Kremlin Wants To Pull Strings On Satirical TV Puppet Show Leaders Unused To Caricature, Pungent Commentary
For proof that President Boris Yeltsin does not rule Russia like a dictator just yet, turn on Channel 4 here Saturday nights at 10:45 p.m. and watch “Kukly” (“Puppets”), a 15-minute satire starring caricatured, even grotesque, puppets of the nation’s leaders dressed up as fools and doing silly things.
If Yeltsin were a dictator, the show would not be on the air.
However, for proof that Russia is not yet a free democracy, watch the show’s creators squirm when discussing the self-censorship imposed by the network before each episode’s broadcast, for fear of triggering a state-ordered shutdown.
Even so, “Kukly,” modeled after British TV’s popular “Spitting Image,” is startlingly daring by Russian standards.
Saturday night’s show contained a skit ridiculing Yeltsin for his recent boast that he used the nuclearweapons “black box” to track a Norwegian test rocket - only here, he tries pushing the nuclear button to kill a giant fly buzzing around his office, then brags about “the decisive action by the president of Russia.”
In an earlier show, Yegor Gaidar, the architect of Yeltsin’s free-market reforms, is portrayed as a sorcerer, hypnotizing Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, who is dressed as a circus clown.
“Prices are higher … higher … higher,” Gaidar drones, “but everything’s OK … OK … OK …”
In a skit about the war in Chechnya, taped a few weeks ago, Yeltsin’s press spokesman, Vyacheslav Kostikov, introduces the defense minister, Gen. Pavel Grachev, as “the brain behind the Chechen operation,” then knocks on the Grachev-puppet’s head, producing a hollow, wooden sound.
Kostikov says, “We have many soldiers here who have experienced defeat in Afghanistan.” Grachev adds, “Yes, and we’re using their experience to the fullest.”
This skit never made it on the air. Some jokes are not ready for prime time or any time on Russian TV, not even on NTV, Russia’s only privately owned network, which broadcasts “Kukly.”
NTV executives read every script and watch every videotape in advance, and frequently exercise their right to order cuts and changes. “We do tone things down at NTV’s request,” Alexander Levin, the show’s 35-year-old director, said hesitantly. “It’s not very pleasant.”
“We don’t want to provoke certain things,” said Basil Grigoriev, the 36-year-old producer.
The 40-year-old president of NTV, Igor Malashenko, makes no apologies about this arrangement. “We realized it’s quite a revolutionary step to introduce such a program here,” he said. “We’ve been getting warnings from `friends’ that this show infuriates many people. There are people with access to the president and the prime minister who are saying that NTV is trying to undermine the reputations of the leaders and of political authority.”
Yevgeny Kiselev, host of NTV’s popular Sunday night week-in-review program, “Itogi,” said, “We have it on good authority that this puppet show irritates some of the people in the Kremlin even more than our news coverage of the war in Chechnya.”
By coincidence, “Kukly” debuted about the same time as the start of the Chechen war. For the first few weeks of that war, NTV news programs were alone in providing objective coverage and criticizing the Russian army’s conduct and tactics.
“The timing was not very fortunate,” said Malashenko. “A lot of politicians were very angry toward NTV already.” And so, the puppets had to step more lightly than the scriptwriters planned.
The moderation even involves plans to change the mask of Yeltsin’s puppet, currently a wrinkly, blotchy sculpture of latex that exaggerates the president’s facial expressions well beyond Russia’s normal boundaries of disrespect toward authority.
Andrei Drazdov, 31, who built the puppets, said, just before a taping session last week, “They’ve asked me to make a nicer puppet, so I’m doing one that looks 15 or 20 years younger than this one.” He smiled at his creation, shrugged and added, “I can’t imagine anyone who would enjoy being portrayed like that.”