Kukly ["Dolls'], still from episode 2 “The Old New Year” (01/07/1995) featuring the first appearance of Boris Yeltsin’s puppet on the show.

Producer Vasilii Grigoriev’s Kukly or Dolls was among the most significant and visible works of political satire in the 1990s. Running from 1994 and until 2002, Dolls was a puppet show that lampooned all significant political figures in Russia with timely and uniformly critical mockery. Vasilii Grigoriev bought the concept rights in 1994 from an existing French show: Alain De Greef and Alain Duverne’s Les Guignols de l'info (1990-2015). Alain Duverne created the first dolls for Grigoriev’s version , while puppet-maker Andrei Drozdov took over the endeavor for further broadcasts (and new politicians). Satirist Dmitri Shenderovich was the show’s primary writer, but multiple authors were involved in its creation.

The first broadcast was already political, mocking numerous on-going government scandals and initiatives, including the war in Chechnya, represented within the episode through a ridiculous game of charades played by politicians under a table, to avoid directly acknowledging the quagmire. The show proceeded in this vein with numerous controversial episodes challenging the narratives of state power. Initially cautious about insulting the person of the President of the Russian Federation, Kukly added a puppet Yeltsin as early as the second episode (“The Old New Year,” 7 January 1995).

In July 1995, a criminal case was opened against Dolls for demeaning the dignity of the politicians mocked in the show. The case went nowhere, while Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin signaled tacit support by meeting his puppet on the air. Vladimir Putin’s emergence as a political force and the beginning of his reign heralded the end of Kukly. The show came into conflict with Putin in the episode Kroshka Tsakhes (“Little Tsaches”) of Jan. 21st, 2000 by mocking the newly forming politician as a hideous monster-child uplifted to the level of a human leader by other scheming puppets. The episode was a reference to E.T.A. Hoffman’s 1819 dark fairy tale Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober (Little Zaches Called Zinnober). In Hoffman’s original, a fairy enchants a hideous man to appear delightful to all his compatriots, who ascribe all good actions to him, and all his evil acts to someone else. In the Dolls version, the Putin character is defeated when someone plucks out the three magical hairs that give him power. Putin then drowns in a chamber pot at the episode’s conclusion. Despite these insulting jibes, Dolls limited its representation to merely humiliating the disenchanted Putin, revealing that the whole sequence was “just a dream.” Nevertheless, according to Victor Shenderovich, Putin took offense, and as early as April 2000, there were increasing calls for legal action against Dolls, leading to its slow decline and eventual closure in 2002.