On January 1, 1968, Central Television aired the first broadcast of a new evening news program titled “Time” [Vremia]. The chief editor of Central Television’s news desk, Nikolai Biriukov, appeared at the beginning of the broadcast to explain the new program’s name. “We named this program Time,” he told viewers, “because we want it to be as dynamic, interesting, and saturated as our time.”^[1] In these public remarks Biriukov did not explain which “time” needed to seem more dynamic, or why, or how a new television evening news show would accomplish that. Within Central Television and among a small circle of current and former television workers and critics writing in the press, however, Vremia was understood as an urgent attempt to counter the threat of Western radio broadcasting with a compellingly visual, informative, and exciting Soviet news program that could compete directly with the foreign “voices” for Soviet audiences.^[2] The program’s key task was to convince viewers of the superiority of the Soviet way of life, something that previous television news programs had failed to do precisely because they were boring: the “time” that needed to appear more interesting, saturated, and dynamic was that of the Soviet present. As they proposed solutions to the problem of static, dull domestic news on television, Central Television’s editors, critics, and supervisors in the Central Committee were faced with a number of larger practical and ideological problems and conflicting objectives. Some of these can be gathered, I would like to suggest, under the rubric of what might be called the program’s search for a chronotope.^[3]
Mikhail Bakhtin defined the “chronotope” (literally “time space”) as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.”^[4] Time and space are intrinsically connected outside of literature as well; for Bakhtin, the literary chronotope was the outcome of a long process of assimilation of “real historical time and space” into literature.^[5] What distinguished “actual historical chronotopes” from “literary artistic ones” was the latter’s consistency and unity. “In the literary artistic chronotope,” Bakhtin asserted, “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole.”^[6] For Bakhtin, the chronotope was essential to the artistic effectiveness of narrative. By making time “palpable and visible,” the chronotope, he wrote, “makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins.” The chronotope brings the novel to life, animating it with meaning.^[7]
As the rhetoric that accompanied Vremia’s early months reveals, it was precisely this carefully thought-out, unified representation of Soviet space and time that Vremia was meant to provide. The new show was frequently described in figurative language that blended spatial and temporal metaphors. Vremia was to be a “panorama” of “time” or of “events,” in which “excursions… from New York to Donetsk” and “brief visits to the builders of a gas pipeline and to film studios,” were all “subordinated to a unified directorial vision, a single higher task.”^[8] Another critic called the new show a “television equivalent of the day…in which our very epoch speaks in the language of facts and events.”^[9] The program’s executives in Central Television’s News Desk [Glavnaia redaktsiia informatsionnykh programm] and in the Central Committee, as well as a group of engaged critics in the press, understood the problems of Soviet news in terms of the latter’s representation of Soviet space and time. The solutions were likewise spatial and temporal. Most important, they sought to bring Soviet domestic television news to life, to set it in motion, just as Bakhtin’s chronotope brings literary narratives to life, makes them concrete, and gives voice and meaning to events. As Biriukov told a 1966 conference of radio and television workers on the “problems of television and radio news,” Soviet domestic news should continue to feature “the Soviet person,” but portray him “not statically, but dynamically,” creating “not a chain of frozen portraits, but a living reflection of our accomplishments and the people who achieved them.”^[10]
Yet as they struggled to identify the right chronotope for Soviet life on Vremia, Central Television’s news desk faced a number of contradictory imperatives. As a key medium for both Cold War counterpropaganda and for the mobilization of the population toward greater economic productivity, the program was to represent Soviet life as dynamic and modern, yet predictable and stable; to portray the entire Soviet Union as uniformly developed (and thus synchronous), while mobilizing remote viewers in “backward” provinces to construct the future that was visible in central cities (an asynchronous account of Soviet space); and, finally, to ensure that life in the regions and national republics was reflected on Vremia as part of the modern Soviet present while using the program to inculcate a love of Moscow as the symbolic center of Soviet life and the future of all Soviet cities. Likewise, Central Television’s producers and censors could draw, by the late 1960s, on a number of precedents from the past 50 years of Soviet cinematography, Soviet journalism, and the example of Western television news, to name only a few. In other words, the tools, maps, and preexisting “chronotopes” of Soviet life on which Soviet television journalists, critics, and administrators could base their work were also multiple and conflictual, reflecting larger disagreements about where precisely the Soviet Union was on its teleological path toward communism, and what that point on the timeline meant for the relationship between center and periphery in the late Soviet cultural system.^[11]
Far more extensive research, including in regional television archives, would be required to extend existing work on the (under)representation of non-Slavic Soviet regions and national republics on Vremia during the mid-1980s back into the late 1960s and 1970s, or to give a full account of the relationship between local and central broadcasting in the USSR.^[12] Instead, this essay offers only a preliminary sketch of a handful of the practical and ideological problems and contradictions facing the producers of one of the most important media of Soviet “authoritative discourse” as they addressed the problem of representing Soviet reality spatially and temporally.^[13] While recent arguments by Alexei Yurchak and others have focused primarily on the formalization of Soviet ideological language, and to a lesser extent its imagery, this essay suggests the importance of attending to the medium that delivered much of that language.^[14] The form, as well as the content, of Soviet television news was problematic, controversial, and frequently debated internally and in the press; its reproduction cannot be described as entirely formalized. Moreover, given the relative ineffectiveness (and intermittence) of jamming and the exposure of border areas to foreign radio broadcasts meant that the Communist Party did not have a monopoly on the production of news consumed on Soviet territory.^[15] Changes in Soviet domestic news during this period were reflected in the creation of new shows and cancellation of old ones, in the shows’ formal qualities (their speed, use of vocal narration or onscreen journalists, camera conventions, and their changing sign-on and musical accompaniment), and, to a lesser extent, their textual content. Although a catalog of these formal changes to Vremia and other television news shows over the course of the 1960s and 1970s is beyond the scope of this essay, I hope, by focusing on the many practical and ideological problems that the production of domestic television news raised, to suggest how highly contingent and political the production of Central Television’s news programming often was.

