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Gorbachev lost no time in freshening the menu when he came to power in March 1985. He pensioned off Sergei Lapin, who for 15 years had been guarding the airwaves from ideological "deviation" as chairman of Gosteleradio, the State Committee for Television and Radio. With a vigor that invited comparisons to John F. Kennedy, Gorbachev set about teaching the country a lesson in glasnost. He began to go on "walkabouts," mingling with the masses and speaking his mind, as if unaware that cameras were recording his every move.
If the Soviet leader hopes to circumvent entrenched conservatives in the bureaucracy and pitch his policy of perestroika directly to the people, he has good reason to turn to television. Not all rural areas of the Soviet Union may have indoor plumbing, but TV antennas rise above the rooftops of wooden peasant huts in even the most isolated villages. In 1960 there were only 22 television sets for every thousand Soviets; by 1986 the number had climbed to 299. Gosteleradio surveys have found that up to 86% of their sample group consider television to be their primary source of news about the outside world. Moreover, 63% believe it to be the main influence in shaping their attitudes and values.
The state television system responded to Gorbachev's call for perestroika by adding four more hours of programming each day to the two national channels. You can stay up late; you can get up early. A morning show called 90 Minutes proved so popular that it soon expanded to 120 Minutes. Now collective-farm workers can turn on their sets and get an update on how the harvest is faring in the Volgograd district. For prurient relief, they can watch music videos of East German TV dancers, slinking about in peekaboo sequined costumes.
Even Time (Vremya), the stodgy evening news program, regarded as something of a national institution in the Soviet Union, has had an injection of "new thinking." A ten-minute investigative report, called Searchlight of Perestroika, has been tacked onto the end of the broadcast. The mini- documentary covers everything from illegal trading in moonshine to the environmental crisis of the shrinking Aral Sea and the problems of buying artificial limbs.
Some of the more intriguing experiments are going on in local TV studios. Good Evening, Moscow!, a daily news and commentary show on the Moscow channel, sends out a young journalist with an "express camera" to film slice-of-life vignettes on city streets. The show also cajoles officials to take the hot seat for questions called in by viewers. The Leningrad channel broadcasts the provocative cultural digest Fifth Wheel, focusing on "superfluous people" in the arts and letters, as well as the offbeat 600 Seconds news show, in which commentator Alexander Nevzorov races against a flashing digital clock to summarize the day's events, from cultural calendar to police blotter. Journalist Ott from Estonian TV has been so successful with one-on-one celebrity interviews that his regional program Television Acquaintance has been imported to national television.