Twenty years ago, political liberalization began with television. How did this process begin?

At the end of 1984, terrible snowfalls hit the Southern Urals, the railway was covered with snow, train traffic had to be interrupted several times, and soldiers were brought in to clear the drifts. The Vremya program published daily reports on the emergency situation - the main editorial office of information programs of Soviet Central Television sent a special correspondent, Alexander Tikhomirov, who had previously specialized in reporting from Baikonur, from Moscow to the Chelyabinsk region. Tikhomirov talked about the selfless work of railway workers, work enthusiasm and similar things that were customary to talk about in the Vremya program in those years. When the snowfalls ended and Tikhomirov returned to Moscow, he was invited by the USSR Minister of Railways Nikolai Konarev - for a series of reports about Chelyabinsk railway workers, the minister decided to award the TV reporter the “Honorary Railway Worker” badge.

“We talked in his office late at night,” recalls Tikhomirov, who now works on the satellite TV channel “Who is Who.” “He was in pajamas because there was a bed in the back room next to his office, and like a real Stalinist People’s Commissar, he often stayed overnight at work. Nikolai Semenovich said that he was awarding me an honorary title, and I was already aware that this badge does not imply any benefits like free travel, and therefore he said that I really appreciate such an award, I am happy to be recognized with it, but let’s encourage us, the program “Time” is a little different.

10 years before the conversation in the minister’s office, Tikhomirov studied at the Higher Party School in Khabarovsk, and when Leonid Brezhnev met with US President Gerald Ford in Vladivostok, students from the Khabarovsk Higher School of Music were taken to portray jubilant workers along the route of the guests. There Tikhomirov first saw the special carriage in which Brezhnev was traveling.

“It was a real house on wheels,” the journalist recalls. - With a bathroom, a large hall, two compartments for security, and so on. And since then I had a dream - to travel around the country with equipment in such a carriage, making reports. And so I asked Konarev to give this car to the “Time” program. He was surprised, but said he liked the idea. He pulled a stack of papers towards him and wrote an order right in front of me: “To all heads of roads and services. The Ministry of Railways of the USSR, together with the “Time” program, is organizing a visiting editorial office.” And he ordered a carriage to be allocated to us - it’s true, not Brezhnev’s, but exactly the same as the one the head of the local road traveled in in the Far East. I came to my superiors with this order, they were scared at first, but then they were even happy.

The journey of the television carriage, which provided the Vremya program with problematic reports from remote regions, began in February 1985 on Sakhalin. The reports under the heading “On-site editorial staff reports” were dedicated to the 27th Congress of the CPSU scheduled for February-March 1986, and the first episodes of the cycle were presented in the usual pathetic tones for Soviet television.

“The topics were as follows,” lists Alexander Tikhomirov. — About the successes of workers, about the harsh everyday life of the Far Easterners. By March we reached Komsomolsk-on-Amur, and then Chernenko died, we continued our journey to the west and as we moved, we almost physically felt how the situation in the country was changing, how the authorities were letting go of the reins on which they held us.

By the end of 1985, the television special car reached Central Asia. In the Alamedin region of Kyrgyzstan, the hero of the next report from the visiting editorial office was the director of a rich state farm, with whom the first secretary of the district committee, Mamarkaliev, was at war. Mamarkaliev was the nephew of the first secretary of the Republican Communist Party, Turdakun Usubaliev, and, as Tikhomirov says, their clan fought with the heads of successful farms, exchanging them for relatives of the first secretary. The report from the Alamedin region was filmed secretly from the leadership of the republic. The director of the state farm and workers spoke on camera about the corruption of the district and republican authorities, openly accusing party leaders of theft.

“There was a seven-minute report,” recalls Tikhomirov. “And the key artistic image in it was a stone that stuck out in the middle of the Chu River. The current pushed him, crashed against him, and it was clear that sooner or later the river would knock down this stone when it was full. We edited this report in our carriage, then transmitted it from Frunze to Moscow, and the technicians who worked in the control room pulled out the plugs from our equipment: “This cannot be transmitted, this cannot be transmitted.” But in the end I handed over everything, we quickly packed up and flew to Ashgabat, and the carriage was sent empty. And on the way, on the territory of Kyrgyzstan, he was fired upon.

The material about the corrupt district committee authorities was not aired immediately. Tikhomirov says that the decision to show this story was made at his own risk by the new deputy chairman of the USSR State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company Leonid Kravchenko. Kravchenko himself does not remember the details of this story, but in 1985, he, the former editor-in-chief of the Trud newspaper, was a kind of liberalization commissar under the long-time chairman of the State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company Sergei Lapin. In the summer, Lapin went on vacation, and during the month of his boss’s absence, Kravchenko independently reformatted the information block of Soviet television.

