Soviet Television and Radio - COLD WAR DOCUMENTARY
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- čas přidán 18. 06. 2024
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Our historical documentary series on the history of the Cold War continues with a video on the description of the Soviet Television and radio, as we see which technologies were used by the USSR, which TVs were made and sold and so on.
What Happened to the German and Japanese POWs?: • What Happened to the G...
Operation Paperclip: • Operation Paperclip - ...
German Expulsions: • German Expulsions Afte...
Soviet Education System: • Soviet Education Syste...
How Khrushchev Fed the Soviet People: • How Khrushchev Fed the...
Novocherkassk Massacre 1962: • Novocherkassk Massacre...
Soviet Tourism: • Soviet Tourism: How di...
Soviet Passport System: New Serfdom or Reform?: • Soviet Passport System...
Kaliningrad: How Russia Got a Stronghold in Europe: • Kaliningrad: How Russi...
How the Soviets Won the Early Space Race: • How the Soviets Won th...
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#ColdWar #Soviet #Television
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I hate you.
Do how/what the Soviets allow what western/America tv/movies/documentary's they let in. Whats censored what's cut from which famous movies jaws Rambo godfather so forth
@@stupidminotaur9735 The films were censored because the Communist Party did not want people to see those ugly scenes from the movies.
@@Leon68977 no they didn't want people to see the wealth of the west. And nudity so forth.
@@stupidminotaur9735 Capitalism is a bad system, because there is poverty in capitalism.
Laughing at how small early TV screens were.... While watching on a phone
Oh, the irony!
I'm watching on a smart watch, so...😏
Ironic isn't it
Oh, how IRONIC !
@@caise3910 you also get to shutup when u want silence
You know this guy is dedicated when he uses. A real Soviet tv outro
ending was beautiful
@@alecjones4135 *Blyatiful
@@ShinSheel ok . . .
Don't forget to turn off your television!
@@TheCimbrianBull *our television
My uncle spoke of his time in Soviet Russia back in the day. He said there were only 2 channels on TV. He said Channel 1 was propaganda, and channel 2 was a KGB pointing a Kalashnikov at the screen saying "Turn back to channel 1!"
Classic Soviet joke.
Classic anti Soviet propaganda told as a dumb joke
@@bitterballs356 "ree".
@fa q This isn't a good joke bcoz a good joke cannot be based on a lie. No guns were ever pointed at the heads of people in the USSR to force them into doing something they wouldn't otherwise do
@@surendramumgai631 Correct, if a gun was pointed at the head of the "traitor", no threats would be given, just a shot.
Radio Yerevan was asked: "Is it true that in the Soviet Union no one lacks a stereo system?"
Radio Yerevan answered: "In principle, yes, you hear the same from all sides."
I'm taking a newspaper in my hands. Brezhnev's speech is there.
I'm turning the radio on. Brezhnev's speech is there.
Then I'm turning the TV on. Brezhnev's speech is there, too.
Now, I'm afraid of plugging my iron in.
A Radio Yerevan joke!
Gold! 😂
What is a Brezhnev?
@@TheGuyNobodyReallyLikes Leonid Brezhnev was the former leader of Soviet Union.
Most ex soviet citizens regard Leonid Brezhnev as the best soviet leader after stalin , life was really good for them during the period he reigned as president.
Fun fact: I live in Norway. I think we was 2nd to last to have tv broadcast in all of Europe. The last was Albania. TV started in 1960. (NRK) Radio started around 1930. You had to pay a radio and tv tax two times a year. Norway did not get a national privat tv station until 1992! Now you know!
I wish the USSR kinda went socialdemocratic at some point like Norway. Being from a multinational Soviet family, it pains me to see how things ended with such a catastrophic collapse of the country and massive hardships for people in the 90s all over the independent states. The USSR had a lot of potential, resources, people, ideals. Many people were naive though, so when privatization started many oligarchs took all the wealth that the people created for decades overnight. I hope that someday we can reach your level of development and democracy.
Wise Norwegians. You should have kept private TV stations out completely. Once you yield on that, a Berlusconi is behind the corner.
Yeah, I can understand why you would be wary. Still, NRK still seems dominant over there.
@@stefanodadamo6809 Yeah just have the state control all the information, that's totally not retarded.
@@lonerider5933 Gorbachev tried, didn't succeed.
I grew up on a Scottish island halfway between mainland Scotland & Norway. Every summer, we would have Russian deep sea fish-factory ships turn up. They'd fish in the deep Atlantic for weeks, then harbour the ships and process the fish onboard, to sail back to the USSR with full holds of frozen herring and mackerel. When the crew had days off, they'd come ashore on their lifeboats, and buy cheap Wrangler jeans and Nescafe coffee by the score. But they'd also buy cheap electronics - radios, clocks, clock-radios, kettles, coffee machines, even cheap colour or black & white portable TVs and home computers like the ZX Spectrum (which as a computer architecture, had been widely copied in the Soviet Union). Toys were another big hit - cheap action figures, yo-yos, hula hoops, dolls, slinkies - whatever they could put on a pallet and crane onto the lifeboat to take back to the ship. All to sell on the black market.
My parents actually drove a Lada (Russian-built version of a Fiat) at the time. Mechanically, they were pretty reliable (if simple, but with horrible electrics). Anyway, we had several Soviet fishermen offer to buy it from us, because it was cheaper to do that, and ship it home on the deck of their ship, than it was for them to buy a Lada in their own country. Crazy.
