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“What Is Our Life? A Game!”: What? Where? When? and the Capitalist Gamble of the Soviet Intelligentsia
Author(s) -
KHAZANOV PAVEL
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
the russian review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.136
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-9434
pISSN - 0036-0341
DOI - 10.1111/russ.12266
Subject(s) - intelligentsia , capitalism , the imaginary , aesthetics , subjectivity , history , sociology , political science , political economy , psychoanalysis , politics , law , art , philosophy , psychology , epistemology
Around the time of the fall of the USSR, Vladimir Voroshilov’s popular seasonal high‐brow television quiz show underwent a lavish aristocratic makeover, involving a Catherinian gazebo, black tie attire, large stacks of cash, and prominent references to Alexander Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades” in the prologue to every game episode. This article analyzes the cultural logic through which the arrival of capitalism was rendered on What? Where? When ? a process that culminated in the 1990s with the poignant Pushkinian metaphor. To understand this process, I examine the show from the standpoint of its implied subject–the collective of the intelligentsia, at the juncture of the late Soviet and the post‐Soviet eras. I argue that a Brezhnev‐era elitist disavowal of a previous “sixtier” ( shestidesiatniki ) imaginary of socialist intelligentsia subjectivity shaped late‐Soviet cultural products like What? Where? When? By tracking the show’s evolution from its inception in the Brezhnev years, through Perestroika, and into its 1990s makeover, I use Voroshilov’s game as a case study to analyze how the late Soviet intelligentsia shaped the course of 1980s‐1990s liberal capitalist reforms, while also displaying feelings of anxiety for placing its bet on the success of Yeltsin’s problematic regime.