When Sesame Street went to Russia with love
MUPPETS IN MOSCOW: THE UNEXPECTED CRAZY TRUE STORY OF MAKING SESAME STREET IN RUSSIA by Natasha Lance Rogoff (Rowman & Littlefield £20.99, 302pp)
DURING a 1995 production meeting for the Russian version of the TV show Sesame Street, its American producer natasha Lance Rogoff suggested a scene showing children running a lemonade stand, to teach young viewers about business and teamwork.
The Russian educational advisers on the show were horrified. You cannot, they said, show children engaging in ‘dirty, mercantile activities’.
it was typical of the problems faced by Rogoff during her four years bringing the much-loved American institution to Russian screens when, after the Soviet union collapsed in 1991, America provided cultural funding to help Russia grow closer to the West. The project was something Rogoff passionately believed in. But as well as the technical, financial and political hurdles — the latter sometimes involving bombs — there was also the question that gives this wonderful book its real heart: how could she ‘pit Sesame Street’s progressive values against 300 years of Russian thought’?
Conditions were far from ideal. ‘We’ve lived in a police state for 70 years and are creatures of habit,’ Rogoff was told. One executive kept a gun and a box of bullets in his desk. Meetings at 11am saw the vodka flowing freely. ‘ Drinking to the bottom of the shot glass is mandatory in Russia if you expect anyone to take you seriously,’ she was instructed.
Sesame Street’s American creator, Joan ganz Cooney, first got the idea for the programme when she was in a u.S. supermarket and noticed children asking for products they’d seen advertised on TV. Why not create something, she thought, that used the same principle but to sell educational and moral messages?
Translating this to Russia proved tricky. ‘Russia has a long, rich and revered puppet tradition,’ Rogoff was told. ‘ We don’t need your American Moppets in our children’s show.’
The show’s director preferred ‘ sombre lullabies based on Russian
poetry’ to cheery songs, but changed his mind on hearing the legendary Muppet hit ‘Mahna Mahna’.
But the debates about content only mirrored the wider confusion faced by Russians after communism’s collapse.
After decades of repression people embraced life, notes Rogoff, ‘ because history has taught them how just one false step can plunge them into unimaginable misfortune; therefore they live more passionately than most people living in free and open societies.’
But in other respects people craved the secrecy and fear they’d grown used to. ‘Everything is being reinvented… That scares a lot of people.’
Gradually, however, Rogoff worked with the Russians to produce a show that their children loved, and of which she herself was hugely proud. Not that it was easy when funding was so erratic. The team ‘borrowed’ the wooden bench and telephone box they needed from a local park. To stop foreign currency being stolen by corrupt officials, Rogoff was forced to smuggle it into Moscow in her bra.
The difficulties make for a story that draws you in. You feel Rogoff’s frustration as funding once more disappears, you share her joy as the puppeteers bring the new Russian characters to life.
Sesame Street became a fixture on Russian screens until Vladimir Putin’s people at the TV networks cancelled it in 2010. Rogoff looks back on her time in Moscow and reflects ‘how precious, anarchic and fleeting Russia’s brief liberalisation was’. It’s a hard read given the country’s current state.
As she finished the series, she asked a colleague if he thought her time in Russia was over. He replied: ‘Nothing in Russia is ever over. It all just keeps repeating itself, like an infinite circle.’