Imported Lada were considered especially valuable and cost more in the secondary market, there was an opinion that they were of higher quality
If I got my understanding right, for the Lada the Soviet planners had choice; either buy a Ford Mustang factory from America or grab the Fiat factory from Italy. They did the latter, and to think they could have had a bizarre state car in their hands, a Russian version of an American muscle car. Maybe it was not the Mustang but it was still an interesting choice they could have made.
It was not CHEAPER. To buy lada in ussr u had to be a privileged veteran or a political leader, the rest were waiting in queues for decades
@@bambinaforever1402 Yes, it was cheaper. Specifically, for the Klondykers (as they were known), who I was talking about. For them, it was cheaper and easier to buy a 2nd hand Lada in the UK, stick it on the deck if their ship and take it home to Russia, then it was to try and buy one through Soviet Beauracracy. They probably didn't even keep the cars for themselves, but sold them on again for a profit.
I suggest you go back and re-read my original comment.
Sounds like they had a big boat, I'm surprised they were able to carry all that without being caught
My old boss grew up in the Soviet Union. I remember telling her our view of Soviet TV was brief flickering clips of their news broadcasts with the aforementioned men in ill fitting suits.
Funny thing - those Soviet newscasters were fucking ROCKSTARS over there. As close to megacelebrities as you could get in the Soviet Union. She said the big weekly newscast was on Sunday evening and the whole country basically shut down to watch.
Not sure what she’s referring to, news was on channel one daily at 9pm. There was one popular news/entertainment show on Saturday night but that aired in mid to late 80s during perestroika
By the way, that particular guy in a suit, Igor Kirillov, died less than a month ago.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Kirillov
Have you ever seen the satirical _SCTV_ skits satirizing Soviet television? You _might_ get a laugh out of them ( czcams.com/users/results?search_query=CCCP1 )
I never get tired of that awe-inspiring anthem. No matter your politics that is objectively the best anthem ever written and performed.
The GDR anthem is far better
@@judithshapiro1557GDR had a good one too, but I'm gonna stick with my pick
Those last 4 minutes certainly were an unexpected but welcome surprise!
Ah the "good" old days. When Ukraine became independent country they did similar thing at end of TV day where they had Hymn Ukraina with very similar scenes of USSR produced video. It was sort of like same shitty old horse cart but new driver.
The greatest athem ever :)
Magnificent! It makes me want to learn Russian. I only know a few words like "narod"
@@alexcarter8807 Well you're a third of the way into pro-Soviet propaganda already ;) You just need to know " ours" and " best" and then quote production volumes :P
@@ukrainiipyat that soviet (russian?) anthem is something else though, I always loved it as somebody from the West. Too bad everything under the surface was so rotten
May I suggest: "school & teachers - USA vs USSR", same for doctors, engineers, retail workers (which are the areas where life was VERY different)? It also may be interesting "picturing USSR in the USA cold war era movies vs reality" - because watching these movies was so hilarious from the inside of USSR in the 80s.
I was born in 1949 so I grew up during the Cold War I and I was always interested in Russian History and the USSR but our knowledge in America about life in Communist Russia was slight to non existent I remember I was lucky enough to see the movie Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears in the late 1980’s on Cable and it blew me away, I had no idea till then that Russians at least in Moscow lived lives not very different my own here in the states. It was a revelation.
That would make an interesting documentary, comparing Western movies produced during the cold day with actual reality.
The anthem and montage outro is very moving. It shows what the Soviet Union was supposed to be and sometimes was, at its best.
Call me crazy but I've always liked the Soviet/Russian National Anthem.
@@Fiedman the Soviet anthem is beautiful. Politics aside, it's hard to not appreciate a good piece of music!
@@dengxiaopinggaming5500 unironically I listen to some of that while running.
It's surprisingly encouraging
Yeah, though 99.999999999999% of the time it was a shitty hellhole. Actually, scratch that, it was shit 100% of the time.
@@metropolisatlantas you lived in USSR to know this, or just heard stories?
I couldn’t help thinking of that scene in ‘The Hunt for Red October’ where all the crew start singing the Soviet National Anthem, and couldn’t help contrasting which how we used to have the US National Anthem play just before the start of programming every day in the morning.
Ah yes, before all night 'infomercials' existed.
Satire and humor were actually quite widespread in Soviet media, at least by 70-ies and later. Communist ideology and top officials were untouchable, of course. But ineffective local bureaucracy and low quality of consumer goods and services were a fair game for comedians.
Hey The Cold War channel,
The montage with the Soviet anthem as audio background made this video the best so far.
I immediately thought of The Hunt for Red October when I saw it.
it's the real thing
Such a great anthem
Don't forget to turn off your television!
@@alecjones4135 Compare 1930s Nazi Germany Vs 2020s Communist Chinazi IN YOUR NEXT VIDEO Project before it's too late
Correction, Soviet Union never used PAL as a broadcast TV signal system, it always was SECAM like in France.
I grew up in south Lithuania, near the Polish border. In significant southwestern part of Lithuania (including Kaunas city) people were able to watch Polish TV. It was good thing, because Polish TV was still more free and better. I guess that in Estonia the same was with Finnish TV. Also I remember, that my gradpa listened to "Radio Liberty". Soviets tried to block signals of this radio, but attempts wasn't extremely successful - people were still able to listen.
In USSR when anthem play on the TV, it was time to turn TV off so didn't start fire and burn whole Khruschevka down.
What do you mean?
The comment is regarding the quality of Soviet-built TVs. They had a habit overheating and catching fire.
