Soviet audiences devour the Brazilian soap opera "Escrava Isaura"

Since the 1950s, radio and television “soap operas”—so nicknamed for their sponsorship by cleaning-product manufacturers—had enthralled Western audiences with their steamy romances and pleasingly byzantine plotlines. In the late 1970s, the smash hit Escrava Isaura (Slave-girl Isaura) aired in Brazil. Based on an eponymous 1875 abolitionist novel by Bernardo Guimarães (published 13 years before slavery actually ended in Brazil), the show told the story of the mixed-race, white-passing Isaura, trapped between her aristocratic upbringing and her status as an enslaved person on a fazenda (plantation).

Isaura’s beautiful yet not overtly sexual heroine, along with its social-justice overtones, made it a perfect fit for perestroika-era Soviet television. Coming to Russian screens 12 years after its original air date in Brazil, and in abbreviated form (15 episodes rather than the original 100), Isaura represented a fundamentally new media event—not only as the first soap opera ever to appear on Soviet television, but as an unabashedly un-pedagogical, non-utilitarian entertainment. Offering audiences a window onto a beautifully appointed, exotic, and well-ordered (if fundamentally unjust) reality, Isaura became an overnight sensation.

Featured here are stills from the telenovela’s first episode, in which Isaura’s racial and socio-economic status is first disclosed to an unsuspecting friend of the Almeida family, which has always treated the young woman as a beloved niece. The episode ends with a dramatic reversal of fortune for Isaura: to prepare for the impending return from Europe of the Almeidas’ son, Leôncio (the show’s villain), she will now be forced back “where she belongs”—i.e., consigned to slave quarters. By popular demand, the soap opera was re-aired in 1990, when the Soviet project was inching ever closer to collapse. Against the background of the economic and political turbulence unfolding offscreen, Isaura's lush setting, beautiful costumes, and happy-ending finale presented Russian viewers with an increasingly welcome distraction.