GREAT BARRINGTON – On Friday, June 7 at 10:45 a.m., Federation’s Knosh & Knowledge welcomes author Natasha Lance Rogoff in conversation with Avi Dresner about Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia. The book is a captivating true story of a young American TV producer’s adventures bringing Sesame Street to Russia.
The story takes place in the 1990s. Lance Rogoff and her team experience car bombings, assassinations, and the takeover their puppet production office, as well as culture clashes that pit Sesame Street’s progressive values against four centuries of Russian thought. Brimming with insight and nuance, Muppets in Moscow explores the post-Soviet societal tensions that continue to thwart the Russian people’s efforts to create a better future for their country. More than just a story of a children’s show, this book provides a valuable perspective of Russia’s people, their culture, and their complicated relationship with the West that remains relevant today.
This free Jewish Federation of the Berkshires program will be presented at Hevreh of Southern Berkshire, 270 State Road in Great Barrington. This program is part of “Jewish Literary Voices: A Jewish Federation of the Berkshires Series in collaboration with the Jewish Book Council.” For more information and to register, visit jewishberkshires.org.
In March, Avi Dresner spoke to Natasha Lance Rogoff about her story.
The BJV Interview: Natasha Lance Rogoff
By Avi Dresner / Special to the BJV
With all of the evil emanating out of Moscow these days, it’s easy to forget that there was a brief moment between the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the rise of Vladimir Putin in the early 2000s when Russia was full of hope, promise, and Muppets. Yes, Muppets.
If you’re a reader of a certain age – or the parent or grandparent of one – the name evokes images of the unique style of puppet created by the legendary Jim Henson in the 1960s and featured in groundbreaking television shows and movies like Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and Star Wars.
Big Bird, Bert, Ernie, Elmo, Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and Yoda are just a few of the more famous names you’d recognize. However, you’re probably not familiar with Zeliboba, Businka, or Kubik, three of the stars of the Russian version of Sesame Street, Ulitsa Sezam, which aired across the Former Soviet Union from 1996 until 2010.
These characters and the show were brought to life in the face of overwhelming obstacles by the American executive producer Natasha Lance Rogoff and her tenacious team. She has written a book about the experience titled Muppets In Moscow, and the subtitle says it all: “The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia.” The book recently came out in paperback and has been optioned for a documentary and a feature film.
The following is an excerpt of our conversation. It has been lightly edited for continuity and clarity.
Natasha, you’ve got quite a bio. You studied Russian in college and were an exchange student in Leningrad. You published articles about underground Soviet culture, shining a positive light on gays and banned rock musicians, among others. Then you worked in Moscow as a freelance TV journalist, producing the acclaimed four-hour PBS series Inside Gorbachev’s USSR and directing a feature length documentary, Russia for Sale: The Rough Road to Capitalism. All of which ultimately led to you be recruited by PBS to executive produce Ulitsa Sezam.
It was so totally random. I literally had no children's television experience. I'm making these really serious documentaries. I often tell this to young women, who are starting out – be open to new directions, because you never know where it's gonna come from.
How was Russian Sesame Street different from the American one?
The format was roughly the same. They both combined live action films, animation, and studio segments; but, in Moscow, we shot in this new neighborhood that reflected the multiple, various stages of Russian development. The architecture of the set had rural houses like dachas, buildings from the Khrushchev period, a brick pre-revolutionary house. They mixed it up so that it could reflect all of Russian history, and also both rural and urban settings. That's completely different from the US show, which is modeled after an urban street in Harlem.
And then, as far as the content for the scriptwriting and the educational goals, they were also very different because the educational themes and goals of the American show change each year. It could be focused on race relations, or tolerance of blended families, or something like that. But Russia was coming out of 70 years of darkness with Communism, where neighbors reported on their neighbors to the KGB, so they had a very different focus. One of the most important goals for them was to model kindness and a new kind of warmth and neighborliness. That was a very poignant goal and we really achieved that, to the credit of the team of hundreds of artists working there.
A lot of your book recounts the difficulties of melding American and Russian values in the show. It seemed like a constant battle, at least initially.
There were different cultural clashes that emerged and impacted every aspect of the show from the scriptwriting to the development of the educational goals to the design of the set, and even to the Muppets themselves, encouraging the Russians to accept Muppet-style puppets.
