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Lecture "Arseniy Moiseenko. Video Boom in the USSR: The First Video Salons, Repertoires, and the Struggle for Monopoly"

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When
now
20.06.2026 · 17:00 · UTC+5
Where
Yekaterinburg
Ельцин Центр
Intent
Socializing
About

The lecture on the video boom in late USSR will discuss how tapes, video recorders, and the first salons changed the habit of watching movies. Arseniy Moiseenko will analyze pirate copies, attempts at state control, and the new viewer culture that emerged between home screens, queues for tapes, and perestroika. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the video recorder, once a rare technology, gradually became a symbol of new viewer freedom. Tapes passed from hand to hand, films were watched at home, at friends' places, in semi-legal salons, and improvised halls. Thus, alongside official film distribution, another media environment emerged - mobile, poorly controlled, and very attractive to viewers who wanted to see more than what the usual poster offered. Arseniy Moiseenko's lecture is dedicated to how the video boom changed late Soviet everyday life. The focus of the discussion will be on the first video salons, illegal distribution of tapes, repertoires of collective viewings, and the government's attempts to create its own video rental system. These processes unfolded during the years of perestroika when control over cultural consumption weakened, and the demand for foreign, genre, and previously inaccessible cinema grew rapidly.

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