In her new monograph, Santa Barbara (Aperture, $65), a collection of photographs and ephemera that were exhibited with a short film of the same title, Markosian restages her mother’s tumultuous life through the prism of the show, which irrevocably altered her entire world. The photographer Diana Markosian was three years old, living in Moscow, when Santa Barbara first aired, and her mother, Svetlana, was a devout viewer, alongside millions of other Russians. Santa Barbara, as a narrative form, distant location, and cloudless fantasy, became a craze of the highest proportions, spurring pop songs, pet names, even copycat architecture across the former USSR. The show, with two-thousand-plus episodes, would become the longest-running television series broadcast in Russia, ever. It was a repeat, to say the least the season had been filmed and shown in the United States seven years earlier, but this time warp was not a surprise or a deterrent. Cut to January 2, 1992: as the hangover of a momentous New Year’s was starting to loosen, families in Moscow gathered to watch episode 271 of a struggling American show, Santa Barbara, the first foreign soap opera to be televised in Russia.

quickly got camera-ready on Christmas, addressing the American people, “During these last few months, you and I have witnessed one of the greatest dramas of the twentieth century.” The Soviet Union was over, but the year was ending on a cliffhanger. He handed over the keys and a briefcase full of nuclear codes to Yeltsin, and the red flag was lowered. ON DECEMBER 25, 1991, Gorbachev appeared on snowy televisions in the homes of millions, gray faced against gray wallpaper, to resign as the leader of a state that no longer existed.

Soap opera central forum