MUPPETS MOSCOW in MUPPETS MOSCOW

LESLIE DIXON: I’m very humbled to welcome Natasha Lance Rogoff, whom I happen to know personally, to talk about her new book, Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia. It is entertaining, scary in places, very darkly funny, romantic and finally really uplifting when it demonstrates the artistry and the resilience of the Russian people.

It also gives you a peek behind the curtain, the Iron Curtain, maybe at a moment in Russian history that is sadly gone and it’s replaced now by authoritarianism. So Natasha’s mission and that of her parent “Sesame Street” company, was really very altruistic. It was to educate millions of ex-USSR children —now Russian—encouraging honesty, humor, kindness and of course, racial tolerance.

What could go wrong?

Thank you, Natasha, for joining us today. You were a student and filmmaker in the ’80s in the pre-collapse USSR. Tell us how that came to be.

NATASHA LANCE ROGOFF: When “Sesame Street” tapped me to produce the original production of the iconic American show in Russia, it was really an unprecedented time. The Soviet Union had just collapsed a few years earlier. This is one-seventh of the world surface, so a huge, massive territory. This included Central Asia, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia. It was really a period of incredible hope, excitement, but also pain and humiliation, because they were a superpower.

DIXON: And confusion, I would imagine, about who they are now and what to hold onto and what to let go of.

ROGOFF: Nobody had any idea what the future would bring, and especially for their children.

ROGOFF: Talk about how you became fluent in Russian and how you studied there first, because it seems like that prepped you for being the kind of person they might have thought about to give this job to. You weren’t just some Hollywood TV producer that was dropped it cold into this environment. You knew your way around, or so you thought.

ROGOFF: I thought I was the last person that should be doing this production.

DIXON: Why?

ROGOFF: Because I had no children’s television experience. So there’s that. I had spent 10 years in the Soviet Union previously. So I spoke Russian, having worked for television news and making really serious documentaries.

DIXON: You were fluent, right?

ROGOFF: I was fluent in Russian, yeah.

And then these two “Sesame Street” executives showed up at a screening of a documentary, which was called Russia for Sale: The Rough Road to Capitalism. I had just come back after embedding myself with fascist communists who didn’t want to see the Soviet empire fail, and they wanted to retain power. And so these Muppet guys come up to me and they’re like, “Would you help us bring ‘Sesame Street’ to Russia?”

I said, “Did you guys just watch my film?” I just was completely confused.

This was a wonderful guy, Gary Knell, who said, “Come on down to the headquarters. Nobody says no to Elmo.”

DIXON: Well, you didn’t, did you? I’d like you to set the stage for us, because when you were there before, it was the USSR—like you say, fascist and humorless. And here you are about to bring this sparkling children’s program. What was different when you went back after you got the job? What did you walk into?

ROGOFF: Culturally, it was still very similar, because it really had only been two years since the Soviet Union collapsed. So it wasn’t that dissimilar from what it had been before.

DIXON: They hadn’t shaken off the hangover. [Laughter.]

ROGOFF: They hadn’t shaken off 70 years of communism overnight. Although you would think that if you looked at—this project in particular, funding for it was spearheaded by then-Senator Biden. The West was just evangelical about the collapse of communism.

DIXON: And they thought that was it. It was all good now?

ROGOFF: We were somewhat naive about how long it would take or at all [be] possible for Russia to change.

DIXON: Speaking of that naivete, that kind of leads into the next thing, the Henson Company, which also [is involved with] “Sesame Street,” and they are lovely people. Both my husband and I have worked for them and they’re known for their cultural nuances. They had previously done a number of foreign “Sesame Street”s, and they didn’t usually go in thinking they were just going to Xerox what they’d been doing in America. In your book, it speaks about how they would really look at the history and culture and music and costumes and colors of these various places. They had a really good reputation for being sensitive to those things. And yet when you got there, it seemed like Russia was particularly insurmountable in this area. So was it Western arrogance that everybody just thought it would be a cakewalk, or was there more naivete involved that sets the stage for your unbelievable Herculean struggle to get this done?

