The Barbara Walters of MOSCOW : Soviet anchor Svetlana Starodomskaya brings her brash style to the American people. That is, when she is not stuck in L.A. traffic.

She’s got Barbara Walter’s charisma, Leslie Stahl’s chutzpah and Dan Rather’s cantankerousness.

What she doesn’t have is Deborah Norville’s face or figure.

“Who is this Deborah Norville?” asks Svetlana Starodomskaya, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

“Is she a good journalist? Or is she one of those pretty people that bosses like to put on television these days?”

She scowls at the thought of it.

“Now this is the tendency for Soviet TV also,” she continues with undisguised disgust. “Some of our news announcers don’t understand anything. But they’re young. They smile. They’re nice-looking. About a year ago the change came.

“And, frankly speaking,” she notes in a conspiratorial whisper, “I don’t like it.”

Well, it’s one more thing about TV news American-style--the concept of the air-brushed, airhead anchorperson--that KNBC’s newest reporter won’t have to learn.

That 53-year-old blond woman with the thick foreign accent who has been reporting on Channel 4’s 5 p.m. newscast for the past week is not some consultant’s latest brainstorm for attracting ethnic viewers, but a real Soviet journalist.

Specifically, she’s the Soviet Union’s most prominent female broadcaster whose contributions to the nationwide evening newscast, “Vremya” (Time), which is watched every evening by at least 150 million Soviet citizens, probably make her more powerful than all her U.S. counterparts put together.

As part of a reporting swap that sent KNBC’s Jess Marlow to the Soviet Union in August, Starodomskaya was brought to Los Angeles this month by a troika: KNBC, the Pasadena-based Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race and the Woodmont, Conn.-based Promoting Enduring Peace. In her honor, KNBC weatherman Fritz Coleman (calling himself “the people’s prognosticator”) has been presenting temperature reports from Moscow. (Cloudy and a brrrr -acing 38 degrees.)

Through this Friday, the 22-year veteran of Gostelradio is looking at Los Angeles--and, of course, L.A. local news--through Soviet eyes at a time when TV reporting in her own country undergoes astonishing changes with the maturing of Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika .

Still, Starodomskaya seems to be finding more that’s familiar than unfamiliar about KNBC’s operation--except perhaps for the fully staffed room devoted just to making up and powdering down Channel 4 anchors and reporters.

“ Oooooh ,” coos Starodomskaya, who has to put on her own lipstick and mascara in front of a cracked mirror back at home, closing her eyes with unabashed delight as the KNBC makeup artist began to expertly apply eye shadow to her lids. “I have come to paradise. I could become lazy here.”

Not likely, since she’s already giving the folks at KNBC a few pointers on aggressiveness. First, she asked to appear on the 11 p.m. newscast as well as the 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. (Producers nixed that idea.) Then, she tried to get interviews with two prominent but elusive Southern Californians--Frank Sinatra and Ronald Reagan. (Their representatives said nyet .)

Finally, “she asked me for more time in the broadcast for her pieces, which is what every reporter always does every day,” laughed KNBC news director Tom Capra. “She’s got five minutes and I think that’s plenty. So I said to her, ‘You’re just like everybody else who’s ever worked for me.’ It’s sort of amazing.”

What Starodomskaya, in turn, finds amazing is that Los Angeles TV reporters manage to get any work done at all, given all the traffic tie-ups. She and her Soviet news crew have spent so much time in the car since their arrival that her cameraman asked sincerely, “Do you have any homes in Los Angeles? Or do you just have freeways?”

“If not for traveling such long distances, I could work a lot,” Starodomskaya apologizes. “Instead, I find I spend 40 minutes making videotapes--and three hours for just arriving. It’s demoralizing.”

That may be the key to why Starodomskaya--for the present--is unmoved by L.A.’s charms.

And who can blame her? After all, she hasn’t had a minute of L.A.-style fun since she stepped off the airplane--just broadcasts for KNBC and lectures to peace groups. No shopping on Rodeo Drive. (“I don’t like shopping,” she winces.) No dinners at Spago. (“I think someone wants to take me there,” she offers.) No movie premieres in Hollywood. (Though she did meet Phil Donahue at a full-frills cocktail party for him at the swank Hotel Bel-Air.)

“The thing is I have not really seen L.A. except out of the window of the car,” she says, choosing her words with the skill of a veteran diplomat. “But it seems to me that this town is not a typical American town. Usually, there is a downtown and then some territories. Here, there are hundreds of such territories--and they all look like each other.”

Also similar are U.S. and Soviet techniques for TV interviewing. Reporting a story about L.A.’s cultural and ethnic blend of peoples, she shoved her microphone in the face of a guitar player on Olvera Street and started to grill him with questions.

“You are from Mexico?”

The Latino musician looked at her blankly.

“You are from Mexico?” she repeated a little louder.

Still no response.

“YOU ARE FROM MEXICO?!” she screamed.

He shrugged. Luckily, a nearby Swede was able to translate the Soviet’s questions into Spanish.

In the downtown Grand Central Market, Starodomskaya experienced more problems communicating, even though she learned her excellent colloquial English at Moscow’s prestigious Institute of Foreign Languages.

“Do you live peacefully here?” she demanded of a passer-by.

“No,” replied the puzzled man. “I live in Alhambra.”