“When Lapin returned from vacation, he was terrified,” recalls Kravchenko. The Chairman of the State Television and Radio Broadcasting asked his deputy: “Aren’t you afraid of losing your party card? Didn’t Gorbachev call you?” - not understanding that sharp reports and criticism are no longer anti-Soviet manifestations, but a new policy of the leadership of the CPSU. One of the authors of the popular humorous TV show “Jolly Fellows,” Andrei Knyshev, recalls a typical incident for that time. When in December 1986 a musical episode of the program was aired with the participation of Zhanna Aguzarova, the Center group, Boris Grebenshchikov and other artists who were not obvious to official Soviet culture, Knyshev was summoned for a “serious conversation” with his superiors. It was New Year's Eve, the bosses were busy, so the conversation was scheduled for one day in early January.

“And at the very end of December,” recalls Knyshev, “Gorbachev came to Ostankino to record his New Year’s address to the Soviet people.” In the presence of the editor-in-chief of the music edition of Central Television, Viktor Shalashov, and the chairman of the State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (Sergei Lapin had by that time been replaced by Alexander Aksenov. - Forbes), Gorbachev said that he himself rarely watches TV, but from what he has seen recently, he really liked the episode “ Musical Ring” about bards and a program “where young guys talked about music so witty and interesting, it was original.” Maybe he wanted to compliment the music editors, but in the end he saved us from ourselves, because the psychology of the bosses is very simple: God forbid that we upset the top management. The new year came, we were waiting for a call to the authorities, but it still didn’t come, and only at the end of January Shalashov told us Gorbachev’s words.

Perhaps Mikhail Gorbachev really wanted to pay a compliment to the main editorial staff of music programs, but in this case the compliment was in the wrong place - “Jolly Fellows” was produced not by the musical, but by the youth edition of the Central Television, which played, perhaps, a key role in the transformations on Soviet television.

“It’s all very simple,” explains Anatoly Lysenko, who has worked in this editorial office since 1968, explaining the special status of the main editorial office of youth programs. — On Central Television there was a main propaganda editorial office, which dealt with socio-political broadcasting, there was a main information editorial office, and there was a music editorial office. And the youth editors were involved in socio-political programs, music and entertainment, information, international - all sorts of things. That is, we did everything. And with this we freed our hands a little. As soon as they tried to limit us by topic, we began to explain that, you know, this is for young people, a special approach is needed, because this is a completely different audience. And we were allowed to do this. And when they started putting pressure on us and telling us: take care of your youth problems and don’t interfere anywhere else, we answered that you can’t create an age ghetto, young people are interested in everything. And so, maneuvering between these restrictions, we achieved a certain independence.

The dismissed chairman of the State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company Sergei Lapin became an adviser to the USSR Foreign Minister, and when a few months later Anatoly Lysenko accidentally met him in the corridors of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lapin would tell him: “Lysenko, what are you doing, you are ruining the country.” “I waved my hand and moved on without saying goodbye,” recalls Lysenko. In 1987, he, the 50-year-old editor of the main editorial office of Central Television's youth programs, became the head of the Vzglyad program, a live nightly socio-political show that defined the face of perestroika television.

As Kravchenko recalls, the decision to create “Vzglyad” was made by the Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Alexander Yakovlev, after the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee decided to abandon the practice of jamming foreign radio broadcasts. “Yakovlev said that there is such an opinion and that some steps need to be taken to keep the audience, especially young people, at television screens early in the morning and late in the evening - for the “voices” this was prime time,” recalls Kravchenko. Journalists were asked to submit ideas for filling the morning and night broadcasts, and the editor-in-chief of the youth editorial office, Eduard Sagalayev, found in his desk a more than ten-year-old application for a program called “In our kitchen after eleven.”

“This idea arose in 1975 or 1976,” recalls Anatoly Lysenko. — We once decided to make a program in the form of such gatherings in the kitchen: people come to visit, they are greeted by such crazy owners, they have films in the refrigerator, young guys, such a spark of youth, but in the kitchen, because the kitchen is in any apartment is a gathering place.

The application, which was once not accepted, turned out to be very useful; the program was put into production. It was supposed that it would be produced jointly by the information and youth main editorial offices, but the journalists from the competing editorial offices did not work together, so two very similar programs appeared on Central Television - “Before and After Midnight” and “Vzglyad.”

“Vzglyad” was hosted by radio journalists from Foreign Broadcasting. One of them, Alexander Lyubimov, who before Vzglyad worked for two years in the editorial office of Danish-language broadcasting, recalls this time with a mixture of pride and awkwardness:

“The whole society was united by one idea, not even a protest, but this one - “We are waiting for change,” “You can’t live like that.” We were anti-communists and practiced this to the best of our ability. Sometimes we managed to do something, sometimes not, but it just so happened that, although we had a lot in mind - our love for the country, and our love for people, and our love for music - all that was left of us was this , the fight against communists.

