An episode of the talk show “Tema”: “Racism in Russia”

Between 1987 and late 1990, Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost allowed the television show Vzgliad (View or Look) to experiment with new formats, eliciting pointed, engaging conversation about Soviet social problems. By the end of 1990, when revanchists within the Politburo seemed to be sidelining Gorbachev, Vzgliad was taken off the air, but on the initiative of the hosts Vladislav Listyev (1956-1995) and Aleksandr Liubimov (1962-), the show’s creative team founded the private media company ViD—the Russian word “vid” being a synonym for “view” and an acronym for Vzgliad i Drugie (View and Others).

When Soviet political crises culminated in a transfer of power to Boris Yeltsin, Vzgliad alumni began using ViD to run spinoffs of earlier pioneering formats, including the Russian talk show. In 1992, Listyev launched a standalone program called Tema (Theme). Unlike the talk shows that had appeared on Vzgliad, Listyev’s Tema was only sometimes dedicated to the day’s political events. Other episodes centered on controversial subjects like racism, male prostitution, sexual harassment, repressed sexuality, free love, etc. Still other episodes debated more political or social issues like capitalism, the aristocracy, the army, unemployment, and criminality.

Tema built on the perestroika-era understanding of free speech as a social activity in which not just the elites, but regular people should take part, and in which even outlandish, extreme, and offensive perspectives should be aired for the sake of collective healing. The show’s third episode, on “Racism in Russia,” exemplifies this vision of a no-holds-barred agora. The invited experts are ethnographer and Americanist Edgar Nitoburg and Dhzeims (James) Lloydovich Patterson, a Soviet poet of African-American descent. Yet despite their billing as “experts,” these guests get no more than 10 minutes of airtime. The majority of the show consists of recorded interviews with white and Black Russians, and spontaneous conversations between Listyev and the studio audience.

Audience members voice a range of perspectives, from straightforward white supremacy and ramblings about Russian nationalism, to recollections of the role race and ethnicity played in the Soviet past. On this latter point, speakers return to two Soviet touchstones. One is the 1936 film Circus, in which Patterson, then a toddler, played the mixed-race baby of an American performer (played by 1930s screen star Lyubov Orlova, 1902-1975) escaping racial prejudice in the nominally “progressive” Soviet Union. The speakers also recall the 1957 Moscow Youth Festival, which broke the spell of Stalin-era isolationism as visitors from Soviet satellite states and the USSR’s African allies were welcomed in the Soviet capital. Did these examples of Soviet official internationalism influence lived race relations in the USSR, and now post-Soviet Russia? Or were they propaganda talking points that failed to ameliorate popular racist animus? Patterson suggests that, for all of its mythical qualities, Soviet internationalism brought about concrete achievements, including his own career.

For most of Patterson’s interlocutors, however, his personal success is cold comfort. What matters much more are the pervasive racist attitudes they experience every day—which, for many audience members, are a feature, not a bug, of life in Russia. Moreover, with its focus on white-Black relations, Tema’s episode on racism in Russia elides discussion of racism vis-a-vis Russia’s Caucasian and Central Asian communities, both of which are far larger than the country’s African diaspora. Perhaps Tema ignored this elephant in the room because it took its topical cues primarily from American talk shows. This would suggest that ViD ’s commitment to free discussion in the 1990s was motivated at least as much by the company’s desire to calque successful Western TV formats as by the desire to give voice to salient post-Soviet social issues.