The meaning of pluralism on “Vzgliad”

Nina Andreeva’s letter “I Cannot Forsake My Principles [Ne mogu postupat'sia printsipami],” published in the newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia (Soviet Russia) on 13 March 1988, was a bombshell many observers interpreted as the first salvo against Gorbachev’s reforms by the Politburo’s right wing. A year and a half later, Evgeny Dodolev (1957-), a regular contributor to the youth program Vzgliad, was able to charm Andreeva—possibly on false pretenses—into sitting for a longform interview that Vzgliad aired on 27 October 1989. In the interview, Andreeva retreads the main points of her article, while the camerawork alternates between closeups of her face and shots of various doctrinaire Soviet books and everyday objects found in her apartment. Subsequently, in the clip featured here, Dodolev and Alexander Liubimov discuss the interview, articulating thoughts about “regular people,” and positioning the show’s political agenda of “centrism,” “pluralism,” and “common sense” relative to their wider audience. The conversation takes place on the original set of Vzgliad, which imitates an informal apartment setting, even as many of the show’s other episodes were set in agora-like contexts and called “talk shows.” This televised intimacy underlines that Vzgliad’s makers understood the work of politics in very personal terms, as the creation of an audience that recognizes Dodolev, Liubimov, and others as their own avatars—as examples of common-sense, liberally inclined “regular people” who fear neither perestroika itself nor other “regular people” who, like Nina Andreeva, might worry about coming changes.