Leningrad TV Show Thumbs Its Nose at Authority

Most Soviet TV is a wasteland of middlebrow entertainment, safe classics, old movies and stupefyingly dull propaganda. Though the live coverage of the Congress of People’s Deputies session in Moscow was a recent sensation, few regularly scheduled shows hold the attention of public-affairs-conscious Soviets. Among the few exceptions is a daily news-satire-investigation show called “600 Seconds.”

The 10-minute show has become Leningrad’s most-watched program in the 18 months it has been on the city’s single local channel. Employing a dizzyingly fast pace, ironic tone and the flashy personality of leather-jacketed star reporter Sasha Nevzorov, “600 Seconds” consistently challenges the official version of Soviet life.

The darkly handsome, wavy-haired Nevzorov shoves his cameras under the surface of life in Leningrad, pointing out the hypocrisy of higher-ups and the drabness of life for the lower-downs. The show’s existence on the cutting edge of glasnost doesn’t preclude it from continually exposing the shortcomings of Gorbachevian orthodoxy.

A former script writer and movie stunt man with no journalistic background, Nevzorov wore his trademark leather and a hunted look when encountered at a recent diplomatic function in Leningrad. Speaking through an interpreter, he said, “Everything I do is disliked by the majority of the leaders in the area. I risk my neck every time I go on the air.

“ ‘600 Seconds’ amounts to political action. I’m tolerated because I’m too difficult to remove. If glasnost were axed tomorrow, the ax would also come down on my neck--a real ax.”

There isn’t any equivalent to “600 Seconds” on national American TV. If Mike Wallace had a sense of humor, or Ted Koppel presented his political material with the pace and dash of a local sports reporter, or David Brinkley commented on the basic inadequacies of capitalism, America might have a “600 Seconds.”

As a counter clicks off the seconds in the upper right hand corner of the screen, Nevzorov talks speedily into the camera or narrates quick-cutting video reports of significant or trivial happenings. His diction is oblique, heavy with subtext “that all my viewers are intelligent enough to understand.”

The show veers quickly from gently satirical footage of happy-face events like a flower show to a slashing segment on a profiteering private-enterprise soap cooperative “which could only be operating by conniving with officials so high up they are immune from prosecution.” It seems that soap isn’t available in the state stores; it can be bought only from private cooperatives for several times the usual price.

Nevzorov covered a theater party for the city’s orphans by noting that the front rows of the theater were filled with the children of high officials. He briefly interviewed a Soviet who had emigrated to the West and returned for a visit to Leningrad: “Now that I’ve been in the West, I would never live in Russia again--never!”

Compared with “600 Seconds,” most of Soviet TV’s official news shows look drab indeed: a presenter sitting uncomfortably behind a desk staring down at sheets of news copy larded with statistics and verbatim government statements. The visuals generally run to tapes of party bosses pontificating and other ceremonial coverage.

The existence of “600 Seconds” reflects the recent move to democratize Soviet life. But limits to self-expression in the Soviet media remain. The head of Soviet broadcasting, Alexander Aksenov, was fired last month after a critic on a program in Moscow suggested that Vladimir I. Lenin’s body be buried instead of remaining embalmed under glass in his mausoleum in Red Square.

As for Nevzorov, he handles the Lenin issue by referring to Leningrad on the air as St. Petersburg, its pre-Revolutionary name. It’s as if Dan Rather called Washington King Georgeville.

Nevzorov’s popularity among the 5 million people of Leningrad and the 25 million additional inhabitants of the northwestern region of the Soviet Union who can receive his broadcasts was proved, he says, when he came in first in an official poll. Polls were unknown pre- glasnost. By the more traditional Soviet method of gauging public opinion, counting letters from the public, Nevzorov also wins, he says.

“And I also know how popular I am from the trust the people show toward me when we aim our cameras at them,” he adds.

How did Nevzorov get “600 Seconds” on the air? He answers, “You have to suppress all the thoughts that you might not be allowed. I started the program at a time when the authorities were confused. Later, if they had changed their minds and wanted to take me off the air, it would have been politically too difficult.”

Among all other topics, “600 Minutes” covers crime--an innovation in itself for the Soviet media. Some Soviet newspapers now carry a buried half-column of dry police-blotter crime news, a far cry from American tabloids’ screaming headlines--and also a far cry from Soviet papers’ omission of any crime news at all for more than 70 years. Nevzorov also treats news of specific criminal acts gingerly, but more boldly than traditional TV news here.