Soviet technical intelligentsia learns Reaganomics on the Chto? Gde? Kogda? gameshow

The quiz show What? Where? When?, created by Vladimir Voroshilov, had been airing on Soviet Central Television since the mid-1970s and in the 1980s commanded an enormous audience, a fan following, and increasingly a whole network of regional clubs, where thousands of individuals self-organized to play a version of the televised game. Billed as entertainment for the Soviet mass intelligentsia (people with college degrees, often in STEM fields, working in occupations seen as ‘middle class’ in the US), the show effectively became a staging ground for an “alternative elite” (Christine Evans’s term) of competent, future technocrats, who would be able to take the USSR out of its many socioeconomic crises if the doddering Party bigwigs were ever to let up.During Perestroika, Voroshilov moved to secure this manifest destiny for his players, and in the 1988 game season he actively turned What? Where? When? into an outright political discussion forum, focused on Soviet economic problems and the efforts of the “Perestroika managers” [proraby Perestroiki]. The problem-solving ideology that Voroshilov and his players were working out on set was consistent with what would eventually become post-Soviet Yeltsinism’s commitments: to laissez-faire capitalism, American socioeconomic superiority, and the need to discard old bromides of socialist social justice, in favor of a Western conservative value system, in which the market rewards people for their industriousness and produces a justly stratified society.

The episode from which this clip is taken captures facets of this ideology at play. Recorded during the 1988 season, it shows an international cast of players, many from capitalist countries, working together to understand Perestroika’s economics, which appear as riddles that call for clear, swift resolutions. In this fragment, the “experts” solve a puzzle about nascent private enterprise in the USSR, enabled by the 1986 “Law on Cooperation.” On the screen is Nadyr Kasymov, an owner of a café with exorbitant prices that only wealthy foreigners can afford. Angry letters in newspapers call for locking up these unscrupulous proprietors. In the face of this, Kasymov asks: how do all of the angry invectives against kooperatory circulating in the Soviet public sphere actually help them flourish? The American Team 1 from Columbia University assumes that “all publicity is good publicity.” However, in Voroshilov’s view they are incorrect, and truth lies on the side of supply-side economics, which all of the Soviet Teams elaborate each in their own way. Team 12 is allegedly closest to being right: the angry letters are keeping the authorities from permitting more businesses, so there is less competition and the ones that exist can charge higher prices. Other teams explain various flipsides of this answer, but across the board the feeling is that moral truth is on the side of Kasymov– he is free to run his business however he wishes, and the only thing that should bring him to heel is the market, rather than any other social (nevermind socialist) institution.