When Nikita Khrushchev visited Hollywood in 1959 only to be
scandalized by a group of scantily clad actresses, his message was
blunt: Soviet culture would soon consign the mass culture of the
West, epitomized by Hollywood, to the "dustbin of history." In
Moscow Prime Time, a portrait of the Soviet broadcasting and film
industries and of everyday Soviet consumers from the end of World
War II through the 1970s, Kristin Roth-Ey shows us how and why
Khrushchev's ambitious vision ultimately failed to materialize.
The USSR surged full force into the modern media age after World
War II, building cultural infrastructures and audiences that were
among the world's largest. Soviet people were enthusiastic radio
listeners, TV watchers, and moviegoers, and the great bulk of what
they were consuming was not the dissident culture that made
headlines in the West, but orthodox, made-in-the-USSR content.
This, then, was Soviet culture's real prime time and a major
achievement for a regime that had long touted easy, everyday access
to a socialist cultural experience as a birthright. Yet Soviet
success also brought complex and unintended consequences.
Emphasizing such factors as the rise of the single-family
household and of a more sophisticated consumer culture, the long
reach and seductive influence of foreign media, and the workings of
professional pride and raw ambition in the media industries,
Roth-Ey shows a Soviet media empire transformed from within in the
postwar era. The result, she finds, was something dynamic and
volatile: a new Soviet culture, with its center of gravity shifted
from the lecture hall to the living room, and a new brand of
cultural experience, at once personal, immediate, and eclectic a
new Soviet culture increasingly similar, in fact, to that of its
self-defined enemy, the mass culture of the West. By the 1970s, the
Soviet media empire, stretching far beyond its founders' wildest
dreams, was busily undermining the very promise of a unique Soviet
culture and visibly losing the cultural cold war. Moscow Prime Time
is the first book to untangle the paradoxes of Soviet success and
failure in the postwar media age."
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!