ROGOFF: “Sesame Street” has international co-productions all over the world. And they did then, too. As you said, the Henson Company built the puppets for those international productions. And each of those productions ideally were supposed to reflect the values and culture of the different countries. So, for instance, every “Sesame Street” international co-production has a neighborhood and all the neighborhoods look different.

So in South Africa, it’s a marketplace. In

Norway, it’s a train station, their neighborhood. In the U.S., it’s an urban environment; the idea for that was basically Harlem. So when we went to create the Russian production, we used the same model that “Sesame Street” had used in all the different countries.

DIXON: Successfully, correct? They didn’t get the amount of pushback that you were about to walk into.

ROGOFF: This was probably the first one of the productions. I think that most of their productions were in Europe or in Mexico, where I had also worked and trained before I did the Russian production. But the challenges in this production were enormous. The cultural clashes—we faced tremendous violence, with our first sponsor of the show had his car blown up.

But in terms of the culture, there were many, many areas that came up during the curriculum seminar, which is a three day workshop where we bring together child educators from all over the former Soviet Union and the creative team. At this meeting, we are trying to decide what are we going to teach children of the post-communist era, what values, what scenarios are we going to write? How will these Muppets model new ideas?

So when we did that, for instance, I raised my hand and I said, “What about a scenario where children would have run a lemonade stand?” The reaction to that was just horror. They explained, “This would be shameful to have children selling things on the streets.” The only people that sold things under communism on the street were criminals, because independent commerce was illegal. Making a profit was illegal.

DIXON: Wow. You also got pushback about whether they even needed Muppets at all in Russia.

ROGOFF: Yeah, we nearly had, I think, an international crisis over the Muppets and the Russians. I say Russians, but we had Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, everybody. But the creative team really didn’t like the Henson-style soft foam. When we first proposed the series, the head writer said, “We want to use our own Muppets. We have a revered tradition dating back to the 16th century of puppetry—”

DIXON: Okay, I have to stop you there for a second. So their thinking was, if it was good enough for Catherine the Great, it’s good enough for my four year old. [Laughter.]

ROGOFF: But it’s true.

DIXON: Oh, God. And I think some of their actual nationally known puppets that had been on television were probably not something you wanted to pursue. Can you talk about that a little bit?

ROGOFF: Yeah, they were damn depressing. The first time, as they were arguing in favor of their own Muppets, they had me meet with their chief puppet designer. He walks in with two sacks and he pulls out these puppets and he starts holding them up, and one puppet says to the other puppet, “I’m going to kill you!” This is all in Russian. And I’m sitting here thinking, this puppet-on-puppet violence is not very “Sesame Street.” [Laughter.]

The characters were wooden, and they had really cruel expressions. So I thought we’re looking for something very different, something completely original.

DIXON: Well, there were a lot of centuries of things being a howling bummer. So I guess that just reflected that. Wasn’t one of them a cannibal?

ROGOFF: Oh, yeah. [Laughter.] I love what she remembers.

DIXON: Well, I read it over the last two days because I wanted to be fresh. This is not like I read it a month ago, so it’s burning in my brain right now.

Yeah. Cannibal Muppets. Henson’s gonna love that.

ROGOFF: This was at the end of one of these very, very long meetings where the whole table was covered with coffee cups and cookies and everything for hours [as we were] trying to figure out what to do. One of the people said they really wanted to have Baba Yaga as one of their Muppets, and that is a witch who eats children. So I was like, we have a long road to go here.

But it wasn’t only that. It was also like the music director—

DIXON: Oh, this is good.

ROGOFF: —who was an accomplished pianist and a composer. She insisted that the show only have classical music. “Sesame Street” is known for its music, its diversity, its inventiveness in terms of the music. And also, I had lived in the Soviet Union during this earlier period and had made another film about underground rock and roll. A lot of those musicians had been persecuted under communism. They weren’t allowed to record their music. They weren’t allowed to perform, and they couldn’t make any money [to] earn a living.

DIXON: And if this woman had had her way, they would have stayed that way. She was one of the more rigid and unflappable characters [in the book].

