Early Vzgliad parodies itself

Authorized by Aleksandr Nikolaevich Yakovlev, the official ideologist of Perestroka, and produced at the Youth Desk (Molodezhka) at Gosteleradio SSSR, the TV show Vzgliad first aired on October 2, 1987. It was intended for a late-night slot and was supposed to attract a youth audience that would, ideally, choose it over tuning in to foreign radio broadcasts. As such, Vzgliad was one of several shows for this target demographic– others were “Before 16 and Older,” which first went on air in 1983, and “The 12th Floor [Dvenadtsatyi etazh], which first went on air in 1985 and was led by the head of the Youth Desk, Eduard Sagalaev himself). Retrospectively, viewers have often recalled Vzgliad as a harbinger of Perestroika changes, because of all the ways that this TV show seemed to oppose the practices of the censorious late-Brezhnev-era Soviet public sphere. As scholars like Christine Evans have argued, Vzgliad’s seeming rebellion was, in fact, fully consistent with Youth Desk practices of the 1970s-1980s. What was different was that this Perestroika television show combined entertainment, journalism and newscasting in one, and made the whole package attractive through its sincere, intentionally amateurish, freewheeling aesthetic. The present clip is from October 30, 1988, when the show celebrated its one-year anniversary on set by inviting several sketch comedy artists to give a parody of Vzgliad’s broadcasts. The artists play Zakharov, Liubimov and List’ev, who constantly interrupt each other, who move from segment to segment according to a seemingly impulsive logic known only to them, who watch music videos that only they want to see, and who end the show with a conversation that parodically encapsulates what Liubimov will later repeatedly call the “plularism” of Vzgliad. We can also see how this performance of “pluralism” connects to the self-image of Vzgliad and its audience– they present themselves as normal guys who are ready joke about anything, who have a lot of interesting friends in their informal network of svoi (see Alexei Yurchak), and whose friendship easily passes into informal procurement of difficult-to-attain goods (see Alena Ledeneva).