‘Vremya’ Gets a New Look on Soviet TV

Soviet television has announced a move that would be the equivalent of the White House firing the heads of the three American network news divisions and replacing them all with a single figure whose background is a combination of “Nightline” and “Late Night With David Letterman.”

Eduard Sagalaev, a young, mustachioed producer and news executive who began a program in 1986 called “The Twelfth Floor”--the first really innovative show in the otherwise long and painfully dull history of Soviet television--has taken over as the chief editor of “Vremya,” the evening news program watched every night by 150 million people.

Changes at such a high level of Soviet television originate with the ruling Politburo, namely ideology chief Vadim Medvedev. The move was clearly another step in Mikhail Gorbachev’s campaign to revitalize the Soviet press.

At a time when some Soviet television programs, such as “View,” Leningrad’s “600 Seconds” and “Before and After Midnight,” are showing segments on everything from local corruption to teen-age prostitutes to the sewage pouring into Lake Baikal, “Vremya” has remained a relic, a program frozen in time--Leonid Brezhnev’s time.

The Communist Party newspaper Pravda, which sells 11 million copies a day, is a virtual secret compared with the scope of “Vremya’s” audience. Viewers have almost no choice but to watch it at 9 p.m.--”Vremya” airs on every channel except one that shows foreign-language lessons.

“The world comes to the Soviet people mainly through the television screen,” writes Ellen Mickiewicz, whose book on Soviet television, “Split Signals,” examines the shifts in programming here. “The head of (state television) found that 90% of the Soviet population consider ‘Vremya’ their main source of information.”

Recently, such newspapers as Literaturnaya Gazeta have run many letters from readers complaining that “Vremya” is deadly dull and lacks competition. “ ‘Vremya’ is an official program, and personally, I think time has passed it by,” said Anatoli Lysenko, the producer of “View.”

Gorbachev and his leadership circle are the first Kremlin regime to understand the capabilities of television, and there are likely to be changes in the way “Vremya” informs and persuades its audience. As Gorbachev’s closest confidant in the Politburo, Alexander Yakovlev has said, “The TV image is everything.”

Sagalaev replaces Gregori Similyov, who has been running the news division of Soviet state television for five years.