SPACE AND TIME ON SOVIET TELEVISION NEWS BEFORE “VREMIA”

The particular problem of identifying a chronotope for journalistic reflections of Soviet reality was, of course, not new in January 1968, when Vremia first aired. Indeed, Vremia in 1968 was, quite self-consciously, the next in a long series of efforts—from Aleksandr Medvedkin’s Kino-poezd (Cinema Train), to Maxim Gorky’s 1935 book Den’ mira (A Day of the World), to Aleksei Adzhubei’s 1961 version of Den’ mira—to create new media maps of Soviet space and time for the consumption of both Soviet people and professional journalists and propagandists.^[16] Like their counterparts in many other spheres of Soviet cultural life during Khrushchev’s thaw, television workers could and did draw upon artistic movements from the Soviet past, particularly the cinematography of the 1920s and early 1930s.^[17] Most proximately, however, the creation of Vremia was both a continuation and critique of trends in Soviet television journalism during the thaw.
In the mid-1950s, Moscow’s Central Television Studio began a significant expansion of its staff and resources, one that coincided with the broader “thaw” in Soviet cultural life after Stalin’s death.^[18] Beginning in the second half of the 1950s, young, enthusiastic, and highly educated new television staff with backgrounds in radio but also film, theater, philosophy, and other fields, together with sympathetic critics among the artistic intelligentsia, began to articulate a set of claims about television’s nature as a medium, focusing particularly on its liveness and its intimate setting in the home. These formal features of the medium, they argued, gave television the ability to virtually transport viewers instantly across vast spaces, while also granting them a new kind of sight that allowed for far greater intimacy and penetration into the inner thoughts and feelings of people on screen.^[19] For this group, television was a new medium for a new era, an essential tool for de-Stalinization and the revitalization of the socialist project.^[20] In the extensive memoir literature about late 1950s Soviet television that this cohort of early television workers has produced, two kinds of programs are mentioned most frequently as exemplifying the kind of television programming they sought to create. The first was live reports from the scenes of events—the first live television broadcasts from factories, and especially the broadcasts from the 1957 World Youth Festival and the live coverage of Gagarin’s April 1961 return to Moscow after his successful space flight. The second is the appearance on air of particular individuals, either television’s famous diktory, the mostly female corps of on-camera television staff who read the news and acted as hosts and announcers of other programs, or prominent members of the revitalized thaw intelligentsia, likewise appearing as hosts on the air or conversing directly with viewers. These two forms of television broadcasting entailed, however, two very different temporal-spatial models that were potentially in tension with one another: the first facilitated the instantaneous virtual transportation of widely dispersed viewers to the scene of events, the second their deeper penetration into the thoughts, feelings, and worldview of model individuals.
For a variety of technical and political reasons, the latter predominated in Central Television’s news programming in the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s.^[21] Central Television’s main news program before 1968, Television News [Televizionnye novosti], broadcast at the beginning and end of each evening’s schedule, did not include many remote broadcasts or extensive photographic illustrations—it was frequently criticized for simply imitating the radio news program, Latest News [Poslednye izvestiia].^[22] A more innovative, weekly Soviet television news program, News Relay [Estafeta novostei], created in 1961 and hosted by the radio journalist Iurii Fokin, focused very heavily on facilitating direct contact between viewers at home and model individuals, including Fokin himself and his friends among the Moscow cultural intelligentsia, rather than on the experience of virtual, visual movement around the Soviet Union or the world.^[23]
By the mid-1960s, however, changing political, social, and international conditions meant that both the static, radio-like Television News and the lengthy, intimate conversations with journalists and intellectuals on News Relay came under intense criticism, for being boring, slow, and failing to compete effectively with foreign radio news broadcasts. These were the subject of increasing anxiety in the mid-1960s, for several reasons: the cessation of jamming of foreign broadcasts in 1963, the rejection of Khrushchev’s millenarian confidence about the imminent triumph of the socialist system, and the belief that a modern, technology-based economy required an educated and informed citizenry.^[24] Most important, thanks in part to the revival of Soviet sociology, Soviet journalists and Party officials were aware of dissatisfaction among increasingly educated and demanding Soviet viewers about the relevance and timeliness of Soviet radio and television news.^[25]