ROGOFF: Another colleague called her “the oldest 30-year-old I’d ever met in my life.”

DIXON: There is a lot of cultural pride, legitimate cultural pride, that these people had, and possibly mistrust of the West, because they’d been indoctrinated to think that for so many years. And now suddenly everything cracks open and they’ve got Pizza Hut and McDonald’s, which they might have mixed feelings about. And now there’s going to be adorable, clever little ditties like “Rubber Ducky” in Russian.

They admittedly did not do use any of the same songs that we knew in America. But there were arguably going to be new ones created that kids could actually sing. I don’t see kids on the playground singing Prokofiev.

But this is what she thought, right?

ROGOFF: Yeah. I understood where she was coming from. They had an incredibly long, rich tradition of music, and actually most of their animated series for children used classical music, and they’re beautiful. It’s all cel animation. We were lucky, because the talent base of these incredibly talented people was very high. So we pulled people— our team was about 400 puppeteers artists, set designer writers, producers and directors. So at this time, the studios in Russia were black. There was no money to make films, and they were unemployed. And when I went back to Russia in January of 2020 and I met with the chief director, who’s now in his eighties, and he told me something that he hadn’t told me for 30 years, and he had played hard to get when I was trying to hire him and telling me, “Oh, I’m doing another film right now and everything.”

He told me in January that he hadn’t worked in a year and a half, that he was incredibly worried about feeding his family. And when we offered him the job, it was like the greatest gift at that time. But it took him 30 years to tell me that.

DIXON: Would you say that economic sphere is one of the largest reasons why you were able to assemble this team? Why did they want you? What percentage of them do you think actually wanted to help you bring “Sesame Street” to Russia? And what percentage of them initially—because I know this changed over time—just wanted the paycheck, which also didn’t come right away.

ROGOFF: I would say that was not a depiction of the team at all. After living under communism for that many years, people felt this incredible release and hope and passion about trying to create a better Russia, a different Russia, as they often referred to it. “We want to create a normal country.”

At the same time, they did have enormous pride and rightfully so. I mean, Russia has made tremendous artistic contributions.

I had worked in different countries. The experience that I had creating the Muppets, for example, with the Russians was like nothing at all. I mean, the discussion of what the color was going to be of the Muppets involved a multi-dimensional conversation about Kandinsky. Vasily Kandinsky, the artist, had written a treatise on the theory of color. It related to the emotions that different colors carry. So this had to be part of the discussion.

DIXON: Because everybody was fluent in that.

ROGOFF: Yes, everybody. They looked at me when I said, “What are you guys talking about?” They said, “Oh, yellow, you can’t be yellow. That causes madness.” Then they got to the red one, and that makes children hyper. I thought, “Wait a second, Elmo’s red, you know? He’s like the most popular character.” But eventually they chose blue. And even that was a discussion, because the word for blue in Russian means gay. So some of the people thought people will think the puppet’s gay. And I was like, “Puppets don’t have a sexual identity.”

DIXON: When you’ve just arrived there, you are told by corporate headquarters that one of your first tasks in this kind of unstable environment is to find a broadcasting partner. This is the part of the book where I felt like Natasha was like Sisyphus pushing this boulder up the hill, only to have it roll down again and explode. So it’s worse than Sisyphus.

So if you could get into that a little bit; this was where I began to think I would not be woman enough to go through what you went through.

ROGOFF: The environment after communism had fallen apart was very violent. The center of the government was weak. At this point, you had western bankers [and] investors flooding into the country. There was enormous amounts of money flowing into Russia at this time, and the oligarchs were starting to take over.

“Sesame Street” is a nonprofit, and we are looking for a sponsor for our show. So we finally found one in one of the oligarchs, who decided that what we were doing was important and we negotiated a deal. He was all in. He was sort of upset that Big Bird wasn’t going to be in the show, but they were going to have their own original Muppets.

