ABSTRACT
Young Russians today cannot have watched and understood most of the programmes – political analysis, news, speeches of Politburo leaders, the high culture of opera, poetry readings, theatre – on television in the Soviet era, defined as ‘preGorbachev’. Today’s twenty-somethings were toddlers at the time. Yet they have emotional and strong opinions about it. This chapter addresses two research questions: What memories of Soviet television might have survived in the attitudes of these young post-Soviets? And what can we say about all those affect-laden attitudes that the post-Soviets attribute to Soviet television that they could not have seen, much less understood? Soviet-era media discourse was very largely abstract, bureaucratic and filled with evasive euphemisms, such as the ‘internationalist duty of a limited contingent’, which denoted the war in Afghanistan.
