When Elmo was kidnapped in Moscow: The crazy story of how 'Sesame Street' came to Russia

Who does not remember the masterful lessons of Coco, the puppet dyed in electric blue that, among other equally priceless things, taught us the difference between near and far?

Or Triki, the revered doe-eyed monster who instilled in us a love of cookies?

Along with the deceitful and hateful Epi, the resigned Blas, the Dalinian Count Draco, the melancholic Kermit the frog and many others, they formed part of the everyday landscape of our childhood for years thanks to

and its successor,

.

The Spanish children of the time embraced it with fervor.

He was ours.

He seemed eternal to us, like water and air.

We hardly knew that it was actually an imported product, a graft, a manifestation of the soft power of the United States, a highly effective vehicle of seduction and subtle cultural colonization concocted on the other side of the Atlantic.

Sesame Street

, the brainchild of that trio of aces made up of Joan Ganz Cooney, Lloyd Morrisett, and master puppeteer Jim Henson, had debuted on the air on the US public network NET one day in November 1969. Ganz Cooney, an early childhood educator, put instinct on pedagogy and

idealism .

Morrisett, experimental psychologist, the desire to explore the possibilities of the television format with creativity and a scientific spirit.

And Henson contributed the substance: the puppets.

A whole universe of suggestive stuffed creatures that over time would also serve as the basis for

franchise , the famous muppets.

Exported to the five continents

Sesame Street

garnered tremendous critical and public success from that first season, 1969-70, in which it was awarded more than 20 awards, including three Emmys.

Five years later, the joyous invention crossed the pond to find a place on Televisión Española, the only one existing (with its two channels) in that black and white Spain of late Francoism.

For the journalist Sonia Torre, that was a complete television revolution, because "it had the capacity to educate us without successive generations realizing it."

By then, the program had been exported and adapted to a dozen countries, including Germany, Sweden, Italy, France, Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Kuwait, which would soon be joined by all of Western Europe, Latin America and much of Africa, Asia and Oceania.

In the mid-1980s, the children of half the planet were already growing up in that peculiar neighborhood of the global United States that was

.

These days, a self-proclaimed girl from the

the American writer Natasha Lance Rogoff, publishes a book

, not yet translated into Spanish) in which she explains how the program managed to cross even one of the most fiercely guarded ideological borders in the world to put a pike in Moscow.

Although it did not happen in the middle of the Cold War, but in 1996. Seven years later, to understand each other, that giant with feet of clay that was the Soviet Union in its death throes gave way to the Russian Federation of Boris Yeltsin and his fragile and ephemeral experiment democratic.

The producer Natasha Lance Rogoff, during the recording of the Russian version of 'Sesame Street', in an image that she shared on her social networks.

The result of a fertile misunderstanding

The story is as strange as it is fascinating.

Lance Rogoff experienced it in the first person and, as she herself says, not without humor, she is one of the main people involved "who have lived to tell about it".

A native of New York, the 62-year-old writer today peeked into Russian culture through such privileged windows as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Chekhov, the readings that caused the greatest impact on her in adolescence.

After studying Russian at university, she obtained an international exchange student scholarship that allowed her to settle in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) at the age of 22.

There she related to artists and dissidents and she began to work as a correspondent for American media such as the

, which commissioned her a series of articles on the slow but steady emergence of the gay subculture in the Soviet Union.

In the fall of 1983, he arranged a marriage of convenience with a friend who needed an alibi so as not to suffer reprisals for his sexual tendencies.

This initially trivial act of camaraderie ended up burying Lance Rogoff's aspirations to pursue a diplomatic career: when he returned to the United States in 1986, a job interview at the FBI headquarters made him realize that an American who had lived several years in the Soviet Union and married a Russian citizen would always be suspected of collusion with the enemy.

The Administration of her country was not going to hire her.

So she was forced to look for alternatives.

Those alternatives would eventually appear in Moscow, the city to which she moved in the early 1990s. And the best, the most exciting and peculiar of the jobs that her knowledge of Russia would end up providing her with was that of general supervisor of the export project. from

to the Russian Federation.

When Lance Rogoff joined the production team in 1993, three years before the show finally landed on the small screen, the talks were well under way, but they hadn't quite come to fruition yet.

In an interview with

, the writer explains that "many of our interlocutors did not quite see clearly why a puppet show imported from the United States had to be released in Russia when they already had a fertile local tradition of children's shows based on puppets dating back to the 16th century.

Lance Rogoff defines those preliminary conversations as "a cultural misunderstanding of epic dimensions that lasted for months."

However, her participation in the project helped pave the way: “The Russian team was simply more receptive once they realized that the unofficial representative of the United States in that operation was a woman who spoke her language and knew and I valued her culture.”

The reluctances were diminishing.

