COLUMN ONE : It’s New, It’s Jazzy, It’s Soviet TV : A new programming chief favors game shows and ‘Geraldo.’ Critics say he’s using television as a diversion, substituting fluff for political debate.

MOSCOW — It was sweet hell for Agdam Shaikramov, a bushy-haired crossword puzzle fan from Bashkiria, but his tribulations would give a video thrill to millions.

In studio ASB-4 at Central Television’s Ostankino complex, where a taping session was nearing its climax, the latest winner of the Soviet Union’s No. 1 game show, “Field of Miracles,” had been brought face-to-face with odd yet alluring objects from another world. Like a 12-cup Mr. Coffee coffee maker. A Hoover upright vacuum. And a four-pound box of Tide.

The chairman of a village government council somewhere in the Urals, Shaikramov, 51, furrowed his brow as he studied the pile of prizes he was supposed to choose from.

“You couldn’t even find such things in Ufa,” he said later, still agog.

After long minutes lost in thought, Shaikramov squandered his 265 prize points on something familiar: a sugar bowl and other pieces of pottery in the blue-and-white Russian pattern called Gzhel.

The studio audience draped elbow-to-elbow on bleachers clapped wildly.

And so it goes on Soviet TV.

For seven months, a new man--Leonid P. Kravchenko--has been in charge at Gostelradio, the state television and radio company. His most impressive feat has been to rid the airwaves of a seemingly endless parade of arguing politicos, to ax or gag critical news personnel and to promote laughter, pathos, music and fun.

But should the Soviets be applauding?

His many critics contend that Kravchenko has concocted a televised tranquilizer to keep the populace’s mind on trivialities. Media wizards in President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s entourage, realizing that the state cannot meet the demand for bread, have decided to give people circuses instead, the critics contend.

Moreover, they say, Kravchenko’s programming shifts have maimed the vital, serious parts of Soviet broadcasting.

Since the affable, white-haired Kravchenko took over, many of the “Vid Kids” of glasnost --the men and women who carried the battle cry of openness to television and revitalized what had been the most hidebound of Soviet mass communications media--have been driven from the airwaves.

“Vremya,” state TV’s 9 p.m. flagship newscast, has become mired in an orthodoxy so stultifying that a liberal journalist such as Vladimir Molchanov refuses to anchor it.

In place of freewheeling debate, there’s more glitz.

For example, there’s the two-hour-long “Bravo!” variety show, which the TV critic at the progressive daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta calls “utterly tasteless garbage.”

And a nadir was reached one day after the Soviet army butchery that left 14 unarmed civilians dead in Lithuania. Central TV aired a variety extravaganza, “Alexander Show,” at a time when much of the country was in shock or mourning. Such timing was a “bad mistake,” the Gostelradio chairman now admits.

But Kravchenko is adamant in defending the changes he has made. Before he was moved by Gorbachev from his job as general director of the official Tass news agency to take charge at Gostelradio last November, he says, “whenever you turned on the television, you saw talking heads--it was awful.”

“The population had become sick of politics--and I mean sick in the literal meaning of the word,” Kravchenko said in his first major interview with a Western newspaper since he became Gostelradio chairman. “Doctors noticed that the number of heart attacks increased, as did the number of nervous diseases.” Overly politicized TV was partly to blame, he says.

But now Kravchenko has taken the 174 hours of programming--shown daily on Central Television’s two main channels, educational station and on separate programs for Moscow and Leningrad-- and dramatically boosted the number of movies, variety shows and musical galas.

Under his tutelage, he says, Soviet TV is becoming more like television elsewhere in the world.

Take, for example, “Field of Miracles,” an unabashed Gostelradio adaptation of “Wheel of Fortune” that even has a Slavic Vanna White--Natasha Chistyakova, 22, a willowy university student majoring in French and Finnish who also is one of the show’s editors.

Aired Tuesdays at 10 p.m., right after the evening news, “Field of Miracles” receives an incredible 40,000 letters weekly from fans and would-be contestants. To get on the air, people must submit a crossword puzzle of their own making.

To win, considerable brainpower is needed. The day the wizened Shaikramov played, the topic was precious stones. Shaikramov, who lost his left arm in an accident while working at a rope-making factory, beat out a retired diplomat and another finalist by correctly guessing the word gliptika, Russian for the art of gem carving.

“Field of Miracles”--ironically, the start of a well-known Russian phrase whose end half is “Country of Fools”--antedates the Kravchenko era by a month but is thriving under his stewardship.

Kravchenko has had less luck with the talent that feeds and supports Soviet TV. To protest the programming changes at “Kravchenko’s channel,” prominent cultural figures have announced a boycott of their services. Since air time must be filled with something, well-worn material from Gostelradio archives--often from the officially discredited “age of stagnation,” the early 1980s--is frequently broadcast yet again.

This includes “17 Moments in Spring,” a late Cold War thriller in which CIA agents are the bad guys, and a prime-time soap opera from Czechoslovakia called “Hospital on the Edge of Town.”

“What we’re being shown now are films every Soviet knows by heart,” complained Lidia Polskaya, who writes on TV for the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta.

Now there’s also professional women’s wrestling from the United States, scads of Western music videos and even “Geraldo.” The 50-minute talk show--dubbed into Russian--debuted in March with Rivera interviewing Death Row inmates in Alabama. Among its episodes airing five days a week to 40 million potential viewers in the greater Moscow area: “The Death of Elvis” and an expose on the British Royal Family.

“Clearly, not every program is of interest for a Soviet audience,” acknowledged Allan Graffman, vice president of Tribune Entertainment, the syndicator of “Geraldo.” The Chicago-based firm gave “Geraldo” to the Soviets free, and in an arrangement called barter syndication, is hunting for advertisers.