The formal reason for the resignation of the chairman of the USSR State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company Alexander Aksenov was the performance of director Mark Zakharov in “Vzglyad” - Zakharov called for burying Lenin, and this topic was still considered taboo by the standards of 1989. Aksenov was replaced by Mikhail Nenashev, who in the late seventies was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Soviet Russia” and enjoyed the respect of the opposing intelligentsia. Nenashev says that “he came not to suppress, but to some extent to calm down television,” but he no longer succeeded. According to Nenashev, the country owes all the changes that occurred in the late eighties to television:

— It turned out that the Communist Party ceased to be a political party. It became an administrative body and lost many of its political qualities. And television has largely replaced the party, primarily in its political work. The party was unable to explain any of the problems that existed at that time, and television had to take on this role.

It may seem funny, but this situation - television, replacing the party, itself comes up with the words with which it speaks - existed long before 1989. Alexander Tikhomirov recalls that when, after the triumphant completion of the railway expedition of the “Time” program, he (the highest form of recognition for a Soviet television journalist) worked at the 27th Congress of the CPSU in the Kremlin, he and his colleagues had to do something completely strange and not characteristic of “new thinking”:

“We were required to give responses to the report of the Secretary General; we called them “kakliks.” It was necessary to show some worker or peasant woman from the congress delegates so that they would assess the socio-economic situation in the country. This is difficult for people themselves, so each correspondent for the Vremya program who worked at the congress had his own set of talkers, to whom the texts of their speeches were written on whatman paper in large block letters. The cynicism was terrible, as in general in the country.

Where there is cynicism, there is deception. Andrey Knyshev recalls how he handed over the thematic plans for “Jolly Fellows” to his superiors. The program, which consisted of absurdist sketches, video art and rock music, was documented as a series of serious problem programs:

— It was necessary to write who was taking part in the program. In first place we put the Hero of Socialist Labor Sergei Obraztsov, or the Honored Artist of the RSFSR such and such, or Andrei Voznesensky. The censor's eye glanced over them, he said: well, it’s clear what the program is about. And what is between them is something youthful. In fact, it was the other way around. Famous people appeared in the collage and film. We called them great. "Next episode - who are the greats?"

“Much was based on self-censorship,” Alexander Tikhomirov is sure. “And perestroika actually meant getting rid of the censor.” Journalists drove the censors out of themselves, and this was much more difficult than external liberation. This persisted for a very long time, when people themselves said: “No, we won’t film about this, they won’t let it through.”

In this sense, another case from the practice of “Merry Guys” looks indicative. In one of the episodes of the program, a song was played to the tune of We Will Rock You by Queen - in the version of “Merry Guys” it was like an advertisement for a stain remover: “Removed, removed stains!”

“And our editor-in-chief sits and says: “To be honest, I got cold feet, because on the air I just realized with what fire we were playing, I suddenly realized what spots we had in mind.” That is, he thought that someone might have decided that we were talking about a stain on the forehead of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev. This is the extent to which the power of genetic fear and the internal censor still existed,” says Knyshev.

Television censorship, however, was not only internal - even in the freer years of the heyday of perestroika. In 1988, Ogonyok magazine published an article by film director Eldar Ryazanov, “Why I left television during the years of glasnost.” Ryazanov complained that the poem “My black man in a gray suit” was cut out of his documentary about Vladimir Vysotsky without explanation. Anatoly Lysenko also recalls censorship - according to him, the creators of Vzglyad even had to resort to forgery:

— When the bosses intervened and asked to film some story that had already been released on Orbit, we sometimes agreed, and in the release for the European part of the country we put on a new story, even more scandalous from the point of view of the authorities. It was a very cunning fight, with its own specific strategy and tactics.

Alexander Lyubimov became one of the victims of this struggle in the spring of 1988 - after the publication of Nina Andreeva’s article “I Can’t Give Up Principles” in the Politburo, the struggle between the secretaries of the CPSU Central Committee Alexander Yakovlev and Yegor Ligachev intensified, and in “Vzglyad” they changed the presenters - instead of Alexander Lyubimov, Vladislav Listyev and Dmitry Zakharov, the program began to be hosted by Vladimir Mukusev and Sergey Lomakin, who looked more moderate.

Recalling this time, Lyubimov draws attention primarily to the material, rather than political, circumstances of Vzglyad’s life - he was not accepted into the youth editorial staff for a long time (“Kravchenko did not hire me, as they say, because he personally did not like me - too cheeky, too Americanized"), and the fees in Vzglyad were meager - from 3 to 7 rubles per broadcast:

— I worked in Foreign Broadcasting, I earned from 300 to 600 rubles a month with my labor in Soviet times. He stayed overnight and intercepted the voices of Western radio stations. Endless interviews, original materials, shifts on release. Everything was built on a model that I understood: I worked - I got paid. When I came to television, they offered me fame in exchange for money. Fame didn’t suit me, because it was monstrous, indecent amounts.

