Muppet Show

Imagine the new millennium in Russia without politicians - any of them. After the recent months of electioneering, and with still more speeches and posturing ahead, this may seem like a tall order ... but it's really not. Just tune in to NTV on New Year's Eve.


Minutes after the Kremlin clock strikes midnight, the network will air its annual special edition of the satirical puppet show "Kukly," or "Puppets." The 45-minute show, entitled "S Novym Schastyem," or "Wishing You New Happiness," will culminate with Russia's politicians disappearing into the dark reaches of the cosmos, leaving their humbler compatriots behind to ring in the new year in what the show implies will be a better world.


The program's premise will certainly provide a new dimension to the issue of the Y2K problem in Russia. In the show, as the minute hands of clocks all over Russia's easternmost time zone approach the 12, an unexpected problem surfaces: The clocks just can't move forward into the new year. With half the country stuck at 11:59 p.m., the Security Council convenes in Moscow in screen contact with President Boris Yeltsin for an urgent discussion (which parodies a similar scene in the film "Armageddon") about what to do.


The problem, it turns out, is that the cosmos is just not prepared to let Russia - with its politicians behaving in their usual way - into the next century. "I have always warned that there'll be no place for politics in the 21st century," the Yabloko party leader Grigory Yavlinsky puppet says in its typically condescending manner. Following spoofs of other Russian television shows - one, a parody of "Pro Eto," or "About That," a sex-themed talk show, has the country's leaders come clean about their more personal problems - the politicians blast off into space, and Russia's clocks begin to tick again.


As viewers of NTV's election-night coverage will have noticed, "Kukly" marked its fifth anniversary on the air during the week of Russia's parliamentary elections. In re-aired old episodes, NTV news anchor Yevgeny Kiselyov's puppet reported the news with an extra bit of attitude, and (the real) former Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko had a touching encounter with his double (Kiriyenko later said that his wife doesn't think the puppet looks much like the original). Alexander Chernykh, director of the "Kukly" New Year's special doesn't agree - for him, the Kiriyenko puppet is "an emotional portrayal, true to life with its huge, frightened eyes."


But Chernykh readily concedes that some puppets are better than others - citing the Boris Berezovsky puppet. The puppet Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky is less effective, he said, and the Yavlinsky puppet still doesn't much resemble the real Yavlinsky, even after a recent make-over. It's still too early to tell how audiences will react to the newest addition to the "Kukly" collection (which now includes almost 50 puppets) - a Unity leader Sergei Shoigu puppet.


The puppets spend most of their lives stacked unceremoniously in boxes at Mosfilm's Pavilion No. Four, where the series is filmed. Tiny, doll-sized sets - models of Kremlin interiors, Moscow streets and White House offices - stand in every corner of the large, run-down pavilion.


Since the show debuted more than 240 episodes ago, producing the weekly 20-minute episodes has become distinctly easier, Chernykh said. The show operates on a tight schedule: Scripts are approved on Tuesdays, dialogue recorded on Wednesdays, puppet movement filmed on Thursdays and Fridays and final mixing done on Saturdays. The two-week shoot for the New Year's special, then, despite that the staff has been working an average of 14 hours per day, seems a relative luxury. During filming, an average offour puppet-masters crouch behind any one puppet, controlling its head, eyes and hands.


"Kukly" relies on a core team of 11 actors, all of whom, given the physical nature of the work and the long hours, are young.


Some, like Boris Smelyanets, are graduates of Moscow's Puppet Institute and were originally destined for more traditional venues, like the Obraztsov Puppet Theater. Other members of the staff have no formal training; they learned to control the puppets by watching others and practicing.


A great deal of practicing, perhaps: Bringing to life (in a puppet) the personality and spirit of a human being is no easy task, especially because new characters appear on the Russian national scene often and with little warning. When Kiriyenko was catapulted into the government in 1998, his puppet was rushed into production and appeared on screen within a week. Smelyanets put himself through his own crash course in Kiriyenko, watching the new prime minister's television appearances and memorizing his gestures, later adding extra touches - such as Kiriyenko chewing on his ball-point pen - to round out the role.


Both the show's writers and actors agree that it is the quieter politicians who offer the greatest challenge.


"It's very hard to overplay Zhirinovsky, because he's such a great actor himself," said Grigory Lyubomirov, another "Kukly" director. "I don't see politicians like Putin or Primakov as boring. They try to hide their real nature - it's no accident that they're both from the secret services - and it's our role to bring them to life."


"Kukly" has certainly changed the way the public regards its leaders.


"Before perestroika, people expressed their relationship to power through the telling of jokes. 'Kukly' took that tradition and put it on television, fulfilling the public's need for an alternative view of its politicians," said Lyubomirov, who claimed to know people who have stopped watching regular news broadcasts and now follow the country's political news by watching "Kukly."


Daniil Dondurei, editor of Iskusstvo Kino, a film magazine, agrees that the series has been crucial in defining a new relationship between the Russian people and its leaders.


"Soviet leaders were always seen as statuelike figures, cast in bronze," Dondurei said. "Thanks to 'Kukly,' Russian politicians were suddenly thrown off their pedestals, as people began to understand that politics is a living process."


"Script writers like Viktor Shenderovich and Ivan Giasashvili have a natural ability to catch the comic essence of what's going on in the corridors of power," Dondurei said. "They've started a real political re-education of the country in the process. The program's strong dose of irony has also helped Russia's beleaguered intellectuals maintain a distance between themselves and politics."


Instrumental in that re-education and in bringing the show the popularity it now enjoys was well-known actor Sergei Bezrukov, for many years the "Kukly" screen voice of Yeltsin. Though he's now left the show to focus on his theater career - he has said that his "Kukly" voice-over work constituted only one 1,000th of what he is capable of doing - audiences still remember the popular Bezrukov for his work on "Kukly." A talented mimic, his repertoire includes, in addition to the voice of Yeltsin, the voices of Mikhail Gorbachev, Communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov, Zhirinovsky, Yavlinsky, economist Alexander Livshits and Alexander Solzhenitsyn - indeed, most "Kukly" actors move fluently between five or six characters.


Attending a Kremlin reception to mark Constitution Day last year, Bezrukov had the chance to try out his Yeltsin voice on its owner: When Bezrukov was introduced to the presidential party, he greeted Yeltsin in character. After an initial awkward silence, Yeltsin's daughter Tatyana Dyachenko explained to her startled father who Bezrukov was and everyone relaxed. Word has it the president then pronounced Bezrukov's Yeltsin voice the best in Russia.


Kukly's New Year's episode will air at 10:50 p.m. on Dec. 31 on NTV.