Soviet tv's bought in U.S.A. and Australia

[Hokieman]

Yep, you guys are correct - the Russian system is SECAM, not PAL. For the last 10 years I've been working in Russia, the TV's they use (all imported, BTW) use PAL/SECAM encoding, so I assumed it was PAL without doing my homework. I actually had my original post as PAL/SECAM before editing it out to only PAL.

If you ever saw an old Soviet factory operate, you would understand why it would be well nigh impossible for their system to have had the flexibility to alter their design, parts manufacture, and assembly processes to accommodate:

120v/60 Hz versus 220V/50 hz power and component specs
NTSC versus PAL/SECAM (different tube architecture, if I'm not mistaken)

This wasn't the export-driven Japanese electronics economy, which depended upon the US and European markets to drive their businesses, as well as having NTSC as their native format. They had sufficient economies of scale to justify these variations, similar to LH vs. RH drive cars. Russia was (and still is) a very inward-looking society and economy, and really only concentrated on its "captive" market in eastern and central Europe during this period.