The post-Soviet people’s show, Pole Chudes

In late 1990, Alexander Liubimov, Vladislav List’ev, and much of the creative team behind Vzgliad decided to open up a privately held media holding, ViD (“Vzgliad and Others”), which essentially privatized the production of Vzgliad and sold it back to Central Television, alongside entirely new shows. Unquestionably, ViD’s most successful product end-ed up being Kapital shou ‘Pole chudes’ (“Capital Show ‘Field of Miracles’”). Piloted in October 1990, Pole chudes would continue airing through ViD until December 2021, long past the death of List’ev and the discontinuation of the vast majority of ViD’s other projects (in 2022, the show is still on, though no longer at ViD). In the early 1990s especially, the show regularly secured the top slot in the TV ratings.

At the time of its inception and early years, Pole chudes and Chto? Gde? Kogda? Were the only two shows on early post-Soviet television that flaunted money on set. Unlike its hifalutin rival, however, Pole chudes embedded the circulation of “capital” inside of a folksy aesthetic and represented the post-Soviet economic transition not so much as a triumph of a liberal intelligentsia, but as a kind of holiday for the regular folk. Pole chudes’s gameplay was an intellectual competition of sorts, cribbed mostly from Wheel of Fortune and a little from Deal or No Deal?, but the show very quickly became about much more than just the game of guessing the right word or haggling for the right price. On Pole chudes, attendees from all walks of life (very often visibly impoverished people), from all over the Russian-speaking post-Soviet space, came to represent their far-flung regions and their social classes on central television, and to compete not just for cash and prizes, but even more so, for the spontaneous attention of the game host. They were then able to use that attention to convince the host to modify the show’s rules and to improvise in real time– perhaps by extending the contestant’s airtime well past that of others, or by making the host do something unusual.

The excerpted clip gives a good example of the show’s dynamic. As the contestant, Sergei Kumov from Staryi Oskol (a city of 200,000, near Russia’s Western border) begins spinning the wheel, the host Leonid Arkad’evich Yakubovich (in that role since 1991 until today) immediately senses the coming monologue. Kumov continues to speak long after the wheel stops, while Yakubovich thinks of his response spontaneously. Kumov, it turns out, has arrived both with a gift and a request. The gift is a series of poems about Pole chudes, which he immediately starts reciting. The request is a bald-faced plea to hire him “part time” to announce commercial breaks. Yakubovich doesn’t think twice about it and immediately goes along with it. As for Kumov’s poem, the body of it consists of a silly ode to some silly stunt that the contestant watched Yakubovich pull on TV a little while ago, but its essential meaning is to elevate Yakubovich to a kind of folk hero, who entertains by his willingness to put himself into absurd, vulnerable, unexpected, but always quite banal situations, which in their own way echo the lived chaos of an average post-Soviet 1990s Russian.