“Don’t You Think That We’ve Reached an Extreme?”: The Issue of TV Broadcast Language in Soviet Latvia, 1955–71
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Riga, the capital of Soviet Latvia, was the first city in the USSR where television was created outside the Slavic linguistic space. This presented Soviet television with a brand new challenge of tackling bilingualism in the only available television programme, bringing with it viewer frustration as reflected in letters addressed to the studio. To relieve the republican television studios and their only programmes from the issue of bilingualism, in 1960, the CPSU called for the creation of a second republican programme – the retransmission of Moscow’s Central Television. This article tracks the development of the issue, focusing on the case study of a western-orientated, non-Slavic Soviet republic where negotiations regarding the place of Russian in a given field of public life took fifteen years, involving stakeholders of various levels. Thus, the article offers an opportunity to study certain aspects of Soviet nationality policies in the Soviet Western periphery under Khrushchev and Brezhnev from the viewpoint of a single, specified problem.
Source: Nationalities Papers
DOI: 10.1017/nps.2025.14
Author: Toms Zariņš
Institution: University of Latvia
Language: English
Topic: Soviet and Russian History
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W4408157751