But anyway, his car was blown up in a car bombing and he had severe burns over most of his body. He had to leave the country immediately. That was one deal that exploded. And then not less than a few months later, we did another broadcast deal. So this was now the second time we had done this, and that was with the head of Russia’s largest television broadcaster. There were only two channels in Russia at this time, so they didn’t have cable as we did in the U.S. There were a few tiny stations that were just starting, and that signal from the Russian station was sent across 11 time zones. So when we got the deal to do the broadcast, it was a big deal. This was a wonderful man who was trying to bring freedom of expression, a free press to the TV station and to battle corruption inside the television station related to advertising revenue.

And when he went home to his house after leaving the TV station, he was shot on the steps of his home.

DIXON: This is the moment where I want to ask you if at any point you were personally afraid for your own physical safety.

ROGOFF: It’s sort of like you’re younger; you sort of think you’re close to it. But these two circumstances were probably the scariest moments for me other than one other moment that happened later. It was just a little too close for comfort. Mostly I was just really sad, because these were people that I had become close to. They were my confidantes. I trusted them, and they were going to help us.

DIXON: And at no point was there ever an official explanation, right?

ROGOFF: To this day, that murder of Vlad Listyev has 120 judicial files in their police station, and it’s still unsolved.

DIXON: One of the things in Natasha’s book that I found, in retrospect, typically Russian is these unbelievably fraught things would happen, and there would never be any explanation. You would never really know who was behind it or why. I mean, it could have been the guy’s mistress or it could have been a complete political hit job. That’s always scary when you don’t know what you’re dealing with or who’s behind it. So this leads me to what I personally found, even though she was not physically present at the time, to be maybe the most scary incident. Those were awful; but this actually had to do with your offices.

ROGOFF: Yeah. Our office was inside the television station. This is the same station that I visited in January 2020, which was surreal to be walking around the same place 30 years later. But now it was completely different. And we had all of our scripts and equipment, even a life-size Elmo that was our mascot in the office.

What happened is soldiers came in all of a sudden. They had AK-47s, and they took over the entire floor and kicked everybody out of the offices. [They] then took locks and sealed the lock on the offices and put wax on it and said, “Everybody, that’s it, you’re done.” And of course, everything was in this office. At this time there are no computers. Computers existed, of course, but we had very limited use of computers because most of the people, nearly 99.9 percent of the people we worked with, had never used a computer before. So we had all of our written scripts and everything in this office, and that was pretty terrifying.

DIXON: There are some slightly more lighthearted things I’m going to get to, but you had a glamorous female financial partner who professed great affection for you, but barely came through with offices or production money, and you never really knew what the deal was with her to this day, do you?

ROGOFF: Irina?

DIXON: Yes. She of the designer boots and fabulous hair. But somehow it seemed like the corporate headquarters had to bail you out a few times with cash infusions. She did finally come through with new offices.

ROGOFF: No, she was amazing. She was the kind of person that could get anybody to do anything.

DIXON: Including you.

ROGOFF: Including me. She was coquettish and incredibly powerful; at the same time, she made my life hell. But at the same time, I adored her. I mean, I know that her heart was in the right place, but it was very difficult to be a woman in the advertising and production business in Russia at that time. And for my team, we hired mostly women.

When I accepted the job with “Sesame Street,” I knew going in [that] Russia is a very patriarchal, sexist society. I had come from America as a film person, and it was also not easy. So I thought, okay, I can create the team that is more than 50 percent women. So having a female partner and females help facilitate the key roles made it a really unusual production.

DIXON: You fell in love, got married and got pregnant, all while trying to live like Atlas, the world on your shoulders. And after corporate headquarters agreed to step in with a cash infusion because Irina wasn’t quite there yet, because your people weren’t getting paid, you became something that I have never before heard of, which is a lactating cash mule. Can you tell that story to these people? I was howling when I read it.

ROGOFF: There were no Western banks in Russia at this time. It was impossible, unless you establish yourself as an entity legally in the country. But also, if you sent money to Russia, your dollars were immediately converted to rubles, and the ruble was devaluing like 25 percent each month. You couldn’t run a production like that.

