"Tema" Talk Show- Racism in Russia

Between 1987 and late 1990 the conditions of Perestroika free speech (glasnost) permitted the television show Vzgliad (View or Look) to experiment with new formats for 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 List’ev and Aleksandr Liubimov, the show’s creative team founded the private media company VID (another synonym for ‘view,’ and also an acronym for Vzgliad i Drugie [View and Others]). As the political crisis reached its peak and turned into a transfer of power to Yeltsin, Vzgliad alums started using their new VID platform to run individually-led spinoffs of the formats they had pioneered in the years past. One of those formats was the talk show, which List’ev in 1992 turned into its own programme, Tema (Theme). Unlike the talk shows of Vzgliad, List’ev’s Tema was only sometimes dedicated to specific political events of the day. Other episodes thrived off discussions of controversial subjects, dedicating segments to issues such as racism, male prostitution, sexual harrassment, repressed sexuality, free love, etc. Still other episodes debated less visceral issues (for example, capitalism, the aristocracy, the army, unemployment, criminality, etc).

In all of its broadcasts,Tema built on Perestroika’s understanding of free speech as a social activity in which not just the elites, but the regular people should take part, and in which even the strangest, most extreme and sometimes extremely offensive perspectives of Russian everymen and women should be aired for the sake of collective healing. The show’s third episode, on “Racism in Russia” is a particularly good example of this kind of no-holds-barred agora. The invited experts are Edgar Nitoburg– an ethnographer and Americanist, and Dhzeims Lloydovich Patterson– a Soviet poet of African American descent. However, these guests get no more than 10 minutes of airtime. The other three quarters of the show are occupied by pre-recorded interviews of White and Black Russians, and by spontaneous conversations between List’ev and members of the audience, who voice all sorts of perspectives, ranging from straight white supremacy to ramblings about Russian nationalism, to recollections of the role of race and ethnicity in the Soviet past. On this matter, speakers return to two touchstones. One is the 1937 film, “Circus,” in which Patterson starred as a toddler playing the mixed-race baby of an American performer-turned-Soviet refugee. The other Soviet memory site is the 1957 Moscow Youth Festival, when a decade-long spell of Stalin-era isolationism was broken and the Soviet capital welcomed a large number of visitors from the People’s Democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as the USSR’s African allies. The question is, did these marquee examples of Soviet official internationalism make any impact on lived race relations in the USSR and now post-Soviet Russia? Were they all just lies that had nothing to do with everyday racial ideologies in the Soviet Union? In his response, Patterson suggests that for all of its mythical qualities, Soviet internationalism brought about some concrete achievements, such as his own professional existence. For most of his interlocutors, this does not seem to mean much and what matters much more is the unbroken, generational cycle of everyday racist attitudes (and for many of the guests, this is a feature, not a bug). Interestingly, the show almost entirely occludes any discussion of Soviet/Russian race relations vis-a-vis its Caucasian and Central Asian communities, both of which are far larger than the country’s African diaspora.