I write about that a lot in the book, and it's hilarious. But at the same time, it was real and an incredibly stressful battle, because usually people imagine Sesame Street with the Muppets and, in this case, my colleagues – my head writer, in particular – wanted to use their own traditional wooden marionette-style puppets. The head music director only wanted classical music in the show, but over time I did see many of these same people change and become much more tolerant and accepting. And part of that was this sense of respect that they could see we had for them too, and our genuine wish for them to create a show that reflected their culture, that they'd be comfortable with both aesthetically and musically. And, once they saw that, they started to take more risks themselves, and I believe that it's that process that is necessary for change to happen. It was a fascinating process to watch how change takes place in a society in the midst of revolution and transition.
And you were part of bringing and making that change.
It was such a thrilling, utterly fascinating, and totally consuming experience. Me and my team we really thought we were critical to changing Russia, and that we were participating in something that was transformational in a way that would affect future generations of the country, and I think the show did. I mean it lasted for ten years, and I was very lucky to be part of it; it changed my life. Look where I am now, in my sixties, writing this story.
What led you to write this book 25 years after leaving Sesame Street in 1998?
Like everybody else during Covid, I was watching all these Netflix and Amazon shows, and I started noticing that every Russian was an oligarch, a criminal, a thug, a prostitute. And I just thought, this doesn't ring true to the people I worked with at all. And then, of course, the deterioration of relations between Russia and the West, and I said this story really needs to be told now because it's remarkable what we did together, and how it's a roadmap for us to figure out how to work with this country.
Along those lines, one of the things I was fascinated to learn about in the book was the role that Joe Biden played in bringing Sesame Street to Russia. He was really critical to the whole process.
He was the most important senator in terms of support. He had to galvanize bipartisan support for this in order for them to appropriate the money to be used for the show [that would] then be matched by either the Russian government, or Russian investors, or philanthropic organizations.
And, in spite of all that support, it took three years from the time you arrived in Moscow in 1993 until the show premiered in 1996 and there were dozens of events that you write about in the book that nearly derailed the whole thing – major dramatic life and death stuff.
Absolutely. In the course of producing the show, two broadcast partners got assassinated and another one was blown up in a car bombing.
It was such a violent time – very, very similar to now, and I thought a lot about that when Navalny was murdered recently. It's a brutal place and, at the same time, there’s a flip side that it is also the sweetest place, and the friendships that you create there, they’re very different from my friendships in America. They're so deep because of the hardships.
Your grandparents fled Russia in the early part of the 20th Century pre-communist revolution due to pogroms and antisemitism. What was it like for you to be there as a Jew at the end of that century post Communism?
It was very much at the top of my mind because my father was quite vocal about his criticism of my going to Russia. He just was like, ‘What's wrong with you? Why are you going back? Didn't they cause enough damage already? It's very dangerous. As a Jew, you shouldn't be going there.’ And, of course, I was there in the 1980s, so I was familiar with many Refuseniks, and the fact that Jew was stamped in the passport of my Jewish friends. It was a very antisemitic place, and I was absolutely familiar with how being Jewish had affected the careers of my friends like Leonid Zagalsky, who was my closest friend and still is to this day. At the same time, people really viewed me as an American. Most people didn't know I was Jewish. I didn't have Jew stamped in my passport. I'm blonde. Whenever people asked me what my nationality was, I said I was Italian.
But that was pre-Sesame Street.
Yes, and then the Soviet Union collapsed. We set up the new production, and I hired many people of Jewish descent – our research director was Jewish, our producer, many of our writers. And the person who narrated the audiobook of Muppets in Moscow is Jewish. She left when she was one, and she does the characters with accents, and it's absolutely fantastic. The book has won a ton of awards as an audio book.
Avi Dresner is a writer, journalist and first-time documentary filmmaker. He is a two-time winner of the Rockower Award (aka "the Jewlitzer") from the American Jewish Press Association. He graduated with a B.A. in Government from Cornell University and holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. He is executive producer of the documentary-in-progress, The Rabbi & The Reverend and co-screenwriter of the feature film script King’s Rabbi, both of which tell the story of his father, Rabbi Israel Dresner, the most arrested and jailed rabbi during the Civil Rights Movement and an ally and friend of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Avi lives in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts with his wife, Natasha, and their two sons