By the mid-1960s, a number of former television workers and current television executive editors [glavnye redaktory] began calling for a new kind of television news that would be not only “saturated” [nasyshchennyi] with information but also “dynamic” [dinamichnyi] and “timely” [operativnyi]—characterized by a sense of movement and a clear connection to the present moment.^[26] This desire for dynamism and movement in television news’ portrayal of Soviet life was closely linked to the sense that television news’ existing content in the mid-1960s was strangely and problematically timeless. Internal and external critics remarked that individual stories could not be distinguished from one another, and seemed to bear no particular connection to the day or even year in which they were broadcast.^[27] This created a marked and unflattering contrast between domestic and foreign news coverage within any single Central Television news broadcast: juxtaposed with foreign events, Soviet life appeared static and dull. In a 1967 journal article, a former television director turned critic, Sergei Muratov, described “endless shots of meetings, openings, closings, award ceremonies, ribbon-cuttings, factory machinery, and applauding people… Uniform shots and uniform phrases, astonishingly similar to one another. Not long ago,” he noted, the program’s anchors had read “a piece about one factory while showing footage of another, and they didn’t notice the mistake until after the broadcast.”^[28] This kind of slip-up was extremely dangerous, he warned. Television news “supposedly gives us a panorama of time,” but instead “creates in the viewer a sense of the boringness of this time. Do we always understand,” he asked, “the responsibility of television at that moment, when the viewer goes up to his television set and, with chagrin, turns off THE PRESENT DAY?” [capitalized in the original].^[29]
In other words, what Soviet television news needed in order to compete with foreign radio broadcasting was to become liquid, to borrow Zygmunt Bauman’s metaphor. Bauman uses the metaphor of liquidity to describe what he sees as a second phase of modernity that has followed the high modernism of the first half of the twentieth century, in which revolutionary social movements sought to destroy the foundations of the old order so as to construct a new, perfect and permanent, foundation for social and political life: melting the solids in order to forge new ones, in Bauman’s (really Marx’s) phrase.^[30] “Liquid modernity,” by contrast, is characterized by constant flux, movement, and instantaneity. As Bauman explains, this is not to suggest that modernity was not, from its beginnings, about the experience of rapid movement, change, and fluidity. Indeed, this aesthetic interest in liquidity, movement, horizontality, and so on, has a long history in Soviet culture.^[31]
Yet Bauman’s notion entails something beyond the experience of rapid movement through decentered space that Soviet culture, in the 1920s and early 1930s in particular, fostered and celebrated. When Medvedkin’s kino-poezd showed a film about a successful collective farm to a collective farm in another region, it was not important whether the filmed events had taken place a week before or the previous year. The same cannot be said for Vremia’s producers, whose anxiety about timeliness and relevance were driven by the rapid delivery and temporal specificity of foreign radio news. Baumann’s metaphor is quite apt for describing the predicament of Vremia’s producers, since one of the key distinctions he makes between “solid” and “liquid” modernities was precisely the importance of spatial and temporal specificity in describing them. “Solids have clear spatial dimensions but neutralize the impact, and thus downgrade the importance, of time,” Bauman writes.^[32]
In a sense, solids cancel time; for liquids, on the contrary, it is mostly time that matters. When describing solids, one may ignore time altogether; in describing fluids, to leave time out of [the] account would be a grievous mistake. Descriptions of fluids are all snapshots, and they need a date at the bottom of the picture.^[33]
This was precisely the problem of Soviet domestic news, before and after Vremia: as internal and press critics remarked, domestic news stories frequently lacked any meaningful connection to the particular day, or even year in which they were broadcast; a report from a factory in one city looked astonishingly like one from a different city. How could Soviet domestic news be made to appear more dynamic, more liquid, and thus more specific, more timely, more relevant? Vremia’s launch on January 1, 1968, offered one model of how Soviet television news might be made “dynamic”—it would create a decentered and revolutionized map of Soviet territory, one characterized by rapid motion through space and a relative lack of hierarchy in the arrangement of individual stories.
As I suggested above, this ambition was not new to Soviet culture, but Vremia was also much more ambitious than an earlier, thaw-era attempt to create a compelling, dynamic visual representation of Soviet human and physical geography and its place in the world, Adzhubei’s 1961 edition of the journalistic almanac, Den’ mira. Where Den’ mira was an expensive book with a print run of only a few hundred copies, Vremia sought to provide a similarly broad, yet highly ordered, portrait of every day, for an audience of millions.^[34] What is more, as we will see, Vremia reflected the tension between providing coverage of Soviet and world news that was dynamic and could compete with the brevity and speed of foreign radio news, and one that was panoramic and clearly ordered, like that displayed for emulation in the 1961 Den’ mira. As the remainder of this essay will suggest, the search for a chronotope for Vremia uncovered a series of related tensions concerning the spatial and temporal nature of Soviet modernity and its relationship to the wider world.

