Putting the "Spotlight" on an experimental three-hour line for Soviet luxury clothes

Beginning from August 1987, Prozhektor perestroiki [Perestroika’s Floodlight] was a regular 10-15 minute supplement to the daily evening news show, Vremia [Time], and was meant to be a key component of Gorbachev’s glasnost reforms. Compared to the carefully controlled style of Soviet televised public discourse, Prozhektor felt like a bold step towards social critique. The fact that it was explicitly tethered to Vremia, the only live-aired show in the USSR (because of certainty that nothing in it would raise censors’ eyebrows), made it clear that Prozhektor was a key component of the Perestroika-era Party line. The subjects covered on Prozhektor typically shed light on various economic hardships and failures of central planning in the USSR, and as such they were consistent with the original purpose of glasnost– to make it possible for industrial whistleblowers to alert Soviet central planning authorities to the various factors responsible for a general sense of cascading economic failures that plagued Soviet everyday life with increasing intensity since at least the early 1980s, if not earlier.

Though many of Prozhektor’s airings try to come up with workable solutions for the problems investigated by the show, some reports depict a sense of palpable deadlock. In this case, we visit Tsentr mody liuks [Luxe Fashion Center], a storefront of the USSR Ministry of Light Industry, opened on Gorbachev’s orders a month prior, with a mandate to sell fashionable clothes in a new, “experimental” way, involving computers. The experimental technology, we are told, is supposed to alert shoppers to “what is in the store and what is not,” so as to avoid having to stand in line for things that are not there. To this, a PhD in Economics points out that “in a situation where there are more shoppers than goods, this system is unnecessary.” The man in charge of computerizing believes that ultimately, the line to shop can be sped up. Meanwhile, the line has not moved in several hours. Perhaps there are people trying on clothes and slowing down the sales, as the manager suggests? No, both booths are empty. The on-site filming ends there and we never hear an explanation– that in all likelihood, Tsentr mody managers are simply not letting the regular public in, while letting in whomever they prefer, on the basis of private arrangements (blat).

As Prozhektor wraps up the report, we hear an explanation from the economist for the source of the failure: that here “two opposing technologies have run up against each other: one of mass service and one of individual service.” Insofar as there exists a very large mass of Muscovites who apparently can afford to buy “individual service” goods at Tsentr mody, this store will continue to have long lines. Thus, the economist cagily suggests that prices might have to be raised to tamp down demand– which is another way of saying that the solution to the economic problem of Soviet deficits might well be to create an inherently exclusionary, capitalist-style commerce in consumer goods.