  We discuss the recently established equivalence between the Laplacian growth
in the limit of zero surface tension and the universal Whitham hierarchy known
in soliton theory. This equivalence allows one to distinguish a class of exact
solutions to the Laplacian growth problem in the multiply-connected case. These
solutions corerespond to finite-dimensional reductions of the Whitham hierarchy
representable as equations of hydrodynamic type which are solvable by means of
the generalized hodograph method.
