Soviet Engineers become Post-Soviet Aristocrats on TV

In December 1991, when Boris Yeltsin moved into Mikhail Gorbachev’s office in the Kremlin and the USSR finally ceased to exist, Vladimir Voroshilov’s (1930-2001) television quiz show, Chto? Gde? Kogda? (What? Where? When?), which had been on air since the 1970s and had already undergone major changes during perestroika, once again dramatically altered its visual formula and format. During the Brezhnev years, the show had been a place where young Soviet men and women with scientific-technical backgrounds squared off against their studio-audience peers. In a showcase of socialist intelligentsia prowess, audience members submitted question-riddles for teams of six Experts (Znatoki) to solve on the spot after one minute of joint deliberation. During perestroika, what was already a widely-watched site of cultural erudition with an ethos of sharp, honest intellectual competition became an increasingly explicit political arena where an alternative elite emerged in real time. Now, with the rise of Yeltsin, that elite was apparently taking power and leading Russia’s transition to liberal capitalism. But were they the legitimate stewards of such a project, and was the project itself legitimate?

Voroshilov, like his peers at the financial newspaper Kommersant, believed that, as a post-Soviet, post-socialist Russia took shape, it was imperative to create an appealing image of the successful, respectable liberal capitalist who would inhabit it. For Voroshilov, that ideal figure was the young ex-Soviet scientist or engineer who had once been a typical player on his show. In the new reality, this type of person was likely to have become a successful business leader who nonetheless retained her Soviet intelligentsia bonafides.

Again like his Kommersant peers, Voroshilov imagined such a figure dressed in the garb of an Imperial Russian aristocrat. In accordance with this vision, Chto? Gde? Kogda? began to transform into what Voroshilov repeatedly called an “intellectual casino, where everyone can win money through the power of their mind.” In this opening clip from the 1993 Summer season of the game, the show’s newly aristocratic aesthetics are much in evidence. The players are transported into the nineteenth-century world of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky as money is placed on the table to the tune of the Countess’s aria from Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades (1887). Once the lights go up, the viewer sees a crowd dressed in tuxedos, along with some raspberry blazers worn by the club’s “immortal members.” They are then introduced to the tune of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1896), suggesting that the struggle in which they are about to engage is intense, honorable, and agonistic. Once money is on the table, these former Soviet technical intelligentsia elites become noblemen and noblewomen who wager enormous sums with abandon.