I think TVs in general back in the 80s at least were at risk of overheating. I don't think the anthem was used for that purpose but the "Не забудьте включить телевизор" prompt was used for that instead :) Polish TV channels also did the same thing paired with a loud sound. Even TV channels in the UK at that time would also advise their viewers to shut off their sets - it's just that they said it calmly.
UK: "Please, turn off your television."
SU: "DON'T FORGET! TURN OFF THE TV!"
This.
"It is always a much easier task to educate uneducated people than to re-educate the mis-educated"
- Herbert M. Shelton
Mis-educated, means Democrat
@@pauld9561 and liberal
@@pauld9561 what does that have to do with anything though? don't be so reactionary
Re-education is happening right now in America, right before our very eyes.
That's what the left wing MSM hear in the U.S. is doing today.
Disappointed to learn they didn’t have OurTube.
@fa q I believe France has Breadtube.
@@westrim Hon! Hon! Hon! Hon! Baguette, baguette!
@@TheCimbrianBull excellent French
@fa q I guess they would have called it something like "ВСВС" likе "Всесоюзная Видеосеть", and the people would shorten it to "Vasya"...
Nor OnlyComrades
Love the humor of this show, "Two things that go together like peanut butter and jelly and decaf coffee and the trash.".
Brilliant
If Viktor Belenko doesn't deliver that snack-box from Hokkaido, Japan, flying a MiG25, I ain't buying . . . . that's the perfect Japan-USSR-Cold War-tie-in.
Capitalism and oppression
I expected to hear "Like Lenin and the Party".
@@mrpersianality6363 Yeah, GULAG and human rights.
Would be nice to see an episode about how people from the Eastern Bloc viewed non-Eastern Bloc TV but I think it would be too short and the impact of foreign TV was just about the same as shortwave broadcasts from the West so I assume it wouldn't be too different from the shortwave radio episode. Anyway, aside from how the East Germans preferred West German TV, especially for news and current affairs, there is a story of how Estonians from the south of the country travelled north to watch Emmanuelle premiere on Finnish television on June 24, 1987 :)
Yes, I have fond memories of watching Finnish tv in Estonia. We were especially interested in movies and some tv series.
Mao Ang Plano,
Abay ka o langyaw? Unsa bahin ang plano?
Anyways, i expect the channel to probe deeper about cold war including eastern bloc mass media outside ussr.
@daniel halachevYes, like Sandmännchen.
As a kid in Czechoslovakia I could watch Austrian TV. Most popular were advertisments for toys/videogames. It was like a window into another world. Also remember watching Knight Rider, Star Trek and Tron :). Didnt understand a thing, but it all looked so cool.
Paradoxically, first time I saw a Mickey Mouse cartoon was on Soviet Tv, which was broadcasted locally for soldiers occupying our country after 1968.
Well, near end of USSR there was lot of foreign programmes coming in on TV - like MTV from America and also some drama shows like Beverly Hills etc. It was dubbed over in Russian, or subtitled. But dialogue didn't really matter much - images said so much more.
I've read the annoying beep at the end was done deliberately to wake people up who had fallen asleep in front of their tv to have them turn their sets off. Soviet television sets that still used valves instead of transistors were known as fire hazards, so they needed to be shut off in order for them to cool down.
A few people have already mentioned Radio Moscow, but I would like to see an episode on the external propaganda efforts of the USSR (aka R. Moscow). I listened to Radio Moscow from 1978 or so, when I got my first shortwave radio. I was barely in high school at the time, but I found it very interesting. Their signal was very strong and it could be heard almost continuously day and night, at least on the west coast. One of their broadcast antenna was in Cuba and I believe they had a regular AM signal beamed to South Florida. At any rate, the programming was interesting. I continued to listen, although not as regularly, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the name of their shortwave station was changed to the Voice of Russia, which survived until about 2014. I was somewhat amused at some point in the late 1990's when I saw that Joe Adamov, who spoke perfect English and was a constant presence on R. Moscow, was on U.S. TV with Phil Donahue!
17:11 "that guy in the poorly-tailored suit" is a legend of Soviet and Russian television Igor Kirillov, unfortunately he passed away 2 days ago.
F
In 1967 SECAM color TV standard was adopted in cooperation with France
I seriously disagree with the premise of 'no criticism of the system or the government was allowed on the TV'. I think it was impossible to miss programs like 'Fitil' (Matchlight) when researching the material for this episode. And Fitil was nothing but criticism of the system.
This channel is very much biased, what else did you expect? 🤷
yeah lol, more like U.S.A and propaganda = peanut butter and jelly
Fitil (and many other actually - people like Raikin, Zhvanetsky, programs like "Vokrug Smecha" ("Around the Laughter") etc) critizised not the system, but just some people and events, which are officially called as "isolated shortcomings" ("отдельные недостатки"). But such programs never critisized entire soviet system and it's general problems. Not until start of Perestroika (when programs like "Vzgliad" ("The Sight") and "600 secons" appears), but this is another story.
@@YuryMar so critique of 'parts of the system' is not critique 'of the system'? Critique of individual people in the government is not critique of the government? It is not how logic works.
@@CruelDwarf it's like saying the system is not at fault at all, it's the leaders that are ( this is literally true for any and all systems of governance ). It's not really about how a totalitarian system specifically prevents any form of escape or alternatives for people dissatisfied with the status quo. Any system works when the values of the people reflect the mode of government action, what the people can handle should be handled by them alone, what cannot but is still a necessity is taken up by either the government or by organizations. I afraid this current bourgeoisie capitalist system is while not as bad, is definitely likely to only grow to be even more totalitarian thanks to big tech, big government and mega corporations taking stronger hold of people's lives.
