Kukly

Puppets's puppet of Vladimir Putin, which was shown in his 2000 autobiography, On Behalf Of the First Person. Talks With Vladimir Putin.^[1]

Puppets (Russian: Куклы, lit. "dolls") was a weekly Russian TV show of political satire, produced by Vasily Grigoryev and shown on Saturdays on the TV channel NTV. It used puppets to represent celebrities, mainly the major politicians. It was inspired by the 1980s–90s British show Spitting Image.

The show was well loved in Russia and has inspired spinoffs in other countries.^[2] President Vladimir Putin was frequently represented in the show.

Closure

NTV was forced to close it down in 2002 after pressure from the Kremlin.

Spitting in Russian

On January 1, 2010 the programme Spitting in Russian was broadcast by BBC Radio 4. Presented by Roger Law, co-creator of Spitting Image, it recounts how Russian programme-makers came to London to learn the art of making political puppets, and how the programme came to an end.

• BBC Radio 4: Spitting in Russian

Legal controversies

The show's producing team was involved in several legal controversies.

Viktor Shenderovich, a satirist and a writer for the show, has claimed that an unnamed top government official required NTV to exclude the puppet of Putin from the show.^[3] Accordingly, in the following episode, called "Ten Commandments", the puppet of Putin was replaced with a cloud covering the top of a mountain and a burning bush.

References and footnotes