Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : MOSCOW : ‘I thought of Los Angeles as the city of endless holidays.’

Ever since he first glimpsed U.S. television’s glitzy depiction of Southern California life during the 1984 Olympics coverage, Sergei Schislyaev had envisioned Los An geles as a wealthy city where the sun always shines and the people are always happy.

“But you couldn’t pay me to go there now,” said Schislyaev, a 22-year-old Russian entrepreneur. “I think a lot of other people here feel the same way. We’re shocked that such horrible things could happen--especially in that particular city.

“I had a stereotype of Los Angeles as the richest city in America, where people of many colors live together without any problems and are completely satisfied with life--a city of ecstasies!” Schislyaev said.

Schislyaev’s view of America--and Los Angeles in particular--is widespread in Russia, where movie theaters play mostly Hollywood films and MTV culture is taking over where the Communist Party left off. The contrast between the dazzling imagery and the televised reality merely heightened the Russians’ disillusionment over the Los Angeles riots.

Larisa Gerasimova, a 40-year-old economist, saw Los Angeles as an urban dream, where everyone smiles, the weather is perfect and people get around on roller skates.

“I thought of Los Angeles as the city of endless holidays,” Gerasimova said. “Now I see it as a war-torn place like Yugoslavia, where people of different ethnic groups pick up machine guns because they cannot get along.”

Strikingly absent from Russians’ reaction to the Los Angeles riots was the old-style Soviet propaganda that racist violence in America is the natural result of the class struggle in a capitalist society. Even Yegor K. Ligachev, the infamous conservative on former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s Politburo, avoided an I-told-you-so tone.

“I thought of Los Angeles as a light and sunny city--a modern city,” said Ligachev, now retired. “But it has turned out that the grapes of wrath were accumulating there.

“When I was in America two weeks ago, I saw a lot of homeless and unemployed,” he added. “I also saw that most of the dirty, heavy work is being done by people of color.”

Although many Russians said they were astonished by the violence in Los Angeles, some who have visited the city said the ethnic tensions were obvious. The police chief of a district of St. Petersburg--Los Angeles’ sister city--said the riots did not surprise him, considering the “division in society” that he noticed while on an exchange program with the Los Angeles Police Department.

“When I returned home after being in Los Angeles for 10 days, I told people here that the city had real race problems,” said Albert A. Vorontsov, the police chief. “We have these problems too. But I don’t think St. Petersburg could ever explode the way Los Angeles did.”