It's Nothing To Snicker About: Russia Hit By Candy-Bar Blitz -- Military Moonlighters

MOSCOW - Heard the latest knee-slapper making the rounds of Russian elementary schools?

Question: What happened to Snickers when it came to Russia?

Answer: It lost weight.

To get the joke, you have to know the advertising slogan that has saturated the Russian airwaves - that Snickers is covered with "a fat, fat layer of chocolate."

Kids know the commercial. So do adults. They know the jingle so well that quips about fat, fat layers of chocolate have started to turn up in would-be witty headlines and even in speeches in Parliament.

In the new Russia that President Clinton just visited, some of the Western companies that slavered over potential sales as the Iron Curtain came down are beginning to make major inroads across the Russian expanse and into the Russian consciousness.

Snickers and its Mars Inc. cousins - Bounty, Mars bars, Twix and Milky Way -appear to have penetrated the Russian market far beyond any other U.S. consumer product.

Freezer wagons selling ice-cream versions of the Mars treats stand on corner after corner along St. Petersburg's central Nevsky Prospekt. Moscow schools in wealthier districts are strewn with the wrappers on days the cafeteria stocks the candies.

Demand is so high that chocolate thieves recently hijacked a Mars truck in central Moscow, grabbing tons of Mars and Snickers bars worth about $39,000. Teenagers have been overheard computing prices in Snickers - "That would cost three Snickers!" - and Russians near the Chinese border reportedly consider the ability to buy two Snickers bars per week a sign that a person has solidly reached the middle class.

The candy bars have become so widespread that cultural critic Artemy Troitsky named them in his 1993 list of the top 10 Russian "objects of the year" for the daily Moscow Times, among other booming new trendy objects including handguns, currency-exchange booths, casinos and telephones equipped so callers can be identified.

Mars has found a distinctly American way to create a voracious appetite for its products through the kind of powerful, mercilessly repetitive advertising that has been pervasive in the United States for decades.

Starting in 1992 with billboards that irritated many consumers by advertising Mars products even before they were available in most stores, the campaign moved on last year to a television blitz the likes of which Russians had never seen. One Russian retail trade specialist said it seemed to him that not one television hour went by without a Mars commercial.

With its near-universal name recognition, Snickers is also becoming a lightning rod for Russian sentiment focused against the West, against the difficulties of the new era. The hard-line Moskovskaya Pravda recently ran an editorial lambasting President Boris Yeltsin's reformers for claiming to care about the country while in fact, it said, they were more concerned about taking foreign trips and building themselves luxurious houses.

"They flooded the country with chocolate bars," it said as an example of ill-considered ideas, "and now when you ask schoolchildren to name the planets, they quickly answer, `Mars. Snickers . . . ' "

This anti-Western sentiment may contribute to Mars officials' refusal to talk about the company's Russian success and controversy. Masterfoods, the Mars arm in Russia, refused to comment even briefly on how it has managed to spread its distribution network across Russia's breadth where many others have failed.

A spokesman said it was too "commercially sensitive" and he would be disappointed if Masterfoods were even mentioned in this story. The Mars headquarters in McLean, Va., was equally closemouthed.

A Russian expert on retail trade said that Mars might be especially reluctant to talk, in part, because it was badly burned by a phony story in the Russian media about a poisoned Snickers bar that allegedly killed a little girl in Voronezh, about 300 miles south of Moscow. The story ran in a local newspaper and was picked up by national television, he said, in what he believed to be a sign that the battle for the Russian chocolate market was growing so nasty that a competitor tried to sabotage Snickers to cut its early lead.

Whether Snickers will remain affordable - about 50 cents a bar -

depends in large part on whether the Russian government decides to heed the calls from domestic industry to impose tariffs on imported consumer goods. The tariffs would stem from what former Russian economic guru Yegor Gaidar sees as a great success - that imported goods have become so cheap they are creating competition for monopolistic Russian producers.