Filed Under: The First (Home-Made) Post-Soviet Independent TV

The First (Home-Made) Post-Soviet Independent TV

Primarily based in Leningrad/ Saint Petersburg, Piratskoe televidenie (Pirate television, Piratskoe TV, or PTV) was established by Timur Novikov (1958-2002) and other members of the New Artists/ Leningrad Rock Club/ New Academy as an experiment at the intersection of video art and independent media. In the 1980s and 1990s, the show epitomized the deep influence of late-Soviet underground culture and its scenes or tusovki over mainstream Russian media—and of the increasingly blurred boundaries between these two spheres.

Pirate TV was conceived as a means of “infiltrating” Soviet television to break its stiff atmosphere. Its main creators—Novikov, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monro (1970-2013), Yuris Lesnik (1957-), and Georgy Gurianov (1961-2013)—had initially discussed with Artemy Troitsky (1955-) the possibility of broadcasting their surreal, “psychedelic” sketches as unannounced “interferences” to his musical show Programma “A”—but the plan failed, allegedly, because the language and topics of said sketches were too risky for Soviet TV. Other attempts to incorporate the project into local TV shows, including Sergey Sholokhov’s (1958-) Piatoe koleso and Tikhii Don, failed for similar reasons. However, Piratskoe TV was a prelude to Sergei Kuryokhin’s (1954-1996) sacrilegious Lenin-mushroom prank, which aired on Piatoe koleso and which Novikov and Sergey Bugaev helped conceive and produce.

The show itself, shot at the Leningrad/ Petersburg squat on Fontanka 145 and the studio on Moika 22, then circulated on VHS within circles close to Novikov’s group, was a farcical parody of official Soviet TV. Its main host and protagonist was Vladislav Mamyshev-Monro (1969-2013), the first Soviet drag queen, who appeared as either an affected news anchor or as one of his iconic celebrity characters. These included Marylin (Monroe), Hitler or, in the case of the episode excerpted here, the tentacled bureaucratic monster Gidro-GKChP, the “Hydro-State Committee on the State of Emergency,” a reference to the would-be coup leaders in 1991.

Piratskoe TV covered culture, music, and film, and also included a sports segment called “Spartacus,” which was hosted by Gurianov and reflected his queer-camp-totalitarian athletic sensibility. The show also treated various local events, including concerts, exhibits, and raves, as well as local and national news. Many of its “reportages” relied on the shock and even violence that Mamyshev’s provocations—and sheer presence—would often elicit.

The episode excerpted here serves as a testament to the fundamental ideological, aesthetic, and sexual fluidity of Novikov’s group. In it, Mamyshev-Monroe, Novikov, Guryanov, Bugaev, and Andrey Khlobystin stage a “Hearing of the Committee on the Anti-State of Emergency (Anti-ChP).” Occasioning this segment was the attempted coup d’état against Gorbachev, organized by a group of Soviet hardliners calling themselves the “State Committee on the State of Emergency” (GKChP). During the episode, the artists declare their support for Yeltsin and glasnost and their opposition to the “fascism” of the military junta threatening to seize power. At the same time, they appropriate and parody the empty language of Soviet authoritarianism, from the comical over-the-top military outfits, to the exaggeratedly official tone of Novikov’s announcements, to the absurd acronyms (Anti-ChP; Anti-GKChP; Anti-chepisty), to the figure of Yeltsin’s speech from the tank abruptly interrupted with footage of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. A few short years later, Novikov and his group would turn to equally fluid forms of aesthetic conservatism and totalitarian camp—this time in reaction to Yeltsin’s corrupt bureaucratic capitalism.