The Kremlin celebrates New Year’s Eve on television: style evocative of a Greek wedding
Thanks to smotrim.ru, the internet broadcaster of state and commercial television in both live and call-up streaming modes, I was able to sample how Official Russia packaged New Year’s Eve for consumption by an audience numbering tens of millions who tuned in across the Federation.
Though there were amusing vintage Soviet films on offer the whole day long, the party really began only after midnight, following the President’s televised address to the nation. This speech, in which Putin spoke against a background of male and female warriors in the Southern Military District headquarters, has, to my surprise, been given reasonable coverage on the BBC and on Euronews this morning. Not as much coverage as Zelensky’s rant to his nation last night, but long enough for Putin to be allowed to score several points in his justification for the Special Military Operation. Accordingly, I will skip directly to the entertainment program which followed.
The show was constructed around a succession of popular songs delivered by well known Russian crooners, male and female, young and old. A string orchestra accompanied some numbers, a sole guitarist or pianist accompanied others. Professional dancers lent support to still others.
There were a number of presenters. Among them, I would call the lead a certain Andrei Malakhov, fifty years old, who is the television host of a scaled down version of this type of songfest every weekend. Andrei is a warm personality, a gallant, who regularly brings on stage many superannuated singers, mostly women, in the most kindly and respectful manner. When I say ‘old,’ I mean old: the well-known lady composer who performed last night as piano accompanist to one singer must be in her 90s; the whole nation was aware of her illness with Covid last year; judging by last night, she seems to have emerged invincible.
I was not a fan of Malakhov till yesterday, when I paid more attention to the social message that explains his success over many years, and which also explains what the New Year’s Eve show had to convey to the Russian nation. Yes, the personalities and their music are stale, overly sentimental at times. But what you saw on stage and in the audience was a mirror image of Russian society as a whole. Apart from the several svelte singers, apart from the professional dancers, who were by definition, physically very attractive, most of the folks on stage captured by the camera could be your aunts and uncles at a Greek or maybe at a Jewish wedding: overweight, a bit clumsy, but energized and shaking a leg whenever given a chance. They were determined to have a good time.
If I had to put German words to this homeliness, they would be Gemuetlich and freulich. Only the Russians don’t reach back to waltzes and polkas, but rather to their own alternation of two-steps and gypsy rhythms with their wild acceleration. A lot of oriental gestures among the middle aged women dancers. But these were not borrowings from belly dancing classes; this was the Russian answer to singles dancing in disco bars way back in the 1970s.
In the audience, there were many well known personalities from Russian state television’s leading shows, including its news services. Yevgeny Popov and his wife Olga Skabeyeva, presenters of Sixty Minutes, were picked up by the cameras at their table in the audience. Then there was the chief of all Russian television news programming, host of News on Sunday, Dmitry Kiselyov. Another familiar face in the audience was the talk show presenter Vladimir Solovyov.
However, the television journalists who were not only picked up by the cameras at their seats but who were given the microphone to make short presentations were of a different stripe, namely the best known war correspondents covering the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. They were flown in from the front for this show. I will name one here, Yevgeny Yevgenyevich Poddubny.
Here is where last night’s New Years Eve programming was different from any previous New Years show that I have seen on Russian television over the past twenty years or more: the two war correspondents each introduced four highly decorated heroes from this campaign and each was given the opportunity to address the audience with a New Years greeting .
The casting for the line-up of heroes was intended to make a point that President Putin has repeatedly stressed from the outset of the SMO. It was that Russia is a multi-national, multi-confessional and diverse country. Among the heroes given the microphone was a female officer from the Donbas who has distinguished herself in a tank division. There was also one fighter whose physiognomy was very Far Eastern. Perhaps he is a Mongol. After a brief ‘Happy New Year’ in Russian, he switched to his own (unidentified) language to complete the salutation.
Apart from the Heroes of the Russian Federation, with their beribboned medals pinned to their chests, who were given the microphone and who wished for victory in the war, for the safe return to their families of the reservists who had been called up and for the return to their home bases inside Russia of the contract soldiers, we saw from the camera scans of the audience a number of Russian female officers in uniform. Good looking ladies, all of them, in fighting trim, I might add. Perhaps I am reading too much into the subliminal message here, but I think it was an effective response to the Ukrainian allegations that the Russian armed forces are rapists one and all.
*****
Once the war is indeed over, it will be interesting to see what awaits Russia’s many decorated officers from the field, not to mention all other veterans of the SMO. In Russia’s last big war, in Afghanistan, the returnees came back to a country that was in economic and social disintegration. The disabled, the amputees all got a kick in the ass and little more. In the mid-90s they were used by the corrupt officials around Yeltsin as a cause for granting tax privileges to importers of luxury goods, who were then supposed to pass the savings along to NGOs supporting veterans. Of course, most of those funds were siphoned off to cronies of Yeltsin.
This time around may well be different. Judging by what I saw on television last night, it would be reasonable to expect that the valor of those fighting at the front will be rewarded by fast track promotion in the political and business elites of Russia. And for those who evaded the draft, those who ran away to Kazakhstan, Georgia and so on, the ignominy may well be an irremediable stain on their CVs.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023