Second comment: one very bad thing about state media is how it deifies the leader and acts like he can literally do no wrong
As a Syrian I experienced this first hand with our media, I also saw it in pro-Gaddafi and pro-Saddam media, it's utterly ridiculous they blatantly say stuff like "our glorious leader" and talk about him like he's the greatest to ever live
And no other inner outlet dares to say otherwise or go against the state narrative, nor are any outlets allowed to criticize the foreign policy of the nation
It is sad that American mainstream media has taken to deifying certain leftist persons and movements.
@@daveallentown6868 *certain persons
Have some self-awareness and self-criticism please instead of just pointing fingers elsewhere
The deification of the leader by state tv is to balance the flak the leader is getting from the enemy's media which invariably describes him as an evil murderous dictator. Saddam Hussein , Gadafi , Assad etc all fall into this category.
@@Game_Hero I am unable to point my finger at myself because no one wants to deify me, no matter how hard I plead and cajole. And in the spirit of self-criticism, I will admit I hold a minority view: the rest are busy being brainwashed. But on a final note, which is serious, I consider it disrespectful to the masses who lived behind the Iron Curtain to compare their experiences to those of contemporary Americans. Nonetheless, I do believe concerted, cross-institutional forces are at work in our western societies that are calculated to lead to socialist/ communist outcomes. If you believe this is an inappropriate forum to express such points of view, do let me know.
venezuelan here, same, specially regarding that dead SOB chavez, jesus christ i kid you not, they prayed to him once on national TV
I love that you used Time, Forward! by Svirdov. The movie may be dumb propaganda but its a great score from a composer so good that the composer's of the original metal gear solid theme "sampled" one of his songs to make it.
Which MGS track uses samples from there?
@@namesurname624 it wasn't this one. It was this track. czcams.com/video/8JL4JXEv-RY/video.html
Its even used as a news intro in channel 1's "Vremia" , though they aint reliable.
Fun thing: In the 1990s, my neck of woods in eastern Finland only got the YLE 1 and 2 TV channels over the air. (Which are cool. And remain cool.) I was green with envy with the folks who had cable TV, because they also got the Mainos-TV 3, which had all of the cool series at the time. HOWEVER. We could pick up the Karelian TV broadcasts. In black and white (some SECAM/PAL format incompatibility I think). With, obviously, Russian voiceover. So I had some cool bloody time watching completely incomprefuckinghensible episodes of Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers.
I saw SOME of those episodes when MTV3 actually became available in the region.
[...oh shit it's available in Disney+, WHAT.]
Oh! Oh! Here's a good one.
Estonian folks figured out how to rejigger their SECAM TVs for Finnish PAL colour broadcasts.
They received some Mainos-TV 3 broadcasts. Featuring ads with Väinö Purje, "Väiski from the Kesko store chain".
Soviet government had to send some government propaganda out. According to them the guy was OBVIOUSLY a CIA plant. NOBODY can have that much food on display at any given moment. RIDICULOUS.
This led to some govermental meeting of minds where the president of Finland, Urho Kaleva Kekkonen, went "ok maybe we tone down those transmitters soonish I guess".
Ushanka show's take on this is great too.
Hello, fellow Sergei fan!
Soviet cinema was incredible. The Grammer of cinema was invented by a soviet citizen.
War and peace is a great film. In addition, the soundtrack of two Soviet films is great: grassland, dear grassland，and Singing turbulent youth。
ПОЛЮШКО- ПОЛЕ，Песня о тревожной молодости,This is their Russian name
Come and See is still one of the greatest anti-war films out there.
I liked the earlier videos' background where you placed 2 photos of each of the leaders of US and USSR at the time of the beginning of the event your talking about on the wall (Truman-Stalin or Eisenhower-Kruschcev etc)
Can you imagine doing it for a post cold war series:
Putin - Clinton
Putin - Bush
Putin - Obama
Putin - Trump
Putin - Biden
Putin - ?
Ditto but they’ve been bouncing around a lot. Pretty sure they batch record this and stopping to swap photos might be a pain in the ass
@@badluck5647 or Elizabeth-Stalin to Elizabeth-Putin 🤣
But this time there was a Soviet TV logo in one of these frames. Seems more relevant to me.
@@badluck5647 Putin-Putin
That soviet outro should be at the end of every episode talking about the soviet union. Also, too bad you didn't talk about the anecdote about why there is a beeping noise at the end of it.
Don't forget to turn off your television!
I am from Eastern Europe and my mother told me, that this was a warning to wake up people who fell asleep watching TV, old Soviet TV's were prone to overheating and were a fire hazard if left through the night. Text says "Don't forget to turn off your television!"
@@liveforever141 I used to live in Belfast. I remember in the 60s and 70s having to turn off the TV for the same reason and if I remember right, we also had messages about doing it for a long time.
@@paulohagan3309 maybe that was just a thing with old TV sets then, both in the West as in the East. I do not really know as I grew up with TV made in late 1990's. We had no real problem with it.
@@liveforever141 Yes, I think you're right about old technology. The old sets in the early 60s had lots of problems.
At the time we were behind a small mountain in Belfast and with the technology at the time we couldn't receive the second channel because the mountain was blocking the signal.
We used to go to my Grandparents in the countryside 70km away and see a few programs we couldn't get because we were only a few km from the antenna and the mountain was in the way ...
Very good handling of numbers at minute 14:50. TV in US 97% in all houses in 1977, in USSR 55 million in a population of 257 million in 1975. The reality of TV's in US in 1977 is: population 216 million, 97% of that is 209.5 million and if in each house there are 4 people, gives 52.3 million TV's in the US just like the USSR approximately two years before (1975).
