Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, determined to nurture a public image as a tough former KGB spy with bulging muscles and sometimes crude humor, has shown little tolerance for being parodied. Until now.
Channel One viewers saw a cartoon Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev dancing and singing in a new animated show that debuted on New Year’s Eve and will become a twice-a-month fixture on the state-run television channel, starting at 10 p.m. Sunday.
Surprisingly, the new show is directed by Vasily Pichul, the prominent filmmaker who once oversaw NTV’s “Kukly” (Puppets) program, which drew Putin’s wrath over its irreverent parodies of him and was the last television show to needle Putin until it was yanked off the air in 2002.
The new cartoon, “Mult Lichnosti,” or “Animated Personality,” in a nod to the phrase “cult of personality,” offers harmless depictions of Putin and Medvedev, but the mere appearance of the two leaders on the show is raising expectations that the authorities are beginning to loosen their iron grip on the national media and their carefully orchestrated images.
“Before, Putin was shown on the state television channels as a very serious person in advantageous situations, said Yevgeny Kiselyov, NTV’s former chief who was also a target of parody on “Kukly.”
“But when a person is shown as a cartoon, it is hard to present him as a demiurge. I think this is a definite change,” he said.
Kiselyov, a political commentator on opposition-minded Ekho Moskvy radio, said the cartoon marks “the beginning of the desacralization of power.”
The 30-minute “Mult Lichnosti” episode broadcast on New Year’s Eve showed Putin and Medvedev dancing in the style of Soviet-era stand-up comedians, with Medvedev playing a harmonica and Putin shaking a tambourine and slapping it from time to time on his bottom.
The two sing mockingly about Nabucco, the Western-supported pipeline that would bypass Russia to deliver Central Asian gas to Western Europe through Turkey, and President Viktor Yushchenko and his political problems in Ukraine, which votes in a presidential election Sunday.
The dancing duo also sing about Pikalyovo, the Leningrad region town where Putin intervened to curb angry workers’ protests in May, GM’s decision to cancel the sale of Opel to Sberbank, and corrupt bureaucrats.
“There was a time when bureaucrats lived on kickbacks, but I took some measures and they now live somewhere else,” Putin sings, meaning that corrupt officials have been put behind bars.
Putin plays the dominant role in the cartoon, while Medvedev serves more as a back-up singer.
The show also offered story lines without the two leaders, including sketches that poked fun at Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Russian pop stars and sports celebrities.
Putin watched the cartoon and found it amusing, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday.
“He watched it with interest. He had a normal, human reaction to it, and he was never opposed to parodies about himself,” Peskov said by telephone.
The cartoon could be an attempt to pre-empt possible public dissatisfaction with Putin and Medvedev by placing them in a mild satirical light, said Andrei Mukhin, a political analyst with the Center for Political Information.
Media analyst Alexei Pankin said a flurry of discussion about the cartoon on Russian blogs reminded him of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s early days “when we were allowed to say something about some Politburo members.”
But he also noted that Channel One viewers, who are fed a steady diet of pro-Kremlin propaganda on the news, would also enjoy elements of the cartoon focused on the Kremlin’s foes.
“Yushchenko and Saakashvili being scolded will resonate with 85 percent of the Russian population,” he said.
A Channel One producer said the show aims to fill pent-up demand for a new kind of humor among viewers.
“We think that shows like ‘Anshlag’ are spent stuff,” said the producer, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak with the media.
The stand-up comedy program “Anshlag” (Full House) is hosted by veteran comedian Regina Dubovitskaya on Rossia state television and is routinely castigated by critics for its vulgar humor.
Channel One director Konstantin Ernst, an avant-garde filmmaker turned Putin loyalist, called the cartoon a dream come true. “I have always wanted to create a project like this, but I wasn’t able to find people able to bring it to life,” he said in a statement.
Ernst conceded in an interview with The New York Times that he had to walk a tight rope to feature Putin and Medvedev because “one should be careful not to do anything insulting.”
Putin took offense with an episode of “Kukly” that depicted him as Klein Zaches, a small and ugly creature from the well-known novel of the same name by 19th-century German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, said Viktor Shenderovich, the satirist who wrote most of the scripts for “Kukly” during its run from 1995 to 2002.
The show didn’t last long after that.
Shenderovich criticized “Mult Lichnosti” as “a parody on satire.”
“This is PR trying to act as a satire. This is the most disgusting thing possible,” Shenderovich said on Radio Liberty on Jan. 4.
The New Year’s debut of “Mult Lichnosti” had an audience of 14 percent of all television viewers during its time slot, according to the TNS market research agency. In comparison, 20 percent of all viewers watched Medvedev’s New Year’s address on the same channel.
“Kukly,” in contrast, was a top-rated show during its heyday, frequently pocking fun at then-President Boris Yeltsin and his often-changing Cabinet of ministers. Vodka and pharmaceutical tycoon Vladimir Bryntsalov once even offered to pay the show to introduce a puppet depicting him.
“Kukly” also provoked controversy while Putin was still unknown. In 1995, acting Prosecutor General Alexei Ilyushenko tried to ban the program in an unsuccessful crackdown that he later admitted was “a mistake.”
Putin has rarely been parodied on the main television channels since “Kukly,” with the exception of an occasional, light-hearted impression by comedian Maxim Galkin.