and was there any significant variation across countries in this respect?
• Finally, how is socialist television remembered today, and how are these memories shaped by both past and present experiences?

Beyond these scholarly aims and questions, Screening Socialism also seeks to popularise the knowledge about socialist television among a wider audience, and raise awareness of its importance as an integral part of European audiovisual heritage. In contrast to Western Europe, where television heritage has slowly gained in recognition and increasingly often features in museum exhibitions and dedicated archival collections, the vast body of material produced in Eastern Europe is often hidden from view and difficult to access. To encourage a greater public awareness of this heritage, Screening Socialism is making some of its findings openly available on its website (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/socialsciences/screening-socialism/). At the moment this includes selected visual materials, brief television histories, and publications to date. These materials will be updated as the project develops, and complemented by excerpts from life story interviews. The project’s facebook group, which currently counts over 500 members, is also used as a means of quick dissemination of interesting facts about socialist television and other materials related to the project (https://www.facebook.com/groups/screeningsocialism/). In addition, Screening Socialism also contributed to an exhibition on everyday life in socialist Yugoslavia, which opened at the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade, Serbia, in December 2014, and included several exhibits related to television (http://www.mij.rs/en/exhibitions/250/they-never-had-it-better.html). Over the coming years, the exhibition is scheduled to travel to neighbouring countries in South-eastern Europe.

Sources and Methods

The project is original and innovative not only in terms of the research problems it addresses, but also in terms of its research design, which relies on transnational comparison. This design will enable us to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the diversity of national television cultures in the region, and investigate the different configurations of internal and external factors that gave rise to particular kinds of television culture in each country. The analysis spans five socialist countries (East Germany, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia) which are characterised by different degrees of openness to East-West exchanges and different patterns of television infrastructure development – two of the key factors that are believed to shape socialist television cultures.

To address the questions outlined earlier, the following sources and methods are being used:

• Archival sources and secondary literature: the focus here is on television policies and elite attitudes to television from a variety of aspects, as well as on perceptions of audiences and audience research from the period.
• Television schedules: a sample of historical television schedules from each country is analysed using both quantitative and qualitative methods, investigating the proportions of domestically produced and imported content and well as the changing balance of information, education and entertainment and cultural programming.
• Television series: particular attention is paid to domestically produced television series, which achieved top ratings in all countries and are often vividly remembered by audiences to this day; a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used to investigate, among others, the changing depiction of personal and public lives, and on the narratives of the present and the past.
• Life history interviews: over 160 interviews have been conducted to date across seven post-socialist countries. These are being used to investigate past viewing habits and uses of television, but also to examine vernacular memories of everyday life with television in the post-socialist period.

Each of the four layers of data is examined first at national level and then comparatively, across the five countries. In the final step, the analysis will focus on identifying the constellations of factors that could help explain the patterns of difference and similarity and change over time.

Key Themes and Preliminary Findings

The key findings of the project can be mapped broadly onto two axes: spaces of television and times of television. The selected preliminary conclusions presented here are based on materials gathered from two countries only (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union) and will be revised in light of material from the remaining three countries as the project develops.

One of the spatial aspects explored in the project is the changing relationship between television, personal life and the public domain. After Stalin’s death in 1953, improved provision of consumer goods, increases in leisure time, and a rise in living standards were seen as a means for legitimising socialist rule. Television is often regarded as an inherently intimate medium, prone to personal narratives and modes of address, and tightly intertwined with the everyday rhythm of domestic life. As such, it may have functioned as an important conduit for this ‘privatisation’ of politics in the socialist world. Yet, as our analysis of serial television fiction shows, this intrinsically personal character of television sat uneasily with the ostensibly public, collectivist nature of the communist project. Although the tightening of political control over public space in the 1970s was initially accompanied by a shift from public to domestic settings and personal matters – evident in the production of series such as the Yugoslav Theatre in the House (Pozorište u kuči, TV Belgrade, 1972-1984) and the Soviet Day After Day (Den’ za dnëm, Gostelradio, 1971) – this ‘retreat’ into domesticity was short-lived. By the late 1970s, attention shifted back to public narratives and settings, such as the epic struggle against Nazi enemies on the battlefronts of World War Two, or the troubles and achievements of working life in socialist factories. It was only in the 1980s, when the Party hold over the media started to soften, that serial fiction turned away from the public realm, and rediscovered its fascination with the domestic and the personal.

These results raise intriguing questions about the relationship between television and the communist project, and the nature of television as such. The prevalence of public settings and narratives in domestic television series suggests that the cultural form of television, as known from the liberal democracies of the West, underwent some important modifications in the state socialist context. It would be worth investigating whether other intimate or personal aspects of television content mentioned in literature – its focus on non-verbal messages and personality, the illusion of intimacy between the TV personality and the spectator, and the temporal organisation of its programming – were likewise transformed, and appeared in a less personal form. This would suggest that we need to revise the perception of television as an inherently intimate medium, and acknowledge the existence of multiple forms of modern television cultures, anchored in competing visions of modern society.

Apart from being involved in the changing relationship between private and public spaces and practices, socialist television also played a role in shaping temporal routines and perceptions of time. In state socialist countries, regimes attempted to create a new sense of time, not only through constant mention of revolutionary progress, but also by overlaying the ‘bourgeois’ calendar, with its religious festivities such as Christmas and Easter, with a set of specifically socialist rituals and sacred dates. The project set out to understand the role of television both in commemorating these dates and also helping to popularise this sense of revolutionary time. Did socialist television succeed in synchronizing daily lives with the ongoing march towards the radiant communist future? What notions of time and narratives of the past and present did popular television programmes foster, and how were these affected by the wider social context?

Our preliminary results indicate that socialist television, perhaps more than any other socialist mass medium, became an integral element of daily, weekly and annual routines. Especially during festive occasions – such as the festivities associates with celebrating the secular movement of time (the New Year) or commemorating the glorious achievements of the past (e.g. the Day of the Republic in Yugoslavia, Victory Day in the Soviet Union) – the distinctly socialist rhythms of television time became very pronounced, functioning as reminders of the shared progress towards a communist future. As evident from our interviews, audiences eagerly participated in these activities, yet focused less on revolutionary progress towards the future and more on the comforting sense of continuity that these rituals provided. As one Russian interviewee born in 1962 said of New Year TV: ‘The family is still here; a year has passed. Nobody has … disappeared, died. Everything’s fine.’ This soothing sense of familiarity, attached to the daily, weekly and annual rhythms of television programming, seemed to undermine a sense of active participation in the communist project. Paradoxically, while synchronizing their daily life with the ongoing march towards a radiant communist future, television also enabled socialist citizens to disconnect from communist ideas.

Dr Sabina Mihelj

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