While watching your documentary I noticed a little error. The soviets used SECAM not PAL.
An interesting technical attribute of SECAM is it uses an FM modulation scheme.
SECAM is far superior for long distance transmission and a good choice for a country as large as the Soviet Union was. But is also impossible (at the time) to modify or mix in different program material along the way. I don’t know of this was done on purpose to keep the central government in control or it was just a technical tradeoff at the time.
You can read a simple explanation on Wikipedia -- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECAM under the Disadvantages section.
On a lighter note the three major transmission systems around the world are PAL, NTSC and SECAM.
Each have their sarcastic alternate acronyms
NTSC (American) - Never Twice Same Color
PAL (German) -- Picture Always Lousy
SECAM (French) -- Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method
Rumor has it that the French didn’t want to use the German invention PAL
I noticed that too. The whole eastern bloc as far as I know, used secam. And France.
In 70'ies many families in the USSR still did not have a TV set at home since they were very expensive, and people needed to put by money for several months. The cheapest TV set "Record" costed 200 roubles. Most of people earned less than 200 roubles a month. My mom bought her first TV set just in 1983 when I was 8. In 1982, when Brezhnev died, the school obliged children to watch his funeral. Those, who didn't have a TV set, had to go to their classmates to wathc the funeral. About third of my classmates didn't have a TV set at home that year.
Nice video! Only one tech note:
The 625 line standard is called "CCIR" (Comité consultatif international pour la radio) and it was created in 1948. It had a better quality compared the 405 line system used in UK or the 525 line system used in USA. "PAL" is a color decoding system, invented by Telefunken years later
I collect vintage TVs and I own a Rubin 714. I think that soviet technological products were very reliable, because the internal parts are basically military grade. Every time I fix a soviet radio or a TV i have to replace only a couple of parts.
Isn't there another standard called SECAM? In addition to NTSC/PAL?
@@VisibilityFoggy yeah, it was invented in France
The Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc (including the GDR) actually used the French-originated SECAM instead of PAL from West-Germany. The two systems are very similar, but SECAM is a little more robust against interference on long distance reception. It can, however, pick up false colour information since the colour carrier is always on whereas PAL simply uses bog standard black-and-white mode when the broadcast is actually black-and-white. So that did lead to problems when colour broadcasting was not yet the full-time standard. Later the PAL/SECAM issue became obsolete when tv sets with multi-tuners came available. It was the reason why after communism fell the Eastern countries could quickly switch over to PAL instead of SECAM. PAL was easier to use in the studio. In fact, the eastern countries did use PAL internally, only converting to SECAM at the transmitter site.
XDDD The end got me!
Didn't thought you guys would include it, but you did
The film in the Soviet Union, Moscow does not believe in tears, is very famous in China.war and peace are also great.
😍😍😍
That ending was a delightful little surprise lol. Thank you for another very interesting video!
Stay well out there everybody, and God be with you, friends. ✝️ :)
Adriano Celentano and Ornella Muti on Soviet tv, that I didn't know... But Italian movies and music were widely appreciated. Our music stars from the Festival of Sanremo of the 80s are still legendarily successful in Russia and Ukraine to this day!
I will remember that one girl who sang “boys boys boys” for as long as I live. What was her name,Sabrina I think?
@@pyatig Sabrina Salerno. Believe me, she's far hotter today at 50-plus than she was then. Check her bikini shots.
Why not? They were in soviet cinemas as well.
I went to the Soviet Union (and several other European countries):as an exchange student in 1989. Was an amazing experience
You can go to north Korea if you really liked it
What was particularly good about the union back in the day to you?
The lack of racism?
Style of education?
Or hospitality of the Russian people?
@@necrosteel5013 Hospitality of the people, the teenager/20 something's of 1989.
The monuments for the WW2 fallen were, too, very memorable
@@amirm3621 Nothing in common.
@@chepushila1 Actually, seeing DPRK brought back a lot of memories of early 90s Poland - dull, drab, monochrome even, sooty, but the people seemed optimistic but unsettled. I could have done without it.
My whole family grew up with Sovjet television and even I in the 90s grew up with them.
There was no evil in them whatsoever. There was never focus to badmouth other countries. Children’s shows are the most memorable and I still have fond memories of them.
Wdf are u talking about? News had nothing else but badmouth everything
@@bambinaforever1402
Western news yes,
As someone who was born in Odessa in 75 and been living in NY since 90 I can tell you that everything Soviet tv said about the west turned out to be true
Such as?
And TV in the West itself became propaganda. Such is the cycle.
"Everything". Including how the Communist system (which was never fully adopted by the Soviets themselves) would triumph in the West, gotcha. Cool.
Cough Yuri Bezmenov cough.
They were just hypocrites, then
And don't generalise the West like that, you've seen the least developed developed country and now take it to be as the standard
There was just one TV channel in Bulgaria until the 80's when a second channel was introduced on the national television. And there were just 2 radio "programs" - "Horizont" and "Hristo Botev". The state owned radio is still the most popular radio in Bulgaria.
Watching the Olympics I enjoyed when the CCCP won a sport, because they would play the Soviet Anthem. As national anthems go, the "Gosudarstvenny gimn SSSR" or The State Anthem of the Soviet Union, was one of the most enjoyable to listen to. Of course the lyrics were a tad to martial, or dare I say, "Soviet" for my ears, but the instrumental was rousing.
