Talking with the Consumer: Consumer Issues on Soviet Television
Talking with the Consumer: Consumer Issues on Soviet Television

Summary/Abstract: This article explores how Soviet television engaged in “authoritative discourse” and brought it to the screen. It asks how television helped to shape the Soviet consumer by negotiating consumer issues and generating previously unheard-of publicity. Focusing on Rostov, Leningrad, and Moscow Central Television, it explores how these TV stations were a site of communication between viewers, letter writers, staff, factories, retail services, and party and state institutions responsible for consumer issues. It shows that television played a significant part in normalizing consumer issues by entangling home, consumption, and leisure in a public and private continuum staged on screen. Reproducing the genre of consumer advice and information, it interlaced authoritative discourse with tangible questions of lifestyle and consumer taste, with personal experiences and local events in a more interactive perhaps even intrusive—way compared to print media and radio. Thus, we observe that the space opened by televisual reproductions of authoritative discourse established emotional bonds between Soviet citizens and Soviet material and media culture.

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