From frontal rejection he went on to nuances.

Some characters from the original version seemed more exportable than others and part of the content should, in the opinion of the representatives of the receiving country, "approach local sensibility", so that Russian children, raised in an ecosystem far removed from that of the United States, society of "capitalist competition and consumption", could understand them.

with or without balloons

Lance gives several examples of that effort to translate American children's pedagogy into the peculiarities of the Russian context.

The funniest and most significant, the discussion that took place during a few days of creative coexistence in a Moscow monastery, around the script for "a very simple piece in which we tried to explain to our Russian children's audience the difference between being sad and being sad." happy".

In the intended script sketch, a boy and a girl with balloons in hand were walking through a park together.

The child's balloon escaped him and, consequently, he became "sad".

The Russian scriptwriters proposed that the girl also release her balloon, "in an act of altruism", so that her playmate would stop mourning the loss of her and thus recover her "joy".

Lance was perplexed and dared, for once, to make a frontal objection to the idea of ​​the local writing team, whose criteria she respected on most occasions: “It seems a bit absurd to me.

Wouldn't it be better if the girl offered to share the remaining balloon with the boy?

Better a balloon for two than a pair of empty hands, right?

Well no.

From the point of view not only of the authors of the script, but also of the team of child psychologists who were advising them, the solution proposed by "the American friend" would amount to surrendering to the logic of Western capitalism, "which clings to the values materials because he considers them more important than human values ​​such as friendship”.

The real lesson should be that you don't need toys if you have friends.

Even more so if those friends are willing to give up their toys to make you happy.

Or to share your grief.

The Russia that couldn't be

Lance acknowledges that there was something poetic (as well as absurd) in that way of conceiving the type of life lessons that should be given to children.

The team of idealists who worked in

believed in good faith that they were contributing to the consolidation of Russian democracy with this attempt to import freedom and respect for diversity from the West, without thereby renouncing the sense of equity and equality. solidarity of the former Soviet Union.

And, above all, without succumbing to capitalist greed.

Unfortunately, as Masha Gessen explains in her formidable essay

(Turner Books), in Yeltsin's Russian Federation "a new breed of predators was already flourishing", the future oligarchs, ready to embrace the most stark capitalism and divide themselves the spoils of the Soviet collapse.

For them, it was not a question of letting go or sharing the remaining balloon, but of keeping all the balloons, their own or others, and cutting the throat (in both a real and metaphorical sense) of those who did not allow theirs to be taken away for good.

Lance Rogoff also talks in his book about that accelerated transition to a post-Soviet (dis)order that left several corpses in the gutter, starting with that of democracy itself.

One of the program's closest collaborators, Vladislav Listyev, a television journalist and pro-democracy activist, was assassinated in 1995, months before

to light.

He was not the only one.

Several directors and professionals of Russian television who had a relationship with Lance Rogoff in the gestation and consolidation phase of the project would also suffer violent deaths in those iron years in which almost anyone, especially if they threatened the interests of the new criminal oligarchy that was taking over the country, he could end up receiving a visit from a hitman.

Detail of the cover of 'Muppets in Moscow' ('Muppets in Moscow'), the book by Natasha Lance Rogoff.

On one occasion, she herself felt the whistling of the bullets very closely: in the late 1990s, with

already on the air, a group of young recruits armed with assault rifles broke into the production office, ordered the workers to to get down on the ground and proceeded to search the facilities in an action that Lance Rogoff considers, even today, "as terrifying as it is inexplicable."

Were they real soldiers on official mission or rather mercenaries at the service of some obscure private interest?

The fact is that they took scripts, sketches and even a life-size Elmo (the red monster, Coco's close cousin).

Who breaks into a television studio to steal four sketches and kidnap a stuffed animal?

The Russian executive producer sentenced, sarcastically, that "they would be fans of the program."

Years later, the American writer recalls that adventure as one of her bittersweet experiences as a youth in a country, Russia, "in which a better future seemed possible until everything went downhill."

was a success, especially in the first three seasons of it.

It remained on the air until 2007, faithful to the quixotic task of convincing children that joy, not toys, is something that can and should be shared.

Lance Rogoff was a producer for the first 52 episodes.

Today, this pioneer of intercultural dialogue argues that the fledgling democratic Russia that ended up strangled in its cradle had (almost) everything it needed to prosper: enthusiastic young people, honest and creative people eager to turn the page, a generation of children who he was educating himself in different values, without fear of the future.

He lacked, perhaps, some luck, "a real opportunity" and perhaps also a bit of "generosity and high-mindedness" on the part of an international community that wanted to "incorporate them quickly into the capitalist order and did not worry about almost anything more".

Perhaps Elmo's kidnapping should be interpreted as a metaphor for the Russian utopia that could not be.

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