Information in Totalitarian Regimes, or in Democracies, and in the world at large are "products". In the Totalitarian Regimes it was a product designed by and for the Ruling Party. In a Democracy it is a product designed by viewer appeal, and is used primary to sell soap or automobiles. In the Totalitarian Regimes any information that is not conducive to the benefit of the Ruling Party is deleted. In the Democracies any information that will not sell newspapers, or garner viewer audience, is shoved onto a back pages, slotted for a less valuable viewing time, or is ignored completely.
The Truth can not be "fed" to us, the Truth can only recognized from a position of ignorance, and then earned only though effort, and this is why so few are Wise.
6:01 Soviet Central Television was actually broadcast using the French SECAM color encoding. This was also done in Eastern Bloc countries to prevent the people from watching Western European TV, which was broadcast in PAL. However, viewers in the East were able to buy PAL decoders, and thus could watch Western programs. This was commonly done in Estonia, where Finnish TV signals reached Tallinn.
1:50 Props for using the theme music from the program Время, which itself is from the movie "Time, Forward!", and was composed by Georgy Sviridov.
I love that tune in the end
That Soviet anthem was beautiful.
Russia has the same anthem till this day. Just the lyrics has been changed. Being no fan of the Soviet Union, I must admit that the tune is spot on for this type of the anthem/patriotic song, on par with Marseillaise
@@letecmig I don't like the French anthem and I speak French as my main language, though it's not my country. Soviet anthem was and still is the best ever produced. In fact, it's the only one I like, it's just so damn good. All the rest are boring.
@@MichaelDavis-mk4me absolutely best Anthem ever.
@@johnyanga8532 Not that the competition is fierce, I'm gonna be honest.
@@MichaelDavis-mk4me i'm french but yes, the soviet anthem is THE best one ! La Marseillaise is so... creepy
As a little kid in the waning years of the Soviet Union (detente) I used to listen to my dad's shortwave radio at night, by far the loudest signal on the bands was Radio Moscow, followed by The Voice of America. Of course there was the ever present "Russian Woodpecker" hammering away across the spectrum during the night. When I got my first Ham license, it could usually wipe out the 40 meter band! LOL! It was gone by the 90's, replaced apparently by something more high tech..... And quiet!
Yes i also rember that. I don't know where you lived but radio Moscow was the easiest to listen, deustch welle, we also had the Russian woodpecker all over the place.. but in the 80' we don't know what it was. Also the buzzer, another sovjet broadcast. Some romanian broadcast. And early data transmission. I still have the old hammarlund hq-180a that i used in thoses days.
@@xminusone1 I used to have a mint condition Hammarlund hq-170a! 😁 I currently have several shortwave radios and still listen to the international broadcast bands, still a few stations out there, the ever present "Radio Havana" and both "Radio China) Taiwan and mainland China. Last week I caught "Radio Slovakia" also occasionally Romania. Also still a few pirate stations just below the 40 meter Ham band! Lately I listen to an AM station on 1700 out of Tijuana "Heraldo Radio", they play 80's top 40, pop/rock etc. 😁 All the best to you! 😉
The end video show Everyone is happy. Miner happy,industrial worker happy,farmer happy. A lot of smile. Love it
A couple of ponts:
Most importantly, you seem to imply that "The West™" is just the USA. In many other Western countries (in fact most in Europe), there are public TV stations without advertising, entirely funded by either the government or some form of licence fee. It wasn't until the late 1950s in the UK for example that commercial TV was even allowed, and even then to this day product placement is pretty much forbidden, and sponsors have practically zero say in how most commercial TV is made.
Also, you mentioned "PAL" -- firstly, PAL refers to the method of transmitting colour images. When it's just black and white, it's simply the "625-line system". Secondly, the Soviet Union used SÉCAM for colour transmissions, rather than PAL. A SÉCAM set could receive PAL transmissions and vice versa, but would not be able to render the colour. For this reason, East Germany also opted to use SÉCAM whilst FRD used PAL, but by the 1970s the DDR government recognised "Republikflucht bei Fernseher" (escape by television) and began to manufacture sets compatible with both PAL and SÉCAM.
Great video! As a child of the seventies I remember quite well the Prerestroika years and I recall french newspapers writing about a 5 minutes daily soviet TV program called something like "chaos in the union", where a very popular journalist would focus on the country's problem. I remember it because that kind of program could only be made during Perestroika but the journalist himself was actually very critical of Perestroika... Did you notice that during your research?
Using soviet broadcast at the end was brilliant👍😂
I hope you do this kind of creativity more often
This was really interesting. Honestly this video explains more than really meets the eye here! Great content and great channel
The biggest hit show was “The Glorious Production of Tractor Carburetors Show of Shows!”
My favorite show was shoe shoelace. Shoe and shoelace one is meaningless with out the other
Wilk i zajec was decent too. I used to have a VHS tape at my grandmother's house with that show because they stopped airing it in Poland (they just broadcast it in Russian, straight up) later on into the 90s and I liked watching it when I came for summer vacation.
Love the music video in the end! Ingenious! :D One example of absurdities of Soviet era television making was the decision of the Estonian Soviet TV to start making and showing weird advertisements in the 80s. They advertised all kind of services and products (which, sometimes, where nowhere to be had). One might ask, why did they do it, as there was no real need for the state-owned companies to advertise, there as no market incentive to be won. Well, the reason is quite simply put: Finland. As people in Tallinn and northern Estonia in general had access to the Finnish TV and where very actively watching it (despite the states efforts of banning it and disturbing the signal), the TV makers where trying to do stuff that was similar to the things they saw on Finnish TV, thus also trying to ad TV-ads. I'm pretty sure these ads are now also viewable on CZcams...
