Video: Stirring Up The Comrades

The taping was only 20 minutes old, and Phil Donahue was agitated. Not because of a raging controversy over abortion or the death penalty; the trouble with this particular show, featuring a studio audience of Moscow teenagers, was the absence of any controversy at all. "You are like sheep," Donahue goaded at one point. "Are we going to spend the entire program listening to you tell ((Americans)) how wonderful everything is here?" Replied one youth: "What can we do if everything is all right? Do you want us to create problems?"

The discussion soon livened up, however, as students grabbed for the microphone to voice opinions on everything from religion to the nuclear arms race. The encounter was one of several that Donahue moderated during a ten-day visit to the Soviet Union, a trip that provided material for four segments of his syndicated talk show airing this week. Though Donahue is not the first TV host to broadcast from the U.S.S.R. (the Today show's Bryant Gumbel, for example, spent a week there in 1984), he and his crew were given the most unfettered access to average Soviet citizens since Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, or openness, took hold. Studio audiences were chosen at random by Donahue staffers (accompanied by a Soviet escort) from grocery stores, movie houses, skating ponds and other locations around Moscow, and no restrictions were placed on the questions asked. Donahue also became the first Western journalist to visit Chernobyl since the nuclear accident there last spring. His crew got footage of the crippled reactor No. 4, as well as of a still deserted village that was evacuated immediately after the disaster.

Donahue was well known to Soviet TV audiences even before last month's visit. His two so-called Citizens' Summits -- satellite-linked question-answer sessions between studio audiences in the U.S. and Soviet Union, co-moderated by Donahue and Soviet Journalist Vladimir Pozner -- were telecast in the U.S.S.R. last year, as was a Donahue segment featuring Houston Biomedical Researcher Arnold Lockshin and his family, who defected to the Soviet Union last October. But Donahue's aggressive, confrontational interviewing style seemed to confuse and anger many Soviets, who saw it as evidence of hostility.

In his Moscow sessions, Donahue toned down his act a bit, though he had to work hard to loosen up audiences (wired with earphones to provide simultaneous translations) who were clearly unaccustomed to American-style TV free-for- alls. In the program on family life, for example, Donahue asked a studio full of married couples their opinions on birth control and abortion. The response was almost total silence. A show with some 350 teenagers, however, was considerably more animated, as Donahue hopped about in sweater and jeans and a Soviet rock band provided musical interludes.