After Putin. The Unfinished Russian Revolution

One of the best-known of these exchanges took place in December 1985 between King TV, an NBC affiliate in Seattle, and the Soviet state TV studios in Leningrad. Phil Donahue roamed the American audience with his signature handheld microphone while Vladimir Pozner did the same in Leningrad. There were no speeches and no prepared statements. Teachers questioned teachers. Students questioned students. Parents asked parents about raising children, about their hopes, their fears, and the ordinary concerns of family life. Sometimes the discussion turned to politics. More often, it remained surprisingly personal. No one knew what would be said next. In a subsequent TV exchange that became famous yet apocryphal, in answer to a question about sex in advertising, a Soviet woman replied, “We don't have sex in the Soviet Union.” 

The audience of an estimated 200 million laughed. In the United States, the remark seemed like a crude joke. In the Soviet Union, it carried another meaning. Russians have a word—vranyo. It describes a falsehood that everyone recognizes yet all publicly accept. The laughter was not simply about sex. It reflected the sudden recognition of a shared irony. Millions of viewers understood immediately that public life had long required saying things no one completely believed.

A few weeks later, I visited Alexander Aksyonov, Chairman of Soviet State Television and Radio. Before we began talking, he poured two generous glasses of vodka. He then told me the story of how contentious the spacebridge had been within the Soviet leadership. The Soviet Central Committee, he explained, had spent two hours debating whether the Seattle-Leningrad broadcast should be shown live. Unable to reach an agreement, they finally left the decision to him.

“I went back to my office,” he recalled, “and drank a bottle of vodka. Only then did I authorize the broadcast.”

Aksyonov was not simply approving a television program that would eventually be broadcast in prime time three nights in a row in the Soviet Union. He was permitting millions of Soviet citizens to watch unscripted public life unfold in real time. After seven decades of Communist Party control over the media, neither he nor anyone else knew where that decision might lead.

Watching those early broadcasts was Eduard Sagalaev, then head of youth programming for Soviet television. He and a group of equally restless producers understood that the spacebridges had demonstrated something larger than the possibilities of satellite technology. They had revealed an audience eager for uncensored conversation. From that insight came 12th Floor and later Vzglyad, programs that overturned nearly every convention of Soviet broadcasting. Instead of officials inaugurating factories and celebrating production quotas, viewers saw journalists asking unscripted questions, guests disagreeing openly, audiences participating directly, and discussions whose conclusions had not been decided before the cameras began to roll.

Almost overnight, 12th Floor and Vzglyad attracted audiences that traditional state programming could no longer match. Suddenly, Russians got their news from independent journalists, not Party apparatchiks. The transformation was exhilarating. It was also fragile.

It is tempting to see these developments as the inevitable consequence of glasnost. They were nothing of the sort. Every advance remained contested. Reformers and conservatives argued continuously over how much freedom would be permitted, who would control it, and whether it would survive at all. At every stage, individuals made decisions whose consequences they could not foresee. Yet one change proved irreversible. Mass media had ceased to be merely a vehicle through which the state spoke to society. It was becoming a place where society could begin speaking to itself.

The changes spread with astonishing speed. Under Vitaly Korotich, the newspaper Ogonyok became required reading for millions of Soviet citizens eager to understand a country whose recent past had suddenly become discussable.  Yegor Yakovlev’s Moskovskie Novosti showed that journalism could challenge official assumptions without abandoning professionalism. Radio found its voice as Echo Moskvy introduced listeners to something rarely heard on the Soviet airwaves: genuine debate. Each institution developed its own character, yet all shared a common assumption that would have been almost unimaginable only a few years earlier—that the public could be trusted with information.

None of this meant that censorship had disappeared or that reform had become secure. Powerful forces within the Communist Party continued to resist change, while reformers themselves often disagreed about how far and how fast the country should move. What had changed was something more fundamental. The monopoly over public information had begun to crack. Once Soviet citizens experienced journalism that informed rather than instructed, it became increasingly difficult to persuade them that official truth was the only truth worth hearing. What was happening in journalism was mirrored in culture. In just one example, my friend and, Grisha Liebergal, tested the limits of Soviet control by playing the Beatles' song “Let It Be” on his state radio program and received 80,000 letters in support. The Rolling Stones soon followed.

The transformation was not driven by technology alone, although technology made much of it possible. Nor was it simply the result of enlightened political leadership. President Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of “glasnost” (“openness”) deserves enormous credit for creating the political space in which these experiments could occur, but political openings do not automatically create institutions. They create opportunities. What followed depended upon the initiative of individuals who were prepared to test the boundaries of newly available freedom.

That initiative soon spread far beyond Moscow. The capital remained the center of political reform and national broadcasting, but it no longer possessed a monopoly on imagination. Across Russia, journalists and entrepreneurs began creating institutions of their own—not because they had been instructed to do so, but because, for the first time in generations, they believed they could. The provinces were no longer waiting for permission. They were beginning to act independently.

This marked a profound shift in the way information moved through Russian society. For decades, ideas had flowed almost exclusively from the center outward. Now, initiatives were increasingly moving in both directions. Local broadcasters borrowed ideas from Moscow, but they also adopted them from one another. Editors adapted innovations developed hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Professional relationships were formed across regions that previously had little contact with one another. A new kind of network was beginning to emerge—not one directed from above, but one built horizontally through collaboration among people confronting remarkably similar problems in places far away.

Once censorship and the fear of speaking against the Party line were broken, the floodgates were open. The next stage would prove even more consequential. Independent media would cease to be a handful of innovative programs produced in Moscow and become something far more ambitious: a national community of institutions built by Russians themselves.

That story begins in the provinces.