Profile : Chief Soviet Broadcaster Finds That It’s Lonely at the Top : Leonid Petrovich Kravchenko promoted glasnost. Now the changes he helped the Gorbachev Generation make are the source of his troubles.

How has the Gorbachev Generation, so smart, so determined, so certain of its talents and the rightness of its cause, made such a mess of the Soviet economy and government in only six years? One of the most successful members of the ruling class mused the other day over what had happened to him and others--men largely in their 40s and 50s--who were carried into positions of power on the coattails of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.

“We tore down the house that we were living in, and began moving to a house that didn’t exist yet,” said Leonid Petrovich Kravchenko, his country’s top broadcaster. An “entire system” was junked, and power handed to people without the skills or experience to exercise it, he added.

True, for the Gorbachev Generation, the game is far from over. A multibillion-dollar Western economic bailout, agreement on a new power-sharing deal between Moscow and the republics, prosperity via the Kremlin’s “anti-crisis program”--any or all of these may prolong its hold on power for many years.

But whatever the outcome, it has been a long, strange and painful journey for the men who have done much to destroy Soviet socialism, without building much in its place, and nothing shows that better than the career path of Kravchenko. The onetime prophet and practitioner of glasnost says, only half in jest, that he has become his country’s most unpopular figure, with one exception--Saddam Hussein.

The vistas seemed so different, so promising in the spring of 1986. At a watering hole in Greenwich Village, Kravchenko, then the No. 2 at the Soviet state broadcasting committee, known universally as Gostelradio, was schmoozing with other journalists and media executives taking part in a seminar on U.S.-Soviet relations at New York University.

A droll raconteur, Kravchenko talked devastatingly about how hard it had been to put a presentable video face on the wheezing Konstantin U. Chernenko, Gorbachev’s immediate predecessor as Kremlin leader, or the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev, doddering in his final years.

In that bright dawn of glasnost, when it was enough to admit that prostitution existed in the Soviet Union to create a sensation, state television, though hardly as daringly muckraking as a newspaper like Moscow News, struck some impressive blows for a freer and better society.

Kravchenko, Gostelradio’s first deputy chairman in 1985-88, with hands-on responsibility for what 290 million people saw every day on Soviet TV, can boast of being the godfather of a revolution in broadcasting--one that, ironically, his opponents say he later suffocated.

There were innovative “telebridges,” emceed by Phil Donahue and Vladimir Pozner, that brought together the still suspicious rank-and-file citizens of the superpowers; there was “Spotlight of Perestroika,” a 15-minute expose of official misdeeds that made bureaucrats squirm.

Kravchenko, now 53, proudly evokes the “radical renewal” of Soviet broadcasting. It seems a terrible irony that five years later, the man with the rebellious shock of white hair that keeps falling across his forehead has gone from No. 2 to No. 1 at Gostelradio, only to spend his time selling Gorbachev and his policies to an increasingly doubtful, even hostile public.

“We must occupy government positions and express the government point of view on the most important, principled issues,” Kravchenko said in an interview, by way of explaining how he understands his role.

His commitment to “the government point of view” is easy to understand--unlike, for example, Roone Arledge of ABC or Laurence Tisch of CBS, Kravchenko’s job depends on favorable ratings from an audience of one--Mikhail Gorbachev.

The offspring of teachers from the hilly Russian farm region of Bryansk southwest of Moscow, Kravchenko has the poise and polish that would make him fit in a Fortune 500 boardroom.

But behind the easy charm and telegenic good looks, there is the kind of determination and cool ruthlessness that his predecessor, Mikhail F. Nenashev, did not have. After an interval as general director of the official Tass news agency, Kravchenko took over at Gostelradio last November on Gorbachev’s orders.

“This was not merely a sign of impending change in Soviet television, but in all of politics,” said Lidia Polskaya, a writer on Literaturnaya Gazeta.

For something had happened in the Gorbachev years that made the Gostelradio job of crucial importance. As in the United States in the late 1950s or early ‘60s, Soviet politics had discovered the tube--or vice versa. A country that had grown accustomed to deciphering squibs in Pravda about closed-door meetings of the Communist Party Central Committee was galvanized by the televised spectacle of Andrei D. Sakharov, live from the Kremlin, denouncing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Ironically, the Soviet leadership--which had, in Gorbachev, a screen star of the first magnitude--wasn’t ready for what TV did to political life.

Television helped discredit some leaders. Former Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, drubbed in his race against Boris N. Yeltsin for the Russian presidency earlier this month, became known as the “weeping Bolshevik.”

Conversely, TV made, or helped make, others into idols. It is highly doubtful whether Yeltsin could ever have scored such a landslide at the polls if viewers had not seen his hulking presence and heard him slam the Communist Party Old Guard.

