Puppets (TV series)
Puppets was a weekly Russian TV show of political satire, produced by Vasily Grigoryev and shown on Saturdays on the TV channel NTV from 1994 until 2002. It used puppets to represent celebrities, mainly the major politicians. It was inspired by the French show Les Guignols de l'info.
The show was widely viewed in Russia and has inspired spinoffs in other countries. President Vladimir Putin was frequently represented in the show.
Closure
During parliamentary elections in 1999 and presidential elections in 2000, NTV was critical of the Second Chechen War, Vladimir Putin and the political party Unity backed by him. In the puppet show Puppets in the beginning of February 2000, the puppet of Putin acted as Little Zaches in a story based on E.T.A. Hoffmann's Little Zaches Called Cinnabar, in which blindness causes villagers to mistake an evil gnome for a beautiful youth. This provoked a fierce reaction from Putin's supporters. On 8 February the newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti published a letter signed by the Rector of St. Petersburg State University Lyudmila Verbitskaya, the Dean of its Law Department Nikolay Kropachyov and some of Putin's other presidential campaign assistants that urged the prosecution of the authors of the show for what they considered a criminal offence.Putin's government took actions against NTV in response to the series, including raids on its parent media holding. These measures led to the cancellation of Puppets in 2002, as well as the expulsion of much of NTV’s editorial staff. Some Russian liberal journalists and public intellectuals at the time justified the actions against NTV and Kukly, arguing that strengthening the state was necessary to address the country's problems. Critics later described these responses as early signs of acquiescence to Putin's emerging repressive policies.