TELEVISION IN THE USSR

Television in the U.S.S.R. is concerned with increasing socialist production the way that the U.S. has traditionally been concerned with encouraging material consumption, but in between the profiles of outstanding workers in vacuum-cleaner factories, the speeches by award-winning members of the Lenin Youth Organization, and the endless biographies of Lenin emanating from its 127 stations, the U.S.S.R. has put some fairly radical innovations to work.
The U.S.S.R. was the 1st country to utilize communications satellites as integral parts of its TV networks, and the viewer is offered many fine self-help programs like "Looking After Your Eyesight," or lessons in German, engineering, chess, and television-broadcasting techniques. An interesting variation on the quiz-show concept, a show called "Kvn," has 2 teams who challenge each other to do improvisations on recent news events. And with the purchase of "The Forsyte Saga" in 1969, Russian television ceased to be the closed system that it was.
The Russians worked jointly with the French to film "The Battle of Moscow," and they have imported such programs as "Casals at 88" and "Now That the Buffalo's Gone," the latter a documentary on the plight of native Americans. In 1973, the Soviet Union signed a long-term agreement with the U.S. network NBC to exchange television programs.