So we had to come up with other ways to do this; there were a lot of discussions around this. Everything we did was completely legal. At one point I had to carry less than the legal amount of $10,000—and of course, I had a double-D sized bra because I was pregnant and anyway, there’s ample room for the cash is all I can say. [Laughter.]

DIXON: It’s funny now, because she got through.

Okay, so we’ve talked a little bit about some of the creative pushback and difficulties, but can you talk about a couple of major creative turning points you had where these people start to come together, understand each other better, understand you better? There’s a point where it started to actually gel, and that was a long time coming, too. There was a lot of pushback. Some people quit because they didn’t get their miserable, sad Russian music or other reasons.

ROGOFF: If you take the music, for instance, the woman who was dead set against modern sounds, she met with one of my friends who had become a rock and roll star later. She was scared to meet this guy. He wore leather pants. He had an earring. This was terrifying for herm from where she was from, having been educated in the Moscow Conservatory. But she came back from this meeting like a changed woman. They found commonality. They had children the same age. He explained to her that he could also write music for children. And this guy ended up writing some of the best songs for the show. And the pianist, the music director, was able to change her attitudes and accept bringing in all kinds of young music artists. She didn’t have to quit.

Another example of this is when we were discussing inclusivity. This was at the three day curriculum seminar with all the education experts. We showed a clip from the “Sesame Street” American show to give them an idea of how tolerance can be addressed. In this clip, there’s a little boy in a wheelchair; he’s with a friend, and he’s flying a kite. In the background, there is this upbeat song, “Me and my chair, we go everywhere.”

I’m watching the clip and smiling. The video ends and I look at the group. They’re just looking at me and the TV, and they just say, “How can you do that? It’s so exploitative to show children in a wheelchair.” Another woman says, “Why would normal children ever want to watch a TV show with [not-normal children]?” She’s saying it just innocently. I’m sitting here listening to these enlightened educators and thinking to myself, “Maybe they’re not ready for ‘Sesame Street.’ Maybe this is just a really bad idea.”

This is kind of disheartening, because I’d already been through previous discussions about how they didn’t want our Muppets. There were all kinds of other challenges related to this besides the classical music. Then one woman says, “You Americans don’t understand that our children will never have wheelchairs, that our country is falling apart, that our health-care system has collapsed. So we have children who are trapped in their beds. If you have children who have wheelchairs in the TV show, how will these children trapped in their beds feel? They’ll just be sad.”

DIXON: Wow, that’s intense.

ROGOFF: It was intense. But then, it goes on from there, as the debate continues about how to handle this, because these educators feel a sense of responsibility; they’re making a show for millions of children. They want to change the country, but they’re not sure how.

One guy was a physicist and he said, “You’re tasking us with coming up with a TV show that can teach children and model for children values to help them thrive in a new open society. But we don’t know what a new open society looks like.”

ROGOFF: Could you speak to the racial inclusivity part? Because that was I think one of your triumphs.

ROGOFF: That’s a really good question. During this particular seminar it was very difficult, because there was an attack in [Russia], Chechens were taking over a Russian town. It was one of the first attacks where you had post-Soviet brothers fighting against each other. So there was enormous feeling of hostility toward the Chechens and Central Asia.

Our goal was to create a TV show that would appeal to all children of the former Soviet Union. There were over 123 nationalities that were in the former Soviet Union.

This experience that went on over several days while we were having this discussion with the educators took enormous strength and I’d say tolerance on the part of the people in the workshop, because they had to overcome their feelings of incredible anger in order to think of the bigger issue of educating everybody.

DIXON: And they did.

ROGOFF: And they did.

DIXON: But I guess the Chechen Muppet was out. You weren’t going to make one of them.

ROGOFF: [Laughter.] No Chechen puppet.

DIXON: Can you just come up with one example of a moment you really felt you turned the corner? Was that maybe what we were just discussing?

ROGOFF: Just continuing on this theme of inclusivity; I didn’t really finish that story. What ended up happening is that there was a woman in the back of the room who suddenly spoke up and she said, “My name is Ludmila and I’m from Chuvashia”—which is a small region in western Russia, which extends from the Volga to Siberia—“and our town was used as a dumping ground for hazardous chemicals during the communist era. So we had the highest rate of deformities of children.” As she’s talking to the group and they’re still trying to debate this issue of inclusivity, she says, “I work with these children every day. I play with them, I laugh with them, and they yearn to play with normal children.”

