Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 5, 1990                   TAG: 9005050434
SECTION: SPECTATOR                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: HOWARD ROSENBERG LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SERIES OFFERS PEOPLE'S VIEW OF SOVIET UNION

Affirmation arrives Monday (at 9 p.m. on Channel 15 in the Roanoke viewing area) with the first two of four episodes of "Inside Gorbachev's U.S.S.R.," a grand series from PBS providing an acute people's-eye view of not only today's incredible restructuring of the Soviet Union but also of the fragility of such dramatic changes in a society literally undergoing redefinition.

Reported by Hedrick Smith, who headed The New York Times Moscow bureau for a time in the 1970s, this fascinating series also reminds us of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's emergence as an epic figure in history.

"There's no question that Gorbachev is in the top level of the leaders of the 20th century," former President Nixon - who also had a significant impact on his time - says in a 90-minute interview next Saturday on PBS.

Just as the Russian Revolution threw aside centuries of tradition in 1917, so is the Gorbachev revolution transforming the Soviet Union into a freer society (Lithuania's liberation movement would have been smashed by tanks in the old days) after decades of terror and repression. People can protest openly. Where once the intelligentsia was virtually in hiding, it's now safe for them to emerge from the crevices of Soviet life.

As in czarist days, however, change does not come easily to this land.

Gorbachev the forward-thinking pragmatist is center stage Monday night, encumbered by an intractable bureaucracy in trying for economic and social reforms aimed at meeting his people's demands for a better life.

Scene after scene here demonstrates that reforms initiated in Moscow often lose their momentum by the time they reach the Soviet boonies. "Perestroika is stuck in the mud here," says a woman in Ivanovo.

A society that discourages independent thought isn't likely to produce many creative reforms or leaders. Thus, you have the sense from this program that years of stagnation under a losing economic system and decadent leadership - not Ronald Reagan's Cold War mongering - have led to the Soviet Union's dramatic U-turn under Gorbachev.

Predictably, though, it is Reagan who gets the credit from interviewer Morton Kondracke during "Richard Nixon Reflects," airing on PBS Friday night.

Reagan made the Soviets cry "Uncle," Kondracke insists in contrasting Reagan's policy with Nixon's policy of detente. The notion that Nixon may not have been tough enough on the Kremlin strikes almost an amusing note, given that he made his political reputation as a Red basher, and Friday's program includes footage of then Vice President Nixon lecturing Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in their famous "kitchen debate" in 1959.

Undoubtedly timed to coincide with the publication of Nixon's latest book, his interview is fascinating because - love him or leave him - Nixon makes fascinating television. The familiar topics surface here, as do some of the familiar Nixon scapegoats, although his paranoia seems softer.

Actually, it's less Nixon or Kondracke than it is the program's announcer who pushes revisionist history here: "We asked if Richard Nixon had made peace with the enemies who brought down his presidency - the liberals, the media and the bureaucrats. Why did he hand them the club with which to bash him?" Was it just possible that Nixon bashed himself?

The new Soviet Union is trying to unravel its own revisionist history, witness next week's second episode of "Inside Gorbachev's U.S.S.R."

In going forward with reform, Gorbachev thought he also had to confront the myths perpetuated by Stalin in a closed society, Smith says. Thus, newspapers once used for toilet paper are now sources of information, Smith notes. And in Leningrad, he introduces us to "Fifth Wheel," a bold TV program that exposes sins of the present and past: The feeble appearance of the old man on the screen belies his terrible past as one of Stalin's killers: "Each of us would shoot two."

With glasnost, too, old ways burden the new. We hear of continued censorship of TV by a bureaucracy seeking to justify its own existence. We hear that textbooks are being changed, but that too many teachers remain prisoners of old thinking. "Too much criticism is dangerous," says one.

Still, this freely probing PBS series is itself a glittering centerpiece of glasnost. "When Stalin silenced the church bells, he was also silencing the people," Smith says. There are no guarantees for the future. Yet for the time being at least, the bells are again ringing.