PANORAMA VS. KALEIDOSCOPE

Regardless of its place in a long series of Soviet artistic movements focusing on movement and horizontality, in its first few months on air, Vremia represented a radical change to the aesthetics of Soviet television news. The most notable difference was the length of most reports—most information in the show’s early months was delivered in extremely brief segments between 15 and 30 seconds in length, versus story lengths of as much as 5–7 minutes or more on previous Soviet television news programs. Most of those brief seconds were taken up by silent film, video, or photographic illustrations, of which Vremia featured far more than its predecessors. Shorter stories created the experience of speed and motion, as the show leapt from topic to topic and place to place. This tactic was in explicit imitation of European and American television news formats: short story lengths and the use of rapid cuts between stories in lieu of lengthy transitional shots were one of the aspects of the BBC evening television news that Central Television news editors had identified as a source of visual dynamism.^[35] Not only was information delivered rapid-fire and primarily visually, but the unifying presence of the onscreen newsreader was gone, replaced by only a voiceover. One item in February 1968 consisted of a voiceover announcing that “the Moscow Polar Bears Club has opened its season,” followed by 10 seconds of video of the swimmers set to music.^[36]
One of Vremia’s central features was the inclusion of multiple brief (one- to two-minute) live reports from cities across the Soviet Union in every broadcast, a significant technical feat. Here too, explanatory text and transitions were cut to the barest minimum, each piece prefaced with only an image of the city with its name, rather than a verbal explanation by a newsreader. These live broadcasts had been a part of previous news programs, but never with such frequency: Central Television’s network in 1968 included 50 cities, and each broadcast was to include one- to two-minute live reports from four or five different cities.^[37]
The effect for many viewers, however, was disorientation. People wrote in to complain that the program was incomprehensible at its current speed, and contrasted the program’s intended “panorama” with another image, one intended to suggest disorganization and confusion: the kaleidoscope. As one N. Glagolev from Yaroslavl’ observed, “The general approach isn’t bad. But it’s important to avoid the current incredible kaleidoscope of reports, which prevents [the viewer from] concentrating—you need less, but better-delivered news.”^[38] Critics agreed that the experience of watching Vremia was too chaotic. The show’s attempts to create exciting domestic news by emphasizing speed and motion had undermined the program’s other key objective—conveying a single, unified message about the superiority of the Soviet system. Vremia’s viewers in the Kremlin particularly objected to the show’s relatively fluid, decentered portrayal of Soviet life. One early broadcast came under immediate criticism from the Central Committee for failing to place items in the broadcast in an order that conveyed their relative importance. The head of the Central Committee section on Radio and Television, Pavel Moskovskii, attended a Television and Radio Committee Party conference in January 1968 in order to reprimand Vremia’s producers. “On January 8,” he charged “you reported on the arrival of the French [Foreign] Minister Debré, on dried strawberries, on an incubator for fish, and on a trip to Cairo by a delegation led by Comrade Mazurov. Reported on them, that is, in exactly that order.”^[39] But critics in the press were no more forgiving, and were also unwilling to grant that Vremia’s new speed had really succeeded in making Soviet domestic news interesting. Like the viewer Glagolev, they too compared the program to a kaleidoscope.^[40] Writing in Soviet Radio and Television, N. Ivanovskaia observed that the arrangement of news items within a given broadcast “often appears chaotic, undisciplined” [nestroinyi]. “For the moment,” she continued “it seems that Vremia does not live up to its founding principles: its dynamism sometimes turns into superficiality, covering many themes becomes irreconcilable with depth, and as for interest, it’s hard to find in the mass of similar news items.”^[41] Speed was not dynamism, and rapid, visual movement around Soviet space had not provided the animating chronotope Vremia’s producers sought. The larger problem, however, lay with the uncertainty surrounding the nature of the Soviet present, and its corresponding spatial-temporal representation. Speed and movement seemed not entirely consonant with communicating a single, clear narrative about Soviet life; the program’s censors in the Central Committee were uncomfortable with an account of Soviet space that was not centered in the capital.
The panorama offers a more profoundly ordered map of space than the kaleidoscope, which makes order, pattern, and beauty only a trick of mirrors that masks a fundamental randomness. Panoramas are, however, a very poor fit for capturing the constant flux of “liquid modernity.” The panorama offers a still image, rather than a moving or changeable one—only the viewer’s gaze is mobile across vast expanses of space, usually perceived from an elevation. As an artistic and, later, photographic genre of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the panorama was closely tied to both national and imperial projects, giving the populations of a particular nation or city “a visual means of apprehending that which was most vital to itself,” and, when distant lands and peoples were their subject, facilitating spectators’ virtual, instantaneous travel within a visually unified imperial space.^[42] It was a fitting metaphor for a show that was supposed to illustrate a single thesis with each broadcast, presenting a world clearly ordered into two camps, divided by their different historical trajectories (the “time” in “panorama of time”).^[43]
With the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the arrival, in April 1970, after almost two years of administrative upheaval at Central Television, of Sergei Lapin as chair of the State Television and Radio Committee, Vremia became, as would be expected, much more “panoramic.” In his first years, Lapin began to more vigourously pursue the centralization of the Soviet television system, elevating Vremia as its most important show; he likewise remade Vremia in ways that reaffirmed Moscow even more powerfully as the center of Soviet space. Nonetheless, the show’s important role as Cold War counterpropaganda meant that conveying the “dynamism” of Soviet life (and, as we shall see, fostering it in the real Soviet society Vremia was to reflect) remained a high priority and a vexing problem.

