Meaning of pluralism on Vzgliad

Nina Andreeva’s letter “I Cannot Give Way on My Principles [Ne mogu postupat’sia s printsipami],” published in the newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia on March 13, 1988, was a bombshell interpreted by many as the first salvo of the Politburo right wing’s war on Gorbachev’s reforms. A year and a half later, Evgeny Dodolev, a regular contributor on Vzgliad and a friend of the show, was able to charm Andreeva (possibly on false pretenses) into giving him a longform interview, which Vzgliad aired on October 27, 1989. The interview largely retreads the points in her article, while the camework alternates between closeups of Nina Andreeva and the various Soviet doctrinaire books and objects of everyday life in her apartment. Subsequently, in the clip featured here, Dodolev and Alexander Liubimov discuss the interview, and during the course of their conversation articulate some thoughts about “regular persons,” and where the political agenda of Vzgliad’s “centrism,” “pluralism,” and “common sense” is positioned relative to their wider audience. Note that the conversation takes place on the original informal apartment set of Vzgliad, even as many of the show’s other episodes now take place in agora-like settings and are called “talk shows.” This televised intimacy underlines how on this show, the work of politics continues to be understood in very personal terms, as the work of an audience that recognizes figures like Dodolev and Liubimov as their own avatars, as examples of common-sense, liberally-inclined regular people who are “not afraid” of Perestroika and who are “not afraid” of also normal, also regular people like Nina Andreeva who fear the coming changes.