The Muppets Survive Russian Television

The inspiring story of bringing Sesame Street to Russia involved attempted assassinations and numerous headaches for its American executive producer. Overcoming financial and cultural obstacles proved to be the greatest challenges.

Murders, Bombings and Financing

In 1993, the Sesame Workshop hired Natasha Lance Rogoff, an American, to bring Sesame Street to Russia. The Muppets and Sesame Street are American cultural icons, and introducing them to Russia so soon after the collapse of communism would not be easy. Rogoff was a fluent Russian speaker, having studied in Leningrad, and had directed or produced well-regard news segments and documentaries on Russia and the Soviet Union.

Rogoff admits she underestimated the challenges of bringing the show to Russia, which she describes in her book Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia. “As the executive producer of Ulitsa Sezam, I was thrown into the surreal landscape of Moscow television where bombings, murders, and political unrest were near-daily events,” writes Rogoff. “During our production, several heads of Russian television—our close collaborators and prospective broadcast partners—were assassinated one after another, and one was nearly killed in a car bombing.”

A car bomb almost killed Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky became a wealthy businessman in Russia but garnered powerful enemies. He had agreed to become a significant source of financing to make the Russian TV version of Sesame Street possible—until the bombing.

On July 10, 1994, Rogoff received a phone call: “I have some bad news, Natasha, Berezovsky’s car got blown up . . . . No one knows if he’s alive or dead.” It turned out Berezovsky was alive but had fled the country. He became a critic of the Putin regime abroad and died in 2013. A British coroner could not conclude definitively that Berezovsky had taken his own life.

Arranging financing for the project and securing Russian airtime to broadcast the show took about two years.

Cultural Clashes

The book provides lessons for businesses on how to overcome cultural clashes. The Sesame Workshop paid for training in America for Russian staff who would work on the program. Still, that did not mean Russian television producers, directors and artists thought Americans knew how to put on a TV show for Russian children.

The first problem Rogoff encountered is the Russians who were supposed to work on the show didn’t actually like the Muppets or Sesame Street. Rogoff describes a scene where two Russian puppeteers used traditional Russian folk puppets to demonstrate why the American Muppets weren’t needed:

“Petrushka grabs the tiny stick with his puppet hand and begins beating the female sock puppet in Komov’s other hand,” writes Rogoff. “Petrushka is shouting in Russian, ‘I’m going to kill you!’ Komov vocalizes the shrill sound effects of the stick hitting the puppet while I watch wide-eyed, imagining the shock of Sesame Street’s educational experts should they ever witness this puppet-on-puppet violence. . . . Komov finishes his performance. ‘You see? Everyone loves my puppets. The Moppets cannot bring anything new or valuable to what Russia’s children already know and love.’”

Another cultural clash came over the music. The Russian team wanted the children on the show to sing traditional sad or melancholy songs, a sharp departure from the upbeat songs usually featured on Sesame Street. One of the producers told Rogoff, “Happy is not a Russian concept.”

The book shows the “observer effect” in surveys or focus groups might be more pronounced in children. Rogoff needed to show the Russian team a video of a focus group to convince them that Russian children preferred upbeat songs. It turned out to make the focus group useful, the Russian children needed to be filmed without adults in the room. “When we removed the adults from the room . . . the children’s behavior sharply changed—they laughed, made faces, pointed at the television screen, and moved about having fun.”

More Than A Decade On The Air

It is necessary to read the book to understand how Natasha Lance Rogoff and her team managed to get Ulitsa Sezam on the air. The show premiered on Russian TV in October 1996 and also could be seen in “Ukraine, the Baltics and most former Soviet republics where children were still accustomed to viewing Russian-language programs.”

Given the challenges, it is remarkable that Russian children could watch Sesame Street on Russian television for many years. (See videos here and here.) “Many of the producers and directors associated with the original production continued to work on the show for many more years,” writes Rogoff. “In 2010, the series aired for the last time, no longer supported by Putin’s people at the television networks.”

What are the lessons American businesses can learn from the story of bringing Sesame Street to Russia? Rogoff said one lesson is that the only way to succeed in doing business in Russia is to break some rules since rule of law and following the rules are alien concepts in the country.

“Another lesson learned that was the secret of my success in Russia is always hire women,” said Rogoff in an interview. “They don’t drink a tenth as much as men do, they work ten times as hard and show up for work on time. Ulitsa Sezam was the first major studio television production where women filled more than half of the key production positions. This thrilled my female colleagues. I’m convinced this is a lesson that can be applied to many, if not most, developing countries.”

What is the legacy of bringing an iconic children’s television show to Russia? “Many people have asked what was the impact of Sesame Street in Russia?” said Rogoff. “I realized one night recently that all the men and women in their late 20s and early 30s who are fleeing Russia to protest the war were brought up on Ulitsa Sezam. And when we see young Ukrainians of the same age cohort fighting for their freedom and independence, they also grew up watching Ulitsa Sezam. This is Sesame Street’s legacy.”