‘Videotape’: How the VHS Tape Helped Topple Communism

    As was recently reported in Hot Air and Breitbart, I am organizing an Anti-Communist Film Festival for the fall of 2026 in Washington, D.C. I’m also doing a series on Hot Air about the films I’d like to include. The enthusiastic response has been great, although it’s all going to boil down to raising enough money and finding sponsors willing to back the event.

    One person I’d like to have as a speaker is Oana Godeanu-Kentworthy. Kentworthy is a professor of globalization, popular culture, and political ideologies in film and literature at Miami University.

    She is also the author of a great new book, Videotape. Videotape is an insightful history of the VCR and the VHS tape, from its invention in Japan to the last standing Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon.

    One of the most interesting chapters, “Viewing Parties and the Party,” recounts the history of the VHS in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. As the film Chuck Norris vs. Communism has explored, in the last two decades of the Cold War, there was a black market for American films smuggled into the communist countries. Kentworthy notes the irony of Nikita Khrushchev telling Richard Nixon in 1959 that Nixon’s boast of Americans having color TVs while the Soviets did not was nonsense – that the technology responsible for color television was irrelevant. In fact, it was that very technology that years later would help bring down the Soviet Union.

    As VCR players became more affordable and popular in the 1980s, more and more of them were smuggled into communist countries. Kenworthy describes the “viewing parties” that sprang up in the 1980s in the Eastern Bloc: 

    Crammed in small apartment buildings, a dozen or so people split the costs of the VCR rental or paid a small entry fee to the host of the party. News of the parties spread by word of mouth, from teenagers loitering behind the blocks of flats, to neighbors, relatives, or work colleagues. The most popular genres were films featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme or Bruce Lee, the action films of Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but also miniseries such as The Thorn Birds (1983), or Shogun (1980). Since most VHS tapes ran for two hours, and most feature films were 90 minutes, the space left at the end was filled with MTV music videos or even advertisements. Commercials were an unknown genre in the communist economy and, unlike in the West, where the videotape enabled viewers to fast-forward past the ads, in Eastern Europe, they functioned as sheer entertainment, since the products they promoted could not be found on the local market. 

In the Soviet Union, where the legal penalties against illegal videotapes were harsher than in Romania, people found even more creative ways to dodge the police. Instead of hosting in a private apartment, in Baku, Azerbaijan, grubby taxi minivans of Latvian manufacturing, popularly known as Rafiks, doubled as mobile screening rooms equipped with a VCR and a color TV. They’d tour the city and then show up in neighborhood streets at random times, like an American ice-cream truck, offering Soviet children a motley fare of Tom and Jerry cartoons, B-category action movies, and silly Hollywood comedies crudely dubbed in Russian, but immensely enjoyable anyway.

    In fact the Anti-Communist Film Festival is a similar sort of viewing party. Conservatives have been shut out of Hollywood and most of the popular culture for decades. This is our way of holding our own viewing party under the noses of the people who still hold on to socialism. As Denis Leary puts it in 1993’s Demolition Man, a movie about a rebellion against a totalitarian woke culture:

I’m the enemy. Because I like to think, I like to read. I’m into freedom of speech, the freedom of choice. I’m the kind of guy who likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder – “Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of BBQ ribs with the side order of gravy fries?” I want high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I wanna smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jell-O all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal? I’ve seen the future – you know what it is? It’s a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his pajamas drinking a banana-broccoli shake and singing ‘“I’m a Oscar Meyer Weiner.”