(RE)CENTERING THE TELEVISION NETWORK

One of Lapin’s first tasks was to resolve some ambiguities about the “actual historical” chronotope of Central Television’s network. “Vremia” had been intended, since its creation, to serve as the centerpiece of an expanded, All-Union version of Central Television’s first channel, Channel 1. The extension of Channel 1’s signal across Soviet territory was made possible by the expansion of the radio relay and cable network and the arrival of satellite broadcasting in the second half of the 1960s.^[44] As Kristin Roth-Ey has shown, however, investment from the center had initially been outpaced by the innovation and activism of local enthusiasts who built semi-sanctioned or unsanctioned local broadcasting stations.^[45] Gradually, over the course of the 1960s, most rogue local stations were pressured into closing, and official ones coaxed into reducing their local broadcast hours by both Moscow and Republic-level broadcasters that saw Moscow’s Central Television as a source of programming superior to that of unsophisticated and resource-poor local stations.^[46]
With the arrival of Central Television in their areas, regional and republican studios in the Gosteleradio network were also expected to cut their own programming dramatically, to just a couple of hours a day or less in most cases. In practice, however, this process was quite bumpy: in the late 1960s and early 1970s many local studios continued to broadcast their own programming over Moscow’s.^[47] Although this was presumably sometimes intentional and political, it may also have been, as Central Television’s administrators suggested in internal meetings, because local broadcast plans had not been changed to reflect the arrival of Central Television. Still governed by their old plans, local studios were technically obliged to broadcast more hours of their own programming than Central Television’s feed allotted them.^[48]
By the early 1970s, however, we see a concerted effort by the State Television and Radio Committee to enforce the broadcast of Central Television by local and regional studios. Even then, however, the creation of a single All-Union broadcast channel was a political question in a state that sought to foster the ethnic and linguistic distinctiveness of its regions. In December 1971, Gosteleradio’s leadership discussed the question of how vigorously to enforce the broadcast of Channel 1 by local studios. “On the one hand,” the meeting’s speaker began, “it seems like everything is clear—there must be an All-Union channel of Central Television.” At a conference the previous spring, the meeting’s speaker reminded the group, all of the regional and republican television and radio committee chairs had been “obliged” [vynuzhdeny] to affirm this principle along with several members of the Politburo who were present.^[49] Summarizing the content of this “principle,” the speaker continued: “The All-Union channel of Central Television must be a Russian-language program, unified, indivisible [edinaia, nedelimaia] and it must reach everywhere as the main television channel.” At the same time, he observed, the problem was not so simple. There were different technical levels among local stations, and different languages—it was therefore necessary, he suggested, to approach each region and republic separately.

“We must not infringe on [ushchemliat’] programs in national languages, we must not come out against the fact that the Georgians show a lot of movies—we can’t constantly replace them with Russian TV shows. In a word, in the 50th anniversary year of the Soviet Union, we must display the familiar delicacy [delikatnost’] and care.”

Of course, the speaker continued, it was important to “limit the willfulness” [samovol’stvo] of the local studios, but this should be done tactfully. Gosteleradio should “emphasize the fact that Moscow’s Channel 1 was important not because ‘it is Moscow and we are Russian,’” but because having both central and local coverage of similar material was a waste of resources.^[50] Most important, he stressed, effort could be focused on certain programs that were not to be considered optional. The most important of these, the speaker emphasized, was Vremia.^[51]
The fact that it was impolitic and impractical to enforce the broadcast of all of Central Television’s content in the national republics only heightened Vremia’s importance as an official representation of the spatial and temporal relations between Soviet periphery and center. Yet as we will see, the show’s several objectives for both representing and reshaping Soviet space (and Moscow’s place within it) entailed multiple temporal and spatial maps of Soviet space, not all of which fit together easily.

