Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War

With Moscow Prime Time, Kristin Roth-Ey has written an ambitious, original, and fascinating account of Soviet film, television, and radio in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when the Soviet Union cultivated a mass culture intended to rival western dominance internationally. . . . Adducing evidence from archives, interviews, and printed sources, Roth-Ey convincingly argues that during those three transformative decades, as sundry forms of public experience became private, Soviet culture gradually came to mirror those of its western counterpart. Meticulously researched, well-written, and extremely engaging, Moscow Prime Time is an extraordinary 'must read' for students and scholars of 20th-century history and culture. -Citation by the 2012 AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies Committee

Moscow Prime Time is a smart, ambitious, original, and engagingly written contribution to our understanding of late socialism in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The reader learns about changes and continuities between Stalinism and post-Stalinism, stodgy bureaucratic responses to technological change, Soviet mass culture, and the increasing privatization of previously public and collective forms of Soviet life. This is a 3-D history of Soviet media, with attention to the political, cultural, and social factors at play in the development and expansion of film, radio, and television. -Anne E. Gorsuch, University of British Columbia, author of Youth in Revolutionary Russia and coeditor of Turizm

This insightful study is a strong addition to the growing body of work concerning Soviet media culture during the Cold War. . . . It is a compelling, well-documented, articulate examination of the processes, products, and effects of the Soviet film, radio, and television industries. Roth-Ey argues that the Soviets' success at creating an indigenous popular culture became a major part of the USSR's eventual downfall, since the media in which the culture was expressed were inherently skewed toward a non-Soviet worldview. -Choice

Not only does Kristin Roth-Ey provide a wealth of fascinating details about subjects such as Soviet ticket sales for domestic and foreign feature films, she also analyzes the multiple tensions that constrained post-Stalinist mass media production, and develops a consistent, powerful argument. Moscow Prime Time is a meticulous, well-written, and original book, a fascinating read. -Russian Review

Kristin Roth-Ey's Moscow Prime Time interweaves an analysis of Soviet cinema 'as an industry' with the much-less studied phenomena of Soviet radio and television. . . . Roth-Ey successfully connects the history of post-Stalinist mass media to the broader struggle for power and influence during the cold war. . . . Moreover, Roth-Ey's book contributes positively to the growing historiography on the Soviet Union after Stalin with its focus on mid-level institutional actors within the Soviet system, which thankfully takes us beyond the traditional dissident/repressive-state dichotomy of scholarship on this period. -Joshua First, Technology and Culture

The Soviet media machine may not have been ready for the global prime time, but Kristen Roth-Ey most definitely is. In this intelligent, clearly written, and cleverly researched work, she examines the many ironies of the USSR's history through the prisms of film, radio, and television. This is an important contribution to the excellent and growing literature we now have on post-Stalinist Russia. The Soviets managed to create formidable media institutions which sought simultaneously to educate and entertain, a contradiction they never seemed to solve. -Robert Edelman, University of California, San Diego, author of Spartak Moscow

Kristin Roth-Ey's book makes a great contribution to the existing literature. Her description of Soviet cinema and television in the post-Stalin age helps us to understand the world of the simple Soviet citizen. -Peter Kenez, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Cinema and Soviet Society

Moscow Prime Time is an empirically rich and analytically sharp social and cultural history of Soviet radio, TV, and film and an important work for understanding the USSR after Stalin's death. -Terry Martin, George F. Baker III Professor of Russian Studies and Director, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, author of The Affirmative Action Empire