MOSCOW -- The new international blockbuster film "The Lord of the Rings" has not hit Russian screens yet, but the first pirated videocassettes are already here, causing almost as much of a stir as a change in vodka prices and definitely much more than the recent news of the shutdown of independent television network TV-6.

Many anticipate the movie as much as they did the homecoming of exiled writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn seven years ago. As for the book itself, it is by now infinitely more influential in Russia than Tolstoy's "War and Peace," let alone the muddled writings of Solzhenitsyn. In Moscow, only psychiatric patients would replay Natasha's first ball or the 1812 Borodino battle. Every weekend, though, hundreds of youths in odd-looking clothes simulate elf-dwarf skirmishes in Moscow parks.

J.R.R. Tolkien would have been genuinely surprised by the belated popularity of his trilogy in this snowy, indoctrinated and definitely un-European country. Arguably, the sinister land of Mordor, where the dark sorcerer Sauron dwells and plots against Middle Earth, represents the totalitarian East. All of Tolkien's historical allusions are rather ambiguous; Adolf Hitler stands just as good a chance of being Sauron's prototype as Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong. In any case, the Soviet censors smelled a rat and banned the books in the 1970s.