The Soviet technical intelligentsia learns Reaganomics on the “Chto? Gde? Kogda?” quiz show

The quiz show Chto? Gde? Kogda? (What? Where? When?, abbreviated ChGK), created by author and producer Vladimir Voroshilov (1930-2001), had been airing on Soviet Central Television since the mid-1970s. By the 1980s, it commanded an enormous audience, a devoted fan following, and, increasingly, a network of regional clubs where thousands of individuals self-organized to play a version of the televised game. The show was 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. Over time, it became a staging ground for what historian Christine Evans calls an “alternative elite” of future technocrats who thought themselves capable of rescuing the beleaguered USSR from its perpetual state of crisis—if only the ancient Party bigwigs ever ceded control.

During perestroika, Voroshilov moved to secure this manifest destiny for his players. In the 1988 game season, he actively turned ChGK into a forum for open political discussion focused on Soviet economic problems and the efforts of “perestroika foremen [proraby perestroiki]” to mitigate them. The problem-solving ideology that Voroshilov and his players were working out aligned with the future commitments of the first Yeltsin presidency: laissez-faire capitalism; a belief in the superiority of the American social and economic orders; and the need to discard old bromides of socialist social justice in favor of a Western-style, conservative value system where the market rewards people for their industriousness and produces a justly stratified society.

The episode from which this clip derives captures the emergence of this ideology on live television. 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.” Onscreen is Nadyr Kasymov, the owner of a café with exorbitant prices that only wealthy foreigners can afford. Angry reader letters published in local newspapers call for unscrupulous proprietors like Kasymov to be locked up. In the face of this popular rage, Kasymov asks: How do all of the angry invectives against kooperatory (owners of cooperative businesses) 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. The truth may instead be found in supply-side economics, which each Soviet team elaborates in its own way. Team 12 is, according to Voroshilov, the closest to being “right” on Kasymov’s issue: the angry letters are keeping the authorities from permitting more businesses to open, leading to less competition and thus higher prices. Other teams explain various flipsides to this answer, but across the board, the feeling is that Kasymov is morally correct. He is free, in this view, to run his business however he wishes, and the only thing that “should” bring him to heel is the market, not any social—still less socialist—institution.