It is 11:15 p.m. A suave young man in a red tie and gray pinstripe suit is seen walking through a grove of trees outside Moscow's Ostankino television center. Vladimir Molchanov, 37, host of the late-night television show Before and After Midnight, is opening his monthly broadcast with an elegiac monologue on the passing of summer. By the time Molchanov has entered the studio, oak branch in hand, Soviet viewers have been treated to brisk, taped reports on an Australian stork breeder, a Japanese horseback-riding robot and the world's largest egg. The 90-minute show also features videos from rock stars like Michael Jackson and Sting.
By the once staid standards of Soviet television, Western music videos and a smooth transition from the great outdoors to the broadcast studio seem revolution enough on the airwaves. But the millions of Soviets who watch Molchanov's show find it spellbinding for other reasons. They tune in for a glimpse of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost: a prominent Soviet writer denouncing the "monstrous slavery" of Stalinism, scenes of rusting railway cars in an abandoned stretch of the Gulag, even rare film footage of Czar Nicholas II and the royal family.
Over on View, a hip late-night hybrid of 60 Minutes and MTV, co-hosts "Alex" Lyubimov, 26, and "Dima" Zakharov, 30, prefer what they jokingly call the "rough and macho" look. They wear T shirts and blue jeans. At times they may seem a bit cocky, inviting viewers to send in such oddities as leaden macaroni mixes or bread loaves containing glass chips for their "museum of shoddy goods." But they are as earnest as Molchanov in exploring the boundaries of glasnost.
View, broadcast on Friday night, routinely touches taboo topics and raw nerve ends. The show's reporters have interviewed young neo-Nazis, Soviet investigators on the Mafia beat and Afghan vets who brawled with police and have the bruises to show for it. Even the music carries a message, whether it be a video from the Eurythmics that uses snippets from the film 1984 or a satiric jazz ditty from the Soviet group Akvarium, complete with Stalinist-era newsreels and pictures of a booted foot atop a typewriter and a saxophone. The show's philosophy, as explained by Zakharov: "The more glasnost there is on television, the more glasnost there will be in daily life."
There is no equivalent to the Nielsen ratings in the Soviet Union, but according to the latest "popularity index" in the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta, Soviet audiences ranked View and Before and After Midnight in first and third place. TV viewers now have such an insatiable appetite for information that news and talk shows occupy seven of the Top Ten spots. As Boris Purgalin, a former scriptwriter for TV entertainment programs, notes, "Who would find sports interesting anymore, when talk shows turn into a real battle of opinions?"
Not too long ago, bored Soviet audiences found little of interest to watch but the evening news, an occasional "world of nature" documentary or the mildly spicy cabaret programs and quiz shows. Nor was late-night TV suitable for a working class that had to rise early to go out and build the permanent revolution. In the words of Estonian journalist Urmas Ott, state-controlled Central Television was like "preserved food: perfectly round and sealed, so that nothing spoiled, nothing changed, and nothing was very interesting."