TV REVIEW : Revisit to ‘Gorbachev’s USSR’

Few journalists are more closely associated with their subject than Hedrick Smith is with Russia, and yet not even he can quite fathom what is going on there.

Checking up on the people profiled in his 1990 PBS series, “Inside Gorbachev’s USSR,” Smith visited Russia for “Frontline” during the January lifting of price controls, a key component of Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s free-market reforms. Naturally, the report is titled “After Gorbachev’s USSR” (at 9 tonight on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15, at 8 p.m. on KVCR Channel 24), but it’s a sequel sure to have a sequel of its own.

Smith never talks to Yeltsin (in fact, Yeltsin’s image is never seen), but he’s after something perhaps more meaningful: How the shift from state socialism to capitalism is being played out in the emerging middle class of new entrepreneurs, old state managers and young populists.

Some of these new businessmen, like Mark Masarsky, are actually wealthy and dramatically go against the grain of the predominant media image of the new, impoverished Russia. Two years ago, Masarsky was a Leninist-capitalist who believed in enterprise by collective means. Now he’s simply a capitalist, and growing richer.

At the same time, Smith finds his old friend and head of a large state-run farm, Dmitri Starodubstev, retaining much of his Soviet-era power as he deliberately undercuts the market price on agricultural goods.

Smith revisits several other old haunts, but these two men come to symbolize the war for power inside Russia. Both exude strong determination and confidence, yet clearly one of them must lose. Or both, if an unwieldy system marrying freed, skyrocketing prices with state-run industries is allowed to persist much longer.