This article contributes to the growing literature on diverse television cultures globally and historically by examining selected aspects of television cultures in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Being part of a political, economic and cultural system that self-consciously set out to develop an alternative form of modern society, state socialist television offers a particularly apposite case study of alternative forms of modern television. State socialist television was inevitably drawn into the Cold War contest between two rival visions of modernity and modern life: one premised on liberal democracy and the market economy, the other on communist rule and the planned economy. As a result, its formats, content and uses were different from those familiar from western television histories. The analysis, based on 70 life-story interviews, schedule analysis and archival sources, focuses on the temporal structures of television and on the challenges posed by television's ability to offer an instantaneous connection to the unfolding present. We argue that the nature of television temporality had ambiguous consequences for the communist project, allowing citizens of state socialist countries to disconnect from communist ideals while at the same time synchronizing their daily life with the ongoing march towards the radiant communist future.

The comparative study of media systems and their relationships with political systems has received a substantial amount of attention in recent years, and made significant strides in understanding the diversity of mass communication around the world, along with its causes. Yet, while this systemic approach is important, it offers it offers only a partial insight into diversity of global media landscapes and, more generally, into the social implications of mass communication. To gain a fuller grasp of these implications, we need to start from the premise that socially significant communication extends well beyond the traditional domains of politics, and encompasses the mediation of basic cultural ideals and narratives, as well as the structuring of everyday practices and routines. These include the perceptions of private and public life, the understanding of the nation and its position in the world, the modes of organizing daily routines and everyday spaces, the historical events remembered and celebrated on a mass scale, and much more. To investigate these dimensions, this paper develops a conceptual and analytical framework that conceives of media cultures as patterns of ideas and practices that enable mass mediated meaning formation, and that have distinct spatial and temporal characteristics. These media cultures can vary on a number of dimensions, from the extent to which they seek to serve public or private goals, the degree to which they are open to transnational exchanges, to their modes of engaging with the past, present and future. This framework can be applied to different media and cultural forms, and in diverse political and cultural contexts. By way of illustration, the paper outlines how the framework can be used for the comparative study of (analogue) television cultures.

This article focuses on the ways in which socialist television sought to create a sense of extraordinary temporality out of the ordinary through its coverage of historical commemorations, national days, and secular and religious festivities. To do so, it develops the concept of ‘media holidays’, which draws on Dayan and Katz’s seminal notion of media events, and the work of other scholars of media ritual, to show the ways in which socialist television created extraordinary temporalities through scheduling. Drawing on schedule analysis and archival documents, the article compares the cases of television in East Germany, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. It examines a number of different kinds of media holiday on socialist television, and shows how different kinds of holidays and commemoration were marked with different kinds of programming in which entertainment played an important role.

This article examines memories of the TV psychic Anatoly Kashpirovsky, whose TV ‘séances’ were broadcast on Soviet state television in the late-1980s. Based on the results of interviews from Russians and Ukrainians conducted in 2013–2014, a television serial based on the rise of TV mystics in the late-1980s and a web forum devoted to discussion of the serial, this article uses memories of Kashpirovsky in both vernacular and public contexts as a means of understanding the place of perestroika and the 1990s in the post-Soviet historical consciousness. In particular, the article focuses on the continued contestation over the meaning of perestroika and the 1990s in Russian and Ukrainian collective memory and the different interpretative strategies used to explain the past. The article seeks to examine the different forms of memory work taking place in different memory spaces, from the popular, vernacular memories voiced in interviews, to public memories expressed within popular culture.

This article challenges the assumption, frequently made in scholarship on Soviet media, that news was absent in the Soviet Union. Working across press, radio, and television, the article shows how after 1953 reform of Soviet news became a priority for journalists, editors and media professionals. The article focuses on discussions among journalists and officials about the future of journalism, arguing that journalists’ notions of professional excellence played a crucial role in shaping news coverage. In a climate of Cold War competition with western radio, new technological possibilities and changing political priorities, journalists gradually overcame their condescension towards news, emphasising its civic potential as an agent of social ‘democratisation’, and the artistic nature of reportage. This new configuration was precarious, however, and collapsed after the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1968. As the Party placed new restrictions on the flow of information, news lost its professional prestige.