The Ushanka show channel has one or two videos about that.
In Czechoslovakia, there also weird commercials being produced. I know about ones for milk, cabbage, sausages, state owned lottery and many other stuff. Another weird thing about the food commercials was that, since there wasn't any competition, there wasn't any brand mentioned in the commercial, therefore the message was essentially just "Drink more milk." or "Eat cabbage" etc.
I work as an audio engineer in the TV business and have had many run ins with russian and soviet made microphones. the oktava mk 12 was and is still a widely used microphone. the unit is typically "russian" built. it does what it is supposed to do and is as durable as a tank . other high quality systems are the "Soyuz" line of professional microphones. extremly well crafted and rival the top tiers in production audio from the west. i remeber working with a russian, ex soviet ENG cameraman and he had at KT 190 in his living room. For those who dont know - it is basically a sony betacam copy and looks ecxactly like its japanese counterpart. even the most hardcore communist must be true to his heart, that you just cant beat the asians in electronics - but instead of just buying a sony , they redesigned the unit , and because of " why not" reasons put a betacam recorder on the back.
This is super interesting for me, a former TV engineer who worked for Thomson CE R&D. Merci beaucoup, sir.
I found it Interesting, starting @19:14 that the U.S. the programing day in that period started with the Test Pattern and "The National Anthem" too, but mostly that there were no images of Stalin in the montage (even though "The Great Patriotic War" was shown) although Lenin was shown frequently, Comrade Stalin was conspicuous by his absence....
They should make a DVD box set of the best of Soviet TV I’m sure that would make a killer in sales
Everything, what was worth watching -- republished in DVDs years ago.
All junk
Loved the outro. Makes me miss those fun days back in the gulag.😪
I used to watch old Soviet-Era News intro Channels on You Tube all the time. Something about them (And the Soviet Union) I found absolutely fascinating. I appreciate this channel and this episode so much !!!
U can go to north korea if u re fascinated with dump like ussr. I was born in that toilet country - nothing fun. Robbed of childhood
ya always been curious about all this. its always fascinated me that russians have seen some of the same things we have, but others not at all while we seem to share a lot of classical stories and mythology. guess this is true to some degree with many others, but seems kind of distinct in its own way.
Hey The Cold War channel, i think if you can post the sources have been used for the episodes, that would have been great for reading/learning more about the topics. Thank you so much! :)
I've seen the outro before. That slightly misshapen star gets me every time.
so authentic. Bravo!
I've always been intrigued by propaganda, and it's effectiveness. I'd also love to see one of these on American, hyper-patriotic cold war era propaganda. Something I feel has done a considerable amount of damage to us in the long run because anything meaningful for the common good of the citizens of the US gets lambasted by our elites as sOcIaLiSm/CoMmUnIsM. However, I do find it fascinating that we have a large portion of the population that seems to look at _Red Dawn_ as if it was a documentary or something. Also, just the way Hollywood and the military intersect and coordinate is something that still goes on. Military incorporation into sports events (expensive, wildly unnecessary, flyovers and all). Copaganda. Etc.
It really is impressive how we've been able to manufacture consent for a lot of the stuff our nation does domestically and OCONUS, and how that's changed over time. But for the sake of the channel, I'd assume that we'd just stick within the confines of the actual cold war.
The stigma to socialism seemed to work out pretty favorable to the US economy.
Wolverines!
@fa q Real wages were on the rise until covid hit, the price of rent is going up in every developed country, and healthcare cost are high because people are living longer.
Meanwhile, every country that embraced a socialist economic system collapsed with the exception of Cuba where everyone is equally poor.
Just watch modern American TV, it's still pure propaganda. As a Canadian, I just can't watch their TV, it's so horribly biased.
@@MichaelDavis-mk4me Most TV here seems to be sensationalized at best, and partisan propaganda at worst.
I was born in The Czechoslovakia in 1985, exactly 4 years before the Velvet revolution, so I could not remember the real life both in The Czechoslovakia as well as in The USSR. I was 6, when The USSR colapsed. I am highly interested in the real life behind the Iron curtain (mainly in The Czechoslovakia and The Soviet union), I learn Russian and I am collector of the stuff made in The CS and The USSR. And now back to business. I would like to point out, I am not comunist. The Soviet TV served as the propaganda tool, in deed. If I say "A", I should say "B", so here we go! I have a lot of Soviet movies, cartoons, interviews, documents, even New Year show etc., and honestly sayd: There were also TV - broadcast programs without propaganda, really! Yes, of course, You are right - at least in general. Greetings from Prague to all, stay safe and be healthy, take care!
I actually do remember TV in Czechoslovakia up until 1986 when my family escaped to Australia.
It wasn't all that amazing to as there were only two TV channels, 1 and 2. Channel 2 was just a delayed broadcast of channel 1 for the most part.
TV shows were actually pretty good and I remember them very fondly, such as the fantasy Arabela and the sci-fi Návštěvníci.
Propaganda wasn't actually all that prevalent by 1986 as the communists knew the while mess was coming to an end and probably just gave up.
There wasn't much western stuff but you would still get the occasional US film or TV show, provided it wasn't anything anti-communism.
The 625 line standard isn’t known as “PAL”. The Soviet Union used the D/K black and white standard. Later SECAM was used to transmit color.
another great episode. thank you
This was one of the best produced episodes yet.
Thanks CWC !
I love that you use the time forward rumba by Sviridov as your background music because it introduced the news for Soviet people.