With Kravchenko’s arrival at Gostelradio headquarters on the south bank of the Moscow River, things began to change. Yeltsin, for example, charged television with boycotting him, and championed a successful campaign to get the Russian Federation’s government, which he heads, its own six-hour-a-day channel.

Even by law, Soviet TV is now designed not to respond to viewer desires or immutable standards of public service, but to the whims of power. Long a “state committee” in practice indistinguishable from a ministry, Gostelradio in February was metamorphosed by a stroke of Gorbachev’s pen into a “state company” answerable to the Soviet president alone.

For, by all available accounts, Gorbachev knows he needs help in reforging a popular consensus around his policies. During his first years in power, it was a refreshing shock to see him--alternately feisty, cajoling and funny--on TV. Then he seemed to become rambling, long-winded, sometimes testy, and his countrymen nicknamed him baltun --the blabbermouth.

To retool both his image and his message, Gorbachev is now talking about creating a “council of observers”--his own private “spin doctors”--to make his countrymen listen again.

“He wants to establish a group of political observers with whom he would meet from time to time at briefings, with the purpose of giving them the rundown on current politics,” Kravchenko said.

It’s a virtual certainty that Kravchenko or his designate will occupy an important place on this panel. Gorbachev and the Gostelradio chairman already exchange phone calls nearly every day, but Kravchenko flatly rejects charges from progressives that Gorbachev is Soviet TV and radio’s ultimate censor.

“Mikhail Sergeyevich simply tells me about the situation,” he says.

In monetary and human terms, Kravchenko’s responsibilities are enormous. He oversees 22,400 employees at Gostelradio facilities in the Soviet capital alone, and a budget of 3 billion rubles, or $1.7 billion at the official commercial exchange rate.

For all this, aides say, Kravchenko receives a monthly salary equivalent to that of a government minister, which would be about 1,700 rubles or, officially, less than $1,000.

In comparison, Tisch, chairman and president of CBS, received $1.5 million last year, not including stock dividends.

One of the younger members of the Gorbachev Generation, Kravchenko spent most of the Khrushchev “thaw” in school--he graduated from the journalism faculty of Moscow State University in 1961, six years after Gorbachev finished law school in the Soviet capital.

It was during his tenure at Tass that his increasingly hard-line definition of glasnost became common knowledge. Communists at Tass refused to elect him to the 28th Party Congress last summer--an unprecedented slight--but a seat was found for him anyway as a nominee from Azerbaijan.

Soviet editors and reporters showed what they thought of Kravchenko by booting him out of the official Journalists Union while he was abroad in April. Ever urbane, Kravchenko laughs at the slings and arrows of criticism.

“Perhaps you have noted that 500 to 600 publications of all sorts have appeared against me--some of them quite vicious,” Kravchenko said. Rumors of his departure are rife--”I have been appointed ambassador to Japan, Norway, Sweden,” he notes.

But Kravchenko, a member of the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee whose office is dominated by a portrait of Vladimir Lenin, is forging ahead. As at the U.S. networks, a new fall lineup is planned at Soviet TV as Kravchenko pursues his campaign to give entertainment shows priority over politics.

The No. 1 question both at home and abroad about the Gorbachev Generation seems to be whether it can hang on, in the face of secession drives by ethnic separatists, challenges from hard-liners and radicals, and looming economic collapse.

Kravchenko, for one, intends to soldier on: “As the head of this company (Gostelradio), I will fight for the successful process of the creation of a union of sovereign states within the framework of the federal state,” he says.

During the interview in his office, Kravchenko’s hands trembled uncontrollably. It may have been a sign of the strain of power, like the perceptible whitening of Gorbachev’s scant remaining hair. But as he said goodby, Kravchenko managed a firm handshake, then bounded into his black Volga limousine to be whisked across the Moscow River to the Kremlin.

Biography

Name: Leonid Petrovich Kravchenko

Title: Chairman of Gostelradio, the state broadcasting committee

Age: 53

Personal: Graduated from the journalism faculty of Moscow State University in 1961. Married with two children. Likes skating, skiing and ice hockey.

Career: Member of the Congress of People’s Deputies (the Soviet Parliament), a Communist and a voting member of the party’s policy-making body, the Central Committee. Staff member of the Central Committee apparatus in 1971-75, then editor in chief of the newspaper (now defunct) that served the Soviet building trades, Stroitelnaya Gazeta, in 1975-80. Edited the labor union daily Trud for five years and was first deputy chairman at Gostelradio in 1985-88. Appointed general director of Tass, the official news agency, and in November, 1990, returned to Gostelradio.

Quote: “Television is the X-ray of the personality. A person doesn’t have to say anything--he can just sit on camera--and you get a clear impression of who he is.”