Is the new Soviet programming totally frivolous?

The mustachioed emcee of “Field of Miracles,” Vladislav N. Listiev, sees his hourlong show as “pure theater” that nonetheless has redeeming social value. In his warm-up patter to the studio audience one Saturday, he implored them, “Let’s do our part so that when this program is shown, it will do a little something to raise the morale of Soviet people watching it.”

Later, relaxing with a cigarette, the 35-year-old emcee agreed that program quality had plummeted in the Kravchenko era but rejected the notion that a plot had been hatched to addle the national mind by feeding it large doses of televised fluff.

“Let me ask you this: Why shouldn’t we broadcast ‘Field of Miracles?’ ” Listiev asked. “If a man is dying and searching for a medicine to cure himself, what are you going to do--just explain to him why he is dying? You’ve got to keep his spirits up as he seeks a cure.”

A dissenting opinion comes from Nezavisimaya Gazeta’s critic, Sergei Fomin: “Soviet TV today is crammed with Communist propaganda utterly intolerant of dissenting views, vulgar erotic shows and a multitude of rock groups. . . . Marx and Lenin would turn over in their graves at the way their doctrine is being propagated.”

That polemic may be too harsh. Soviet television now offers both “Communist propaganda”--for example, news of Politburo meetings--and the video catechism of capitalism, “Adam Smith’s Money World,” translated into Russian.

But even if such theoretical challenges to Marxism are no longer forbidden, there is no question that Kravchenko has reharnessed Soviet TV’s information and news programs to protect the Kremlin hold on power.

The often daring “Vzglyad” (View), where, ironically, Listiev once worked, got the ax in January, as it was about to air an interview with an aide to former Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who had just quit, stunning the country with a warning of a looming “dictatorship.”

“Television News Service” was also smothered. On March 15, its anchors--Tatyana Mitkova, Yuri Rostov and Dmitri Kisiliev--were told they would no longer present the 15-minute broadcast.

“They spread so much disinformation that it became the shame of Central Television,” Kravchenko charged.

Galina Chermenskaya, TV critic for the Nedelya weekly, acknowledges that Television News Service “never gave the whole truth. They didn’t allow it.” But she adds that “it never lied, and that was important.”

Vladimir Pozner, Phil Donahue’s Moscow sidekick who had once been ready to embrace every twist of the Communist Party line and ardently defend it in exquisitely American English, left Gostelradio to protest the rebirth of a “political monopoly” over the Soviet airwaves.

“Kravchenko was very candid with us--we were ‘on the president’s team’ and we were to support him and his policies, period,” Pozner said.

Still, Kravchenko does have his defenders. In the main, they say he is striving not to stifle meaningful debate but to avoid arousing tempers already badly frayed by six years of what Gorbachev has called his “revolution without the gunshots.”

“TV has gotten better,” one approving couple, the Savelevs, wrote a Moscow newspaper. “Before, it was never-ending politics and stress. Now sometimes they show good movies, like ‘The Big Waltz.’ ”

And Culture Minister Nikolai Gubenko observed, “Leonid Kravchenko realizes that television should not be used to kindle confrontation. We have to seek ways toward tolerance and cooperation.”

Such “tolerance,” however, has definitely not meant balanced broadcast reports on critical issues. Before a nationwide referendum in March, Central Television crusaded for Gorbachev’s notion of a union treaty, even airing a virtual commercial on “Vremya” to persuade people to vote for it.

Kravchenko makes no apologies. “If one simplifies it, the (current) policy is that of holding Central Television to centrist positions, to positions that the president holds,” he said. “Anything else is the dialogue of civil war.”

Was that why, when Russian Republic leader Boris N. Yeltsin called in March for Gorbachev to resign, “Vremya” and other news shows on Soviet television kept quiet?

“It is self-evident that state-owned television will not assist in this effort with its broadcasts, to clamor for the president’s impeachment,” Kravchenko said.

When he took over, Kravchenko says his analysis of programming revealed that 70% of TV air time was devoured by “sociopolitical programs,” and only 30% by shows of artistic or entertainment value.

Those statistics in hand, he set out to reverse the ratio to stop “those endless live broadcasts from the Kremlin of the Congress, sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., of the R.S.F.S.R., of the Leningrad City Council, the Moscow City Council.”

Kravchenko may be wrong about what viewers want. After he said on the air that people had grown “weary” of politics and wanted more movies and sports, 546 apartments in the Moscow area were phoned by a newspaper. Of the Muscovites who had been watching, only 19% agreed with the Gostelradio chairman.

Whatever Gorbachev and his allies might wish, there are fissures in what until recently had been the Soviet broadcasting monolith, and they are widening. Each of the constituent Soviet republics has its own TV company, and where nationalists have taken power, they also have captured the airwaves.

Moreover, Leningrad, the country’s second-largest city, has its own outspoken, usually anti-Gorbachevian channel that can be viewed by 70 million people throughout European Russia.

“In Moscow, we watch it the way people once tuned in to the Voice of America or BBC,” Polskaya said.

Such competition is the ultimate threat to Gostelradio’s role and its ability to keep viewers coming back to “Vremya” to see the Soviet Union and its problems through Kravchenko’s “centrist” lens.

It took almost a year, but Yeltsin’s Russian Federation also won the right to project its own world view into citizens’ living rooms. In mid-May, the republic’s own TV network began broadcasting six hours a day on Channel 2.

“We will have no censor,” Sergei A. Podgorbunsky, Russian television’s director, pledged, adding that, “at ‘Vremya,’ every editor is a censor, and Kravchenko is the chief of censors.”