I was thinking it sounded an awful lot like tthe Soviet news intro. Guess it really was that
Me: Wow, he is wrapping it up with four minutes to go?
30 Seconds later: Ha! Brilliant!
LOL !!! The images at minute 11 belong to a popular italian movie of the 80 ( the girl Is Ornella Muti, the man Is Adriano Celentano; now I undestand why Ornella went to one Putin's party some years ago). So I guess that over the Iron Curtain people knew italian stuff. So funny.
Your documentaries are fascinating! And the Bell Button bits are some of the finest around (million dollar idea: annual "The Cold War" Bell Button bit montage video?!). The Soviet End-of-Broadcast snippet is a brilliant inclusion.
Don't forget to turn off your television!
That sign off at the end is just a masterwork of propaganda
Great content. Love the educational value.
I grew up in Denmark in a part of the country, where we could pick up both East and West German tv along with Swedish. The East Germans broadcasted in SECAM, so we weren't able to pickup DFF in colour but with sound. Most of the GDR could pickup West German tv, but not Rügen in the north east and Dresden in the south east. These areas was known as Tal der Ahnungslosen (Valley of the Clueless) and the West German public service station ARD (Das Erste) was jokingly referred to as Ausser (except) Rügen & Dresden.
At the end of the video, I became a patriotic comrade aiming to restore the Soviet Union.
You even look like a young Stalin XD
Red Salute Comrade 💕
Reading the anti capitalist scum news with pistol held to head😂
Khorosho, Tovarich! Now all you have to do is vote for the Amerikanskii Democratic party...😏
@@charlestaylor253 wow that's taking a joke to far lol
You can always just turn on CNN. To get a feel what it was like.
Or MSLSD
This hour has 22 minutes is 100 percent still on the air
The Soviet union used SECAM NOT PAL. SECAM and PAL are color TV encoding formats. The 625 line monochrome format you mistakenly referred to as PAL is CCIR. Pretty much all of Europe and the Soviet union (Britian and France had their own oddball 405 and 819 line TV formats ) started out with 625 line monochrome CCIR in the mid 60's to mid 70's as the rest of the world started trying to catch up to the US (which introduced the NTSC color standard in 1953) Soviet and soviet friendly countries (Cough France Cough) adopted SECAM, while almost everyone else adopted PAL. (Brittan almost adopted/created 405 line NTSC and there were some 625 line NTSC countries.) NTSC was also universally adopted in North America (including Cuba), parts of South America and Asia.
In soviet Russia, TV watches you!
In Soviet Russia, radio listens to you.
@@badluck5647 In the West today, lots of CCTV cameras watch a lot of people 24/7.
I would love to see an episode on dissident movements within the Soviet Union during the cold war
In the video there is at a certain point a scene from the movie “Il Bisbetico domato” (The Taming of the Scoundrel) from 1980 starring Adriano Celentano and Ornella Muti.
It is a comedy movie loosely based upon William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.
Great episode. The best. I like the way you ended the broadcast in what I assume is Soviet sty;e. LOL Keep up the good work!
I had no idea CNN was around so long…
LOL that last bit, the Soviet song. Reminded me of the days when broadcast closed with the national anthem - sans that third verse - and all those glorious American scenes. I was cracking up! I miss the days of straight-up propaganda.
Love the end part of the video !
The most exciting thing about watching Soviet TV was wondering if your set was going to explode.
Met an older soviet man in the UK. He said they were not allowed to watch western movies but they saw a lot of Indian movies. Bollywood was very popular in the USSR as India was not a western ally and often sided with the soviets.
Soviet people watched ten times more American films (in Soviet cinemas and on Soviet TV) than Americans watched Soviet films. On the issue of “censorship” and how it actually works.
Now western censure is much stronger and systematic then USSR could ever achieve.
My Mum and Dad used to love Koronation Prospekt, the story of everyday working class citizens in Marxchester.
Nothing like the workers ration of Comrade Bettyskya's borsch hotpot and the weekly ale delivery to wash it down with whilst saluting the Stakhanovite efforts of Regional Director Barlowski's Number 17 Textile Factory.
Nice topic! It would be great if you make another video about television and radio and their influence in daily lifestyle in other eastern block countries, like Cuba, China and Vietnam. Thanks!
Serious question: what was the percentage of television ownership in the USSR versus that in the United States or Western Europe in the early years (i.e., late 1940s and 1950s)? Does anyone have reliable figures on this?
You could probably make a terrific video on the subject of tedium, with the question, Why is so much propaganda (East and West) often so boring? (If you've ever known a psychopath then you know lies don't have to be boring - just the opposite.) Amazon Prime several years ago tried to expand its programming by adding old Soviet TV shows (without even mentioning "Russian with subtitles," or that the images were fuzzier than fog and the content static.) Soviet entertainment TV seemed to consist of announcing upcoming and recently past action without ever showing anything. (I briefly watched a show which included a multi-ship pirate battle - but no pirates, no ships, not a drop of water, just this blond kid excitedly telling what he'd just seen.) Following this method I could do all three Matrix movies in my living for about $50. Post Soviet Russian TV is a great improvement, better image quality, some actual action (Lada car chases) but mostly just the boorish star getting drunk, being accused of being drunk, admitting or denying it, and then the hangover scene where the hero is woken up to be congratulated that he's solved the crime. Dogs are included more often than a love interest.
I suspect what will derail China's recent turn toward communist repression will be when the Chinese find out they aren't all still getting richer and the media is becoming boring.
You forgot the Soviet Union's favorite cartoon cat & mouse duo: "Worker & Parasite".