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

Beginning in August 1987, Prozhektor perestroiki (Perestroika’s Floodlight) was a regular 10-15 minute supplement to the Soviet Union’s 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 televised Soviet public discourse, Prozhektor felt like a bold step toward social critique. 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. Prozhektor typically shed light on economic hardships and failures of central planning, including goods shortages, industrial failures and bureaucratic bottlenecks. As such, the episodes were consistent with the original purpose of glasnost—to make it possible for industrial whistleblowers to alert Soviet central planning authorities to the causes of the cascading economic failures that had plagued the Soviet economy since at least the early 1980s.

Though Prozhektor tried to invent workable solutions for the problems it uncovered, some episodes exhibit a palpable sense of deadlock. In the clip presented in this artifact, we visit Tsentr mody liuks (Luxe Fashion Center), a storefront of the USSR Ministry of Light Industry. Opened on Gorbachev’s orders in September 1987, this store was mandated to sell fashionable clothes in a new, “experimental” manner involving computers. The experimental technology, we are told, is supposed to alert shoppers to “what is in the store and what is not” to save them the trouble of standing in line for things that are not there. Commenting on this arrangement, 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 the computerization appears on screen to say that ultimately, the shop’s lines could be sped up. However, the viewer is informed, 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 changing booths are empty. The on-site filming ends there, and viewers never learn the true reason for the delays. In all likelihood, Tsentr mody managers were simply not letting the regular public in, while admitting preferred customers on the basis of private arrangements (blat).

As Prozhektor wraps up the report, the host interviews the economist, who speculates about the source of the failure: that, at Tsentr mody, “two opposing technologies have run up against each other: one for mass service, and one for 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 be to create an inherently exclusionary, capitalist-style commerce in consumer goods. With this suggestion, one can clearly see the paradox of Gorbachev’s reforms, which empowered a public sphere to shine a light on instances of Soviet mismanagement, only to reveal intractable problems. These revelations then naturally compelled key perestroika actors to seek a radical démontage of Soviet socialism, which Gorbachev had originally set out to rejuvenate.