Company Town : Columbia TriStar Video Announces Deal to Distribute in Former Soviet Union : Movies: The venture with Varus Video hopes to cut into the market for illegally copied feature films.

In an effort to reach millions of film lovers in the former Soviet Union, Columbia TriStar Home Video announced a deal here Monday to distribute its tapes throughout Russia, the Baltics, and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

In association with Varus Video, a Russian-Greek joint venture, Columbia TriStar will be releasing Columbia, TriStar and Orion Pictures feature films, along with the foreign and independent movies distributed by those companies.

Sales in the venture’s first year could approach a million video-cassettes, said Christopher Deering, Columbia TriStar’s executive vice president.

Columbia TriStar hopes that by offering high-quality tapes, with lip-synced dubbing in the local language, video-happy consumers in the former Soviet Union will eschew cheaper, illegal copies.

Russians imported 64 million blank videocassettes last year, 90% of which were used to make illegal copies of movies, said Chris Abel-Smith, managing director of Varus Video. Varus is also the distributor for Warner Home Video, the division of Warner Brothers that began distributing its videos in the former Soviet Union in February.

“There’s a very receptive market,” Deering said. “We are getting inquiries, unsolicited, from all over, from stores (that) want to be in legal business with high-quality products.”

Video pirating has been so severe that the Motion Picture Export Assn. of America imposed a boycott on the Russian market in June, 1991. The ban was lifted in January, 1993, after Russia founded an intellectual property agency and drafted laws to control the problem.

Despite the government’s effort to crack down on the problem, illegally copied videos can be bought for 9,000 to 15,000 rubles ($3.72 to $6.20 at the current exchange rate) in virtually every street kiosk in Russia. They include copies made from laser discs, duplicates of promotional copies and “rag copies”--those shot with a video camera in a movie theater right off the screen.

“We can now respectfully ask for enforcement, now that we’re officially in the marketplace, whereas, before, people could always say we have no choice but to pirate cassettes or to buy pirated cassettes, because it was the only thing on the marketplace,” explained Ben Feingold, president of Columbia TriStar Home Video.

Columbia TriStar releases--including “Platoon,” “The Fisher King” and “Flatliners”--went on sale Monday for 25,000 rubles ($10.32). Tapes will be sold to individuals--an estimated 8 million Russian households have video players--and to video rental stores.