Authors

Dmitrii Bezuglov¹;  ¹ University of Cambridge, UK

Discussion

Throughout the 1960s, Soviet Central Television programmers applied the concept of "simultaneity" (сиюминутность) to broadcasting, as they looked for distinct features of the medium of television. An epistemological contract between studio and televised audiences was premised on both audiences witnessing the same event.  A prime example of this contract was the entertainment show  KVN (Клуб веселых и находчивых) (1961-1972), a competitive team show of wit and humour, broadcast across the Union. 

Scholars typically frame KVN's closure in 1972 as marking the end of Central Television's experimental period. I complicate this picture by examining how the introduction of tape recording technology, adopted across Western and Socialist television systems in this period, intersected with centralising pressures within Central Television. This collision, rather than administrative force alone, disrupted the existing epistemic contract. KVN, as the show that branded itself as principally live, serves as an exemplar of this collision.

In 1966, KVN commissioning editor, Elena Gal’perina, warned that сиюминутность is the key feature of the show; she wrote: «Если лишить КВН этого [сиюминутности], значит подрубить сук, на котором сидишь». Three years later, late in 1969, exactly this occurred: a KVN broadcast pitting Moscow’s institute team of MISI against Odessa city team of Soviet Ukraine was pre-recorded and edited before airing, thus violating the show’s commitment to establishing the perceptual link between physical and televised audiences. Those edits created two different viewing experiences, leaving the televised audience wondering why the Odessan team won (and leaving no such question among those who witnessed the game firsthand). 

The paper explores the crisis of witnessing and dismantling of cиюминутность on Soviet television, which was its theoretical tool throughout the 1960s. The scandal exposed fractures within the KVN community while undermining the broader epistemic contract upon which programming of the 1960s rested. 

Reconstructed through oral histories and memoirs (the broadcast itself was not publicly archived), this case illuminates how the introduction of a new technology revealed existing latent institutional tensions within Central Television, which led from the creative experimentations of the 1960s to the era of centralised, regulated TV broadcast of the 1970s.