PROMOTING LOVE OF MOSCOW AS BOTH CENTER AND FUTURE

As Lapin’s Central Television worked to ensure the broadcast of Vremia across Soviet space, it also sought to reshape the program to elevate Moscow’s role as the symbolic center of Soviet life. In this sense, Vremia was only a microcosm of Central Television’s “unchanging orientation” toward Moscow as “our capital… the largest proletarian center, the largest scientific center, site of the greatest concentration of institutions of culture, educational institutions, and arts,” as Lapin put it in a November 1972 meeting.^[52] Central Television’s broadcast day had always begun with the words “Moscow speaks and shows” [Govorit i pokazyvaet Moskva], but this focus of all of Central Television’s content on Moscow as the center of Soviet life was particularly important, Lapin noted, in the lead-up to the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the Soviet Union. The holiday was celebrated on Central Television by a series of hour-long films about each national republic and autonomous republic.^[53] “It’s no coincidence,” he continued, “that in the film about Ukraine, if you recall, you saw Kiev and Moscow, Moscow and Kiev. Just recently,” he noted, “the past Friday, the film on Belorussia was on, and it ended [with a scene] on Red Square.” And of course, Lapin added, this reflected a deeper meaning about “the role of our capital and… our obligation to promote love of the Motherland and love of Moscow.”^[54]
On Vremia this focus on promoting “love of Moscow” took several forms, including reaffirmation of the proper hierarchical order of stories, in which the news always began with the (usually Moscow-based) activities of the country’s highest leadership. (This feature of the news had, of course, never really disappeared, even during the program’s “kaleidoscopic” first six months.) Vremia also sought to promote, in collaboration with the Moscow Party organization, Moscow-region factories and farms as examples of the city’s status as the “most advanced” socialist city, the site of the realization of a Soviet future (that might or might not be the future of every Soviet city, regardless of the national and ethnic makeup of its population).^[55]
Perhaps the most important way in which Vremia sought to promote Moscow as the temporal and spatial center of Soviet life was in its visual content. In addition to the famous white clock face on a blue ground ticking off the minute before the show’s 9 pm (Moscow time) airtime, Vremia’s opening and closing moments were illustrated with images of Moscow. Under Lapin, moreover, the program’s set was redesigned: a blue screen onto which images or word were projected replaced an outdated physical set that resembled, as one internal critic charged, the interior of a “village club” and featured a clock in the background that was not always set to the right time.^[56] Most often, the backdrop was a photograph of the place in which news was taking place; at the beginning of the broadcast, the image was usually of the Kremlin’s towers. Lapin emphasized the importance of these backdrop images as a key feature of the program: “these backdrops would seem to be just a formality,” he told a meeting of Central Television’s Party activists, but they are watched by millions and millions of people in the Far East, in the Urals, in Central Asia… and they create the image of our capital.”^[57]
Given his sense of the importance of these images of Moscow, it is not surprising that Lapin altered the ways Moscow was represented on Vremia. Prior to his arrival, the show’s credits had aired to the accompaniment of street scenes of Moscow, featuring all the activity and movement of bustling pedestrians and automobile traffic. In 1974, this closing footage of regular Muscovites in motion through the city’s famous landscape was apparently replaced by still images of the Kremlin, a change about which viewers complained.^[58] Lapin preferred to represent the capital’s spaces not horizontally, but vertically, in a visual language closer to that of the late 1930s, rather than the 1920s. When Brezhnev visited Paris in 1971, Lapin noted a year later, Central Television had broadcast French-produced television films about Paris, many of which featured aerial views of the city shot from helicopters.^[59] Lapin observed that Central Television did not have any aerial footage of Moscow, and asked the Moscow Party Committee for assistance in gaining the needed permissions for filming in Moscow’s tightly controlled airspace.
Lapin’s concern about changing the ways that Moscow appeared in the program’s backdrops and credits was more complex than it might appear, however. The shift from horizontal, mobile, decentered representations of Moscow (the footage of pedestrians in the show’s credits in its early years) to vertical, aerial ones would initially appear to simply replay the cultural transformations of the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, we see a phenomenon that was typical of television’s temporal and spatial politics in the early 1970s: a persistent confusion between helping viewers see what was genuinely new about the immediate moment (a more liquid, time- and place-specified account of Soviet modernity) and granting them a new view of the present that would reveal its true and timeless nature, a version of what avant-garde artists of the 1920s had called “new vision” [novoe zrenie].^[60] Lapin’s comments about why it was necessary to improve the images of Moscow on Vremia and other shows in 1972, and why aerial views were the right solution, suggest how this worked. “The backdrops [photographs] of Moscow that we often show on television programs are sometimes boring [serye or ‘gray’] and uninteresting. We don’t always capture new changes [peremeny] that are taking place in Moscow, and yet they are of colossal importance.” The notion of “capturing” the city’s recent changes suggests the fluidity and motion of the city’s landscape, and the need to focus on that which is recent and specific, rather than eternal. The solution Lapin proposed however, was something else entirely—not allowing viewers to see what was new in Moscow, but causing them to see Moscow in a new way. There had been one recent moment when TV viewers had seen Moscow from above—not via aerial film footage but from the Kremlin’s towers and the roof of GUM, looking down on the 1972 November seventh holiday parade on Red Square. Lapin cited this as an example of how aerial views of Moscow affected viewers. “We all somehow saw Moscow anew [my vse uvideli kak-to Moskvu po-novomu], and even more beautiful.”^[61] Seeing that which is new, and seeing things anew are quite different, however. Over time, focusing on content that aimed to help viewers see “anew” emerged as an easier path for Vremia’s producers and censors, in light of the technical, political, and ideological constraints on Soviet domestic television news production. One important source of these constraints was the technical challenges of broadcasting a television news program across 11 time zones, and the reception of the program by viewers in local areas.