Back at the station, KNBC producer Rick Marks reviewed the videotape from that morning’s outing and couldn’t stop laughing. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he admitted as Starodomskaya dumbfounded yet another Los Angeleno with her brashness. “But you know something? I like it. Because she has soul.”

Marks explains. “You see, a lot of our reporters at KNBC make a lot of money. They’re in the upper economic classes. And there’s a difference with her. I’m not saying that Svetlana’s from the lower economic classes, but she’s from a more level society. She identifies with people on a terrific level. So when she goes and interviews people, she’s talking to them and not above them. I rarely see that with American reporters.”

And, yet, Starodomskaya’s life style is typical of most prominent Soviet journalists in that it is extremely privileged. A product of white-collar parents (her father was an engineer and factory director, her mother a bank accountant), she earns 260 rubles (about $400) a month, and still is able to afford such luxuries as a Moscow apartment, automobile and country dacha (summer home) complete with sauna and swimming pool.

Though her salary is minuscule compared to some of the L.A. TV stars she’s hobnobbed with this week, like John Beard, Kelly Lange and Colleen Williams, she is the first to acknowledge that what she lacks in money she makes up for in power. Agreeing with Soviet Communist Party foreign policy chief Alexander Yakovlev who said early in Gorbachev’s rule that “the television image is everything,” Starodomskaya explains that “as a TV reporter you have a lot of enormous rights and possibilities. And in terms of Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, television is leading the way.”

Of course, that wasn’t always so.

When Starodomskaya was a cub reporter for Moscow Radio in 1965, she, like all the other journalists, reported only what she was told to report. And when she was chosen in 1967 to become one of the original “Vremya” correspondents, “I was doing what I knew would go and be on the air. I knew that if I did not censor myself, my boss would do it for me. We were all in the same boat.”

She admits she thought of quitting journalism several times during her career because “I was ashamed. Sure, some people could write about anything with enthusiasm. But a lot of journalists suffered because they were not themselves. And, because I am a person of conscience, the only thing I could do was to lie a little less.”

The change came three to four months after Gorbachev rose to power. She was covering an international conference in Moscow and “I just remember that for the first time I was able to air the statements of people representing different points of view. And there was no editing. This, for me, was a paradise.”

Today, she says, Soviet TV journalists are enjoying “amazing freedom.” Just this week, she notes, a “60 Minutes”-like program called “Seven Days” debuted Sunday night and featured frank coverage of once-sensitive Soviet subjects, live debates and commentaries by prominent specialists.

Also, now that the activities of the Supreme Soviet are being broadcast on television, the media are showing the people “how to debate their points of view as well as what is going on inside the government. And this is so interesting that people don’t go to the movies and don’t read books anymore. Now we watch TV.”

Still, she warns, not everyone is pleased with the TV news fare being fed to the Soviet Union’s new generations of couch potatoes. Starodomskaya openly worries about “some bureaucrats” who are beginning to publicly complain that TV reportage has become too autonomous.

“They’re afraid that by showing the strikes or the nationalist protests we inspire people. But I think it is too late to shut our mouths. Soviet TV without any doubt is going on the right road, and we should not give up. It is really the task of journalists to be honest and to do everything possible to back perestroika. And, without glasnost, there can be no perestroika. So there will continue to be glasnost even though it gets on the nerves of some people.”

And getting on people’s nerves is something that Starodomskaya specializes in, apparently. “She’s respected but not adored,” notes Jess Marlow, who worked with her for three weeks in the Soviet Union. “By some she’s barely tolerated, and that’s because she’s highly opinionated.”

At one point in his reporting trip, Marlow tried to cover a small nationalist demonstration in a Ukrainian town, but the mayor refused to let him film the protest. That is, until Starodomskaya stepped in.

“She was like a tiger unleashed,” Marlow recalls. “She tore into this guy, accusing him of ‘small thinking,’ and then of ‘old thinking.’ And when she found out that the guy who was handling PR for the mayor was a former reporter, that infuriated her even more.”

Ironically, Starodomskaya believes that if she is ever taken off the air, it will not be because of anything she does but because of who she is and how she looks.

For one thing, sex discrimination has been a fact of life in the Soviet TV industry for decades, she alleges, noting that there has never been a female foreign correspondent for the state network.

“We protest, but nothing comes of it,” she contends. “If I were a man, I would be a correspondent in Washington by now.”

And now that the trend in Soviet TV news is to hire for youth and beauty over experience, Starodomskaya candidly wonders how many on-air years she has left. “This was done not because our audiences asked for it but because our bosses wanted it. Five years ago, you could just go and work and they listened to you. Not anymore. God knows what will happen tomorrow. In the near future, perhaps, they may not want me.”

She smiles. “And then I will try something else. Maybe I will become a businesswoman.”

Or maybe she’ll come to Los Angeles and work for KNBC. After all, Capra thinks she could make it here as a broadcaster, and the newsroom gave her a standing ovation after her first on-air report. “Now I’ve been here for 21 years,” says Marks, “and I’ve heard people applaud like that only two or three times.”

“I would like to work here with pleasure ,” Starodomskaya says brightly. “I feel I could do it.”

Yeah, but is she really ready to swap reporting her country’s history-making stories about perestroika for L.A.’s “lite ‘n’ brites” about lost pooches?

“Why not?” she asks. “Because I’m a great specialist in both.”

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