A landmark was NTV’s launch of the hilarious weekly satire Kukly (Puppets) in November 1994. In it, life-sized rubber dolls of politicians acted out skits that were often based on literary or film classics. The puppets did not have fixed roles but rotated through a repertoire. The creators had some doubts about the propriety of deriding the president of the country. It did not take long to resolve them. Like the man-woman Margaret Thatcher in Spitting Image, the British prototype, so Boriska, a gimpy, apple-cheeked double of Boris Yeltsin, was the drawing card in Kukly. Aleksandr Korzhakov, unprompted by Yeltsin, tried several acts of intimidation against NTV in the winter of 1994–95. He and his government ally Oleg Soskovets demanded that Gusinskii scrap Kukly, which he would not do.104 In June 1995 Procurator General Aleksei Il’yushenko indicted the show for slander. The provocation was a burlesque, “The Lower Depths”—its title taken from Maxim Gorky’s 1902 drama—that showed Yeltsin and Prime Minister Chernomyrdin as besotted vagrants panning for loose change in post–shock therapy Russia, with Korzhakov as a wailing babe in Yeltsin’s arms. The criminal charge was dropped in October 1995 and Kukly went its merry way. Two other episodes—“Feast in the Time of Plague” (about revelers in a miserable land, the title taken from a poem by Pushkin) and a Winnie-the-Pooh piece that showed Yeltsin as the teddy bear with fluff in his head—were quashed by NTV as too salty. One hundred and fifty others were aired unamended. Boriska was in about two-thirds of them.105
For head writer Viktor Shenderovich, Yeltsin was the caricaturist’s dream. He evoked the coroneted tragic heroes of William Shakespeare and the protagonists of the Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky (1823–60), who were merchants or clerks in patriarchal families, living lives of contradiction and futility. Shenderovich’s favorite was the first sketch he wrote in January 1995. It limned Yeltsin as a Hamlet torn by warring impulses. Boriska, the orotund voice supplied by actor Sergei Bezrukov, was “unsure if he is a tsar or a democratic president,” asking whether to lock up his opposition or promulgate liberal reforms. He was “many-threaded… willful and capricious but conscientious for all that… lonely… never knowing what he is going to do tomorrow.”106 One of the wickedest of the Kukly spoofs, in early 1996, cast Yeltsin as the director of a surgical clinic. In a play on the word operatsiya, operation, it slammed both the Russian military action in Chechnya and economic shock therapy. Boriska explains to visiting journalists that he was elected head surgeon five years before “by a democratic assembly of the seriously ill.” He and his staff are all ignoramuses, but not to worry. “Lack of expertise and lack of nimbleness,” he says, “can be offset by power of the will and devotedness to the reforms.” “So what is the main thing” at the clinic? the narrator asks. “The main thing is to convince everyone that you are head surgeon. Once you have convinced them, you can cut away at anything you want and have nothing to fear.”107
Most of the Kukly skits were friendlier to Yeltsin than this—Shenderovich, Malashenko, and Gusinskii all counted themselves supporters of the president—and interlarded praise, disapproval, and puzzlement. Besides the accursed Hamlet, Faust, and Othello (Mayor Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow, with whom Yeltsin had feuded, was the inconstant Desdemona), the latex Yeltsin was God (gazing down smugly at Russia from the empyrean), Robinson Crusoe, a woebegone Don Quixote, Louis XIII, Priam of Troy, the Grand Inquisitor, a sultan closeted with his servants and ambassadors, the winner in a cheesy game show, the custodian of a Soviet communal apartment, a fireman, a Russian motorist bribing his way through a safety check, a Mafioso, a superannuated hospital patient padding around in his pajamas, and Caligula bullying senators to confirm one of his racehorses as consul of Rome—among others.108
Some of the more memorable Kukly offerings painted Yeltsin as a man molded by his time and place no less than a molder of them. In a 1995 sketch modeled on the children’s fantasies of Grigorii Oster, Boriska looks raffishly in the mirror and says to himself:
The conclusion is that the problem with the times lay not only with the man at the top but with the Russian disarray, which he had internalized and which had helped sweep him to power. Yeltsin may not have laughed at the charade—he watched Kukly only several times and decided it was not for him.110 He did, though, get out of the way of others laughing. In a country where politics were more associated with tears, this was something to be grateful for.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Governing the State
Weekdays and most Saturdays through 1996, President Yeltsin got up at five A.M., did his ablutions, breakfasted, eyeballed briefs and a press digest, and was on the job by 8:30. From Barvikha-4 he commuted five miles eastward on the Rublëvo-Uspenskoye Highway and through the pine-forested corridor along the Moskva River where the Soviet upper crust had their dachas and the New Russians were beginning to put up more commodious dwellings. In Moscow, his car whisked him inbound on “the government route” (pravitel’stvennaya trassa) for official limousines and cavalcades, down Kutuzov Prospect and Novyi Arbat Street, and up a ramp into the Kremlin through the Borovitskii Gate.1