ASYNCHRONOUS RECEPTION

The experience of watching Central Television in the Soviet Union’s eastern time zones constantly belied the synchronicity of Soviet space, frustrating viewers with television’s failure to grant them the freedom of movement and equality of opportunity that it seemed to promise. In the first half of the 1970s, Central Television offered only three time-shifted broadcasts, each of which had to cover three or four time zones, which meant that broadcast times for programs like Vremia were often inconveniently early or late.^[62] Vremia was not on at all on Mondays and Tuesdays in the areas reached by satellite because Orbita did not broadcast on those days prior to 1975.^[63] Worse still, Moscow was inconveniently “behind” much of Soviet territory in time, and Central Television initially decided not to create special editions of Vremia for viewers in other regions. As a result, viewers in the Far East and Siberia complained of having to watch rebroadcasts of Vremia that had aired in Moscow the previous night.^[64] Very popular broadcasts, such as live sporting events, were frequently cut off if they ran after midnight, the hour at which many local television stations ceased broadcasting altogether. One I. N. Pozdneev in Irkutsk wrote to Central Television to complain after the final match for the 1973 USSR football championship was cut off in mid-play: “why does the Molniia satellite orbit, and [why do we have] the most complicated [television] system at work,” he asked, “if they’re going to send us back into the pre-television stone ages at moments like this?”^[65] As Pozdneev’s temporalized language suggests, Soviet television’s failure to live up to its promises of instantaneity amounted to a failure to be modern; these practices stood, of course, in striking contrast to the speed and late hours of foreign radio news broadcasts.
The experience of everyday life in most smaller cities and villages raised similar problems for Central Television’s presentation of “that which was new,” and undermined Vremia’s attempts to represent Soviet life as evenly developed, and thus synchronous. In most of the USSR, where economic circumstances and the availability of consumer goods did not match those described on the television news, viewers complained of the unrealistic, “immodest” representations of Soviet life on the program.^[66] Local television producers, too, wondered whether it was acceptable to make programs featuring prominent local workers if their work still involved manual labor.^[67] Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Soviet media tried to avoid calling attention to the privileged status of Moscow and Central Television. Anna Shatilova, who worked as an anchorwoman on Vremia, remembers that when she was finally, after many years, given permission to wear the glasses she needed on air, she received thousands of letters containing prescriptions and asking for help in obtaining frames and lenses.^[68]

SEEING THE REGIONS ANEW

A second set of problems facing Vremia as it sought to make dynamic, exciting domestic TV news concerned the production of news about life beyond Moscow. Lapin’s insistence on the central place of Moscow on Vremia did not entail any rejection of covering the regions. In the early 1970s, the television network, like that of documentary film and newsreels before it, continued to be seen as a force for cultural and geographical integration that needed to represent regional and non-Russian communities in order to reach them. Soviet documentary filmmakers of the 1920s had proposed that local populations would be more affected by seeing recognizable people and places; this was doubly important during the Cold War, when audiences in remote Soviet lands had become directly accessible to foreign radio broadcasters.^[69] In effect, Vremia’s representations of Soviet time-space were characterized by what Katerina Clark has called the “modal schizophrenia” of Soviet culture.^[70] Like the documentary filmmakers’ special train cars that crossed Soviet territory in the 1920s and 1930s showing villagers films of model people and places drawn from comparable regions, Vremia sought to both demonstrate the arrival of the future socialist society and to produce that society by mobilizing viewers to construct it in their own towns and cities. Vremia’s tradition of remote live broadcasts continued—they were still seen as an important form of virtual travel around Soviet territory, one that would demonstrate the dispersal of Soviet accomplishments across the Union.^[71] In 1975, the chief editor of the Central Television News Division, Leonid Khataevich, a former radio journalist, reported that Lapin had praised the division’s recent efforts to increase these live broadcasts, which “make Soviet people almost participants [kak by uchastnikami] in the most important events, [those that] bear witness to the enormous work of the Party’s Central Committee, the Politburo of the Central Committee, and Leonid Brezhnev personally.^[72]
Alongside the system of live transmissions from local studios, Central Television’s News desk began, in the early 1970s, to establish a system where the burden of producing television news about people and places outside Moscow’s vicinity was shifted onto local studios, rather than depending, as it had previously, on Central Television’s own domestic correspondent network, which was never fully developed, or on infrequent expeditions by Central Television production teams.^[73] Beginning in 1971, Central Television began to more closely coordinate the production of news content for Vremia with local studios. By 1973, a system was in place whereby each studio would submit an annual plan for the total number of hours of news programming it would provide to Central Television for broadcast on Vremia and other news shows, followed by monthly plans for the number of individual stories, their topics, and how long they would take to prepare.^[74]
However, this attempt to facilitate viewers’ virtual travel around Soviet space continued to encounter two major problems. First, the geographic distribution of the news items that this system produced was very uneven—the polar opposite of Central Television’s 1971 documentary film series on the fiftieth anniversary of the USSR, in which each Union republic produced an hour-long film, and each autonomous republic a half-hour long one. The total hours of programming planned for each national republic were based on the size and technical resources of the studio and its ability to produce Russian-language content.^[75] Republic television and radio committees also determined their own plan totals in negotiation with Gosteleradio. Thus, according to examples given in one 1973 report, there was the following strikingly uneven proportion of news submitted by the following republican television and radio committees to Central Television: Latvian SSR, 1.5 hours; Uzbek, Georgian, Armenian, and Moldavian SSRs, (each) 5 hours; Ukrainian SSR, 24 hours; Belorussian SSR, 9 hours; and Kazakh SSR, 17.8 hours.^[76] This surprisingly unequal coverage—in one 1969 document, a news-division editor pointed out that Turkmenistan had never appeared on Central Television—was worsened by the fact that studios often failed to submit the material they had promised on time or at all.^[77]
Second, news stories produced by local studios suffered from the same lack of dynamism and temporal-spatial specificity that plagued those produced by Vremia’s own staff. Urged on by Lapin’s emphasis on portraits of model workers and farmers, locally and centrally produced news items on Vremia sought to help viewers “see anew” by portraying the spiritual and ethical qualities of model Soviet persons.^[78] Since, as one Central Television director put it, “the fate of a worthy person should not be recounted in a hurry,” and these features were liable to be very lengthy—just the kind of static, timeless stories Muratov had criticized in 1967.^[79] But it is also striking how the organization of local news production for Vremia was organized like the production of fiction film: themes and topics had to be decided months in advance, and it was never possible for film crews to be present to document events as they unfolded. Soviet news narratives were exclusively intended to provide evidence of the truth of the Party’s promises about the arrival of communism, a stipulation that left little room for the unpredictability, change, and suspenseful, time-specific narratives of news in the West.
We should not be surprised, therefore, to find Lapin’s first vice chair in charge of Central Television, Enver Mamedov, commenting in 1973 on the awkward contrast between domestic and foreign news on Vremia in terms very like those used by Sergei Muratov in 1967. “As paradoxical as it sounds,” he began,

