Types and popularity of Russian series without communism

[Bulgarian Lion]

At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, Russian culture experienced its heyday, giving writers such as Tolostoy, Dostoyevsky, ballets such as Swan Lake and others, being defined as the best or at least one of the best in the world. but after the Bolshevik coup it declined, and to this day it has not regained its lost position, nor will it ever regain it. I am interested in how, if Russia did not fall under communism, what particular Russian genres of TV series would develop - I can think of series about the Cossacks, westerns about the conquest of Siberia and the Russian Far East (they would rather be called "Siberian series "), musical Little Russian (that's what the Ukrainians were called) series and others - because Ukrainian music is one of the best in Europe, compared by its connoisseurs to Italian, to what extent would they be popular - would they be the most famous outside today , of course, the other Orthodox countries, Slavic countries like Czechoslovakia (which without communism would also be a single country) and others, whether they would repeat the success of Russian culture in the 19th - 20th centuries, whether they would repeat or approach the success of Russian culture in the last decades of Czarist Russia, if so - would they have become more famous than today's Turkish and Hollywood soap operas, and to what extent would they have been able to compete with them? And if so, in which city of the Russian Empire would there be a world-famous Russian television festival? To what extent would the series feature actors from the national fringes of Russia, and if so, what nationalities would predominate among them?

 

[CHKeeley]

I think some clarification is needed on what this hypothetical Russian Empire would look like politically before this question can really be answered. I can easily envision a world in which television under the Tsar is as tightly controlled as it was under the Soviet state, but if the Tsar has been sidelined by an effective liberal Duma then maybe the repressive arm of state censorship is less burdensome. So on and so forth.

 

[Bulgarian Lion]

I can easily envision a world in which television under the Tsar is as tightly controlled as it was under the Soviet state

Even before the revolution of 1905, the Russian Empire was an authoritarian, not a totalitarian state, unlike the USSR until Perestroika. And after 1905 it became a constitutional monarchy. And I mentioned that tsarist authoritarianism did not hinder the development of Russian culture, while Soviet totalitarianism crippled and provincialized it. Yes, for a long time there would be censorship regarding sex scenes, anti-religious propaganda, positive representation of infidelity and attacks on patriarchal society (war films could not have characters like Anka the machine gunner from "Chapaev"), but such taboos existed for decades and in Western cinema, which did not hinder its higher quality compared to the Soviet one.