ABSTRACT
‘Socialism’ 1 and ‘entertainment’ sit uneasily together. At the very minimum, entertainment implies the luxury of having some degree of freedom over how to spend one’s leisure time. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, however, when television became a national medium in the Soviet-controlled region, viewers’ freedom came down to a choice between turning their black-and-white television sets on or off, if they could even afford one. Moreover, under totalitarian state control, program imports, production and schedules were centrally monitored to conform to ideological directives that prescribed how socialist citizens should spend their leisure time in the ultimate service of the collective good. By virtue of being a home-based medium whose appeal is affective and intimate, television’s emergence into a mass medium presented state party authorities with both a challenge and an opportunity. It posed a danger as an instrument of quiet subversion in the domestic sphere, which slipped past the surveillance of other public institutions. At the same time, its attraction as a mass medium of entertainment could be harnessed to forge a unity within the larger national family around shared identifications and pleasures, which could in turn fortify the frayed bond between state authorities and the broader population.