“the international part of Vremia, the part covering foreign events, is often much more vivid. This footage is usually more dynamic, as a rule it is not accompanied by text. These short frames show great and often dramatic events in different corners of the world.”

Many, many people, he continued, “contrast the somewhat anemic, sluggish [vialyi] development of events that takes place on screen when we’re talking about the Soviet Union with the fast, rhythmic, energetic coverage of international life that follows.”^[80] This situation was intolerable in the long term, Mamedov urged, and it was essential to understand why it was happening.
Mamedov’s use of spatial and temporal language to describe what was wrong with Vremia’s domestic news returns us to the central problem Vremia’s editors and directors faced: the search for a chronotope that would animate Vremia’s domestic news coverage, giving it concreteness, meaning, and voice. As we have seen, Vremia’s editors and censors saw both the problem of dynamism and its solutions in spatial and temporal terms. As they remade Vremia’s imaginary map of Soviet space and time and the literal map of local and national television broadcasting, they encountered a number of vexing paradoxes. When they tried to make Soviet life seem fast, fluid, and timely, the Central Committee criticized Vremia for lacking a singular and transparent meaning. Efforts to cover more of Soviet territory in order to convey the synchronicity and relatively equal development of Soviet space only exposed the remaining differences and distances that could be temporalized as “backwardness.” Conversely, Vremia’s efforts to elevate Moscow as the symbolic center of Soviet life, or to mobilize viewers by helping them to see Soviet spaces and people “anew” only further contributed to the timeless and static quality of Soviet domestic news.
We can also see, however, why Lapin felt it was important to help viewers see Soviet life “anew.” Portraits of model people offered an alternative to consumer lifestyles as grounds for proving Soviet superiority in the Cold War. As a sudden, revelatory experience, seeing anew offered hope that Soviet citizens might be suddenly made to believe in the truth of the Party’s promises about the direction of Soviet history at a time when so many viewers responded to news stories about Soviet achievements with resentment and cynicism. Since attempts to implement systemic economic reforms had failed by the late 1960s, television, along with other media, was one of only a few remaining ways of shaping economic behavior and public opinion in the 1970s without recourse to either violent coercion or meaningful material incentives. Yet what would have been the outcome if Central Television had been able to overcome the technical and political barriers I have outlined and create a dynamic new evening news program that delivered information and images from across Soviet space instantaneously to every Soviet home? Despite frequent pronouncements about the importance of information for an educated citizenry, it was not obvious how precisely that information could be used in a nondemocratic political system.^[81] The difficulty of finding a chronotope that could bring Vremia’s domestic news coverage to life reflected intractable economic, social, and political problems; it seems unlikely that, by the mid-1970s, these problems were still amenable to a cultural solution alone.