Media : Mexican Soap Opera Has Russian Fans in a Lather : ‘The Rich Also Cry’ tops the TV charts and turns potato farmers into couch potatoes.

When she’s not in the kitchen cooking for her extended family of seven, Valentina Pozdnyakova can usually be found working in the large garden behind her house outside Moscow, making sure there will be enough vegetables on the table next winter.

But three nights a week, at 6:55, the 69-year-old retired pastry cook changes from potato farmer into couch potato.

For a precious 45 minutes, nothing can stir Pozdnyakova from her armchair as she loses herself in the fairy-tale world of “The Rich Also Cry,” a low-budget Mexican soap opera filmed more than a decade ago.

“The people are so beautiful, so cultured,” Pozdnyakova says of the wide-lapeled, flare-panted characters. “Even when they argue, they do it politely.”

Volodya Chernyak, a Moscow cabdriver and self-professed addict of what he calls simply “The Rich,” finds time to watch each episode twice: He catches it around dinner time and then tunes in for a second dose when the soap is repeated the following morning.

“It’s vital, emotional,” Chernyak says of the show, which to more jaded U.S. viewers would seem awkward and dated, almost a parody. “It grabs you by the soul.”

Western programs are nothing new to the post-Cold War television audience of the former Soviet Union. MTV and other music programming are broadcast regularly, and Russian Television has featured various U.S. movies of the 1970s and ‘80s, as well as episodes of more recent shows like “Life Goes On” and “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

Soap operas, a relatively recent arrival on the screen here, are particularly popular, providing a brief but regular respite from reality. “The lives of most of our compatriots--except when they are watching these serials--are completely dedicated to earning a living,” explained an observer in the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta.

“Santa Barbara,” the U.S. daytime drama that ostensibly takes place in the California city of the same name, is watched by millions on the other side of the Pacific, and “Nobody but You,” another Mexican production, is gaining popularity. But no TV show, Russian or Western, has met with such wild success here as “The Rich Also Cry.”

Maria Starostina, assistant director of the film department at the state television company Ostankino, says some 150 million people on the territory of the former Soviet Union watch the show--55% to 60% of the channel’s total audience of 260 million.

In the summer of 1989, after the Soviet people voted in hundreds of lawmakers in the first nationwide free elections, the air was full of political talk, and managers complained that many workers were staying home to watch the Congress of People’s Deputies debate the future of their country.

Three years later, that country no longer exists, and people from all corners of its former territory have lost interest in the machinations of representative government. Most change the channel at the now-familiar sight of rows of men behind desks.

For many Russians, the Mexican melodrama has replaced politics as a topic of conversation--and a reason to shirk their work. Starostina says she and her colleagues decided to slot the show in the evening as well as during the day after a rash of letters from farm bosses blaming it for low turnout on the fields during the spring sowing.

Starostina, who last fall traded two Russian TV movies to the Mexican company Televisa S.A. for “The Rich Also Cry,” has been bombarded by mail and by phone calls from all corners of the former Soviet Union since the series began its run in January. A nurse called from North Ossetia to say that many baby girls born in that south Russian region this year have been named Marianna, after the show’s bright-eyed, much-put-upon heroine.

Other viewers, impatient with the syrupy pace of soap-opera plot development, have offered her “bribes”--ranging from plain old money to “tasty apples from Ukraine”--in return for knowledge of what happens at the end of the 249-part series. But Starostina says she hasn’t told anyone, not even an old woman who called to say she was afraid she wouldn’t live to see the final episode.

The popularity of “The Rich Also Cry” isn’t limited to the provinces. Even in more cosmopolitan Moscow, crowds of city dwellers on their way home from work gather in train stations and shops--anyplace with a working television--to watch the serial.

Starostina is one of the few people who don’t tune in. She echoes a common criticism of the show when she speaks of her ambivalence toward its success. “It’s not high art,” she laments.

But it is the very qualities that separate “The Rich Also Cry” from high art--the lack of subtlety in the dialogue and the moral simplicity of the serial--that seem to appeal to fans here. Many Russians, who have lived through the discrediting of once-blameless leaders and the rehabilitation of people who had been officially scorned as traitors, enjoy watching a show in which it is easy to tell who is good and who is bad.

“You have to hope that, in the end, good will be rewarded and evil punished,” says Nona Kolesnikova, a middle-age Muscovite who watches every day with her mother and daughter.

On the buses, streets and food lines of Russia, perfect strangers bicker over what they believe will happen in the final episode of “The Rich Also Cry,” due to air Nov. 17. Will Marianna be reunited with the son she gave away at birth? Can she find happiness with Luis Alberto? Or will she marry Leonardo, whose love for her has always been true? People from all levels of society and all corners of the former Soviet Union are debating these questions, perhaps even more fervently than Americans once wondered “Who shot J.R.?” or “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

For Starostina, the end of the series also poses a problem--the show is going to be a tough act to follow. “Everyone at Ostankino is racking their brains over it,” she says.

While she hasn’t made any concrete deals yet and is working with a very tight budget, Starostina has high hopes for a replacement for “The Rich Also Cry.”

“I’d love to get ‘Dallas,’ ” she says wistfully.