According to Lyubimov, in the first year of Vzglyad’s existence, the main source of income for its presenters were creative evenings in the regions. “Literally, me, Vladik Listyev, Dima Zakharov, Tolya Lysenko performed concerts: the opening act was some little-known rock band that agreed to perform for a small fee, then we. And they got paid for it.” Lyubimov’s memories of this time are the gloomiest and absolutely apolitical: the broadcast ended long after midnight, and he was able to get home in a “smoky, scary” car only in the morning, after which he often had to fly on a long business trip.

Andrei Knyshev’s most unpleasant memories are also not at all connected with political censorship:

“We survived three or four chairmen, I don’t remember exactly, and by the 1990s the equipment on which we worked simply fell apart. In the control room, video engineers inserted a screwdriver into the block and hung a hammer on it so that the computer board would contact in the right place. Or, for the same purpose, it was necessary to jump in a certain corner of the room... I sat for ten shifts in these computer equipment rooms, editing rooms, then with red eyes I appeared in the editorial office, and they asked me the question: “Somehow you are not visible at work.”

The political situation around perestroika television changed every month. Leonid Kravchenko says that critical television in the first years of perestroika was beneficial primarily to Mikhail Gorbachev himself, who, with the help of journalists, dealt with his political opponents.

“Gorbachev often quoted Peter about “making everyone’s stupidity visible,” recalls Kravchenko, “but when we started showing live reports from meetings of the Council of Ministers - and there was enough stupidity there!” - they were very quickly curtailed, because by that time most of the ministers were Gorbachev’s nominees, and it was not appropriate to disgrace them.

“Vzglyad” and other popular socio-political programs by this time were already seriously irritating the authorities. Anatoly Lysenko recalls how the Secretary General visited the Ostankino television center, and the chairman of the State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company Nenashev brought him to the studio where the Vzglyad presenters were preparing for the next program:

“I came up later, and one of our leaders said to Gorbachev: here, they say, the program manager, all the nasty things are all his.” And he says: why do you criticize and not support me? I say: you know, Mikhail Sergeevich, this is not entirely true, you probably don’t watch the program, they tell you about it. And we fully support Gorbachev’s course. But as soon as Gorbachev begins to deviate from Gorbachev’s course, then we begin to criticize him.

According to Lysenko, Gorbachev, whom Lyubimov invited to the show, said that he would come when his views coincided with the views of Vzglyad. But on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of “Vzglyad”, the creators of the program were given the “Tefi” award, and Gorbachev presented it.

Veterans of perestroika television by that time, however, had already reconsidered their attitude towards what was perhaps the most glorious period in their lives. Alexander Lyubimov says that he does not even consider that time to be freer than now:

— Freedom for me is an internal concept. I was equally free under Brezhnev and now. The scale of social implementation is determined by society. Today is the ideal time for personal development. The period of “Gaze” is a period of destruction, when it is quite simple and clear. If you have enough strength, then you fight the Communist Party, and this gives you all your dividends.

Today Alexander Lyubimov is the first deputy general director of the Rossiya TV channel. Among the latest projects of the former host of “Vzglyad” are the scandalous “Name Russia”, the film “Taras Bulba”, and a colored version of “Seventeen Moments of Spring”. The projects are much more significant than the plots of “Vzglyad” twenty years ago, but was it worth fighting for freedom of speech in order to eventually paint a series about Stirlitz?

“I was naive, I believed in some ideals,” says Lyubimov. “But now I have different ideals; with age, people begin to understand that the main measure of social development is not the decisions of the authorities, but the state of society’s morals.

“As glasnost turns into freedom of speech, it will become increasingly difficult to achieve success on television using the mere poignancy of topics,” wrote the authors of the book “Our Portrait is Being Returned to Us,” Leonid Parfenov (the future star of “Namedni”) and Elena Chekalova in May 1989. — Cock attacks on reality, even the most blatant ones, are already boring to the viewer. Little by little, he increasingly needs a thoughtful and substantive conversation. In short, television in the nineties promises to be more complex and interesting than at the end of the last decade. And by this it does not deny its previous stage, but continues.”

However, twenty years later, Russian television correlates with Soviet television of the eighties in a completely different way than one would have expected in 1989. The battle of journalists with the internal censor ended in a crushing victory for the latter, and the degree of cynicism in the coverage of party congresses (which, in turn, themselves returned to the television screen as a specific genre) perhaps surpasses the times of “kakliks”.

Perestroika speaks and shows