From: verbit@brauer.harvard.edu (Mikhail S. Verbitsky)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.soviet
Subject: Soap Opera on xSoviet TV (from ClariNews)
Date: 16 Aug 92 15:23:21 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.


The following article is reposted from Clari News without
permission. Enjoy!


	MOSCOW (UPI) -- Every weekday, television viewers across the former
Soviet Union set aside their day-to-day cares -- and in some cases lay
down tools, abandon fields and empty shops -- to watch a Mexican soap
opera that has become virtually a national obsession.
	``The Rich Also Cry,'' a daytime television drama about the intrigues
and heartbreaks of a wealthy Mexican family, has become one of the most
talked-about and widely watched programs in the Commonwealth of
Independent States sinced it went on the air in November.
	Russians and other C.I.S. viewers are engrossed by the sad and
twisted fate of Mariana, the wife of a wealthy construction magnate who
abandoned her infant son to a lottery ticket seller in a park and is
then reunited with him 17 years later.
	An estimated 100 million viewers watch it every weekday, according to
the sociological research center of the state-owned Ostankino television
network, which broadcasts to all the former Soviet republics.
	``It's an absolutely huge audience. It's never been so high for a
series,'' said Vsevolod Vilchek, director of the former Soviet Central
Television network's research center. ``It's fantastically popular.''
	Indeed, by early summer the show had become so popular that
collective farm managers were bombarding Ostankino with mail complaining
that so many workers were leaving the fields to watch it that crops were
in jeopardy. They begged the television company to shift the series to
an evening timeslot.
	Now each installment in the series is repeated twice a day, morning
and night.
	``It influences the productive process, distracts people from their
jobs,'' said Vilchek, who said the center's research had confirmed that
a large portion of the show's daytime audience was made up of people
watching it at work.
	Scattered reports from the Itar-Tass news agency from around the
Commonwealth tell of empty shops in southern Siberia and abandoned
fields in western Russia, confirming that workers are more interested in
the television show than their jobs.
	``I watch it so I can turn off the day's events, and escape to
another world,'' said Lyudmilla Ukhlovskaya, a Moscow telephone company
manager who is a devoted fan. ``I'm so sick of all the politics,
economics, finances.
	``I know it's stupid, but it really grips you. Sure, the plots are
very contrived but it doesn't pretend to be quality entertainment. It's
just for relaxation,'' she said.
	The series has generated almost a cult following. Ostankino daily
receives a flood of mail, phone calls and telegrams, and there are
reports from hospitals of an increase in the number of female infants
being named ``Mariana.''
	The popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda is running a promotional
contest offering a signed photograph of the actress who plays Mariana,
Veronica Castro, to the first new subscriber who can bring in 99 new
subscritions to the paper.
	In at least one case, the off-screen melodrama surrounding the series
came close to matching the intensity of the drama onscreen.
	In a now-famous letter sent to a popular weekly newspaper, one
devoted viewer from southern Ukraine wrote: ``I am 85 years old. I'm
captivated by 'The Rich Also Cry.' I'm not certain I'll live to see the
last episode. I promise my inheritance to anyone will write to me and
tell me when and how it all turns out.''
	The following month the paper published a letter from a postman who
said he had tracked down the author of the letter, who turned out to be
an unemployed farmworker in his 40s who wrote it as a hoax.
	The man told the postman that in the time since his letter was
published the previous month he had received an avalanche of mail -- 548
letters, cards and telegrams, with more arriving daily -- mainly from
people eager to get their hands on the inheritance.
	Others wrote out of sympathy. One elderly woman from the Belarus
capital Minsk wrote: ``Don't die, grandad -- there's a happy ending in
the film, the details are in a letter. Hang on.''
	The Mexican series has beat a host of newer competitors for
viewership. A home-grown Russian mini-series, ``Kvartira'' (The
Apartment), about a group of tenants in communal apartment who scheme to
evict an elderly woman so they can use her room, sagged in the ratings
after a few episodes. Another Mexican soap opera on the local Moscow
channel, ``No One But You,'' is slighly behind but catching up. And an
American soap, ``Santa Barbara,'' has less than half the viewership of 
``The Rich Also Cry.''
	Vilchek said ``Santa Barbara'' was earning poor ratings because
Russians don't identify with the North American culture of hard work and
self-sufficiency as depicted in the U.S. soap opera.
	He said Russians had a much greater affinity for what he called the
laissez-faire Latin American mentality depicted ``The Rich Also Cry.''
	``The message is that happiness comes to you of its own accord,''
said Vilchek. ``You shouldn't have to fight for it too much. That seems
to suit our public.''
	Not everyone is happy about the ``The Rich Also Cry'' phenomenon.
	``Already it has influenced our social and personal life too
strongly. And on every corner, at work, in the metro, on the train and
in the shops you can hear heated discussions of the latest twist in her
fate,'' complained the trade union daily Trud.
	Trud said that the negative effects of the series were not just
psychological. The paper said in Moscow technicians in the municipal
water supply network have warned that damaging pressures build up in
system during broadcasts of ``The Rich Also Cry'' because no one uses
water during that time.
	Some wonder how a country in the middle of economic crisis can afford
to import something as frivolous as entertainment.
	``So there isn't enough foreign currency to buy medicine, there isn't
enough for food, but they can afford to pay for 'weeping rich people'?''
a viewer from the city of Tver east of Moscow wrote to the newspaper 
``Argumenty i Facty.''
	``If they had to spend money on culture, then why not buy one
masterpiece instead of 500 episodes of tearjerker melodrama?'' he wrote.
``And if, as they say, the whole country is watching it so devotedly,
then shed a tear for the country.''
Newsgroups: soc.culture.soviet