DIXON: And she was heard by the others. They heard her?

ROGOFF: I watched her speaking and then she pleaded with them. “Why can’t you write scenarios for these children that show them as human and valuable to the society?” And the guy who had spoken earlier who said “Oh, you can’t show children in wheelchairs” and they’re all sitting there, you know, shifting in their seats uncomfortably.

Then I look around the room, and I see that a couple of people are crying. This is humiliating for them. And you have Americans that are sitting in that meeting with them as well.

DIXON: Were you crying, too?

ROGOFF: I was crying, too. And I was trying to hide it, because I’m the one who’s supposed to be in charge. It was really an incredible moment, because I didn’t need to say anything. The Americans just sat there and [the Russians] said it to each other. [Ludmila] was like an angel descending into the room, and then everybody just came to this conclusion that together they had to do this, they had a sense of their responsibility.

DIXON: I want to know something that doesn’t have to do with an angel coming down, although it does sound like that’s what it was. Why were you able in the end to succeed? The more you read this book—and it’s got lots of freakish humor in it and it’s very engaging, but I would have packed up and gone home in week two. Why were you able to succeed? I think that they could have sent 90 other people and they would have washed out. Was it your love of the culture? Was it your respect for the creative process? Tell me why you think in the end you were able to succeed.

Because she did succeed. The show did get made. It did become a huge hit from the day it first aired, and it was on the air for years even after she left. We all know the end of the story, but I’m very interested in what you think you were able to pull out of yourself that made you—with the assassinations and the AK 47s in the office and these tremendous clashes of all of these creative egos— why do you think you succeeded?

ROGOFF: I think it was very much about the people that I was working with and seeing the sacrifices that they were willing to make and the incredible hope after living under communism for so many years—the idea that it was possible that this country, this vast country, could change was incredibly seductive. And the ambition that “Sesame Street,” as a nonprofit, the risks that the company was willing to take, it was phenomenal. I mean, most companies would have walked out at that point.

DIXON: And these people knew that you cared about and respected them.

ROGOFF: I did love them.

Also, people were dying. There are people that you work with every day and suddenly they’re just murdered. I didn’t even talk about the third person who was also murdered. That was the third broadcaster. Two weeks before, I had given him a Tickle Me Elmo doll, and he had a picture of his eight-year-old daughter on his table. We talked about that. He was this kind of buff, attractive guy who hugged me when he first met me, which is kind of unusual, usually [there’s]a little more distance [with] Russians. And this guy was also murdered. No explanation to this day.

But when you’re in that environment and then you go home—I go back home to my fiancé who then became my husband—and you’re in America, it’s peaceful by comparison and stable and has had 200 years of democracy. So you go back and you go out to dinner with friends and they’re talking about pasta and real estate. [Laughter.] And then you go back to Moscow, and you’re in this intense environment where there’s the possibility of creating a totally different future, and to give children something that can help them move into a more open society.

Being part of that for me was a gift. It was nothing like making documentaries.

DIXON: The Russian relationship with misery is really [tight], and that must have been very hard for you to pry that apart a little bit and let some sun in.

ROGOFF: It was, but it was often such an organic process. You ask what kept me there? It was not only the discussions about Kandinsky, but it was also these moments where you have this discussion [about appropriate music], and then several months later, after we had we tested some of these serious songs that we had created; the director was open to changing his mind, because in some of these videotaped research studies where we tape the kids watching the show, the reaction to those songs was not as good as when we had the upbeat music. And in one of them, a little boy picked up a fake pistol as he was watching the lyrical, poetic song, and he shot the little girl with the braids next to him. So the director was like, “Oh, okay . . .”

But I will say one of the things I think about now that just gives me such solace. I thought about this at about 4:00 in the morning one night. I had been watching all these young men and women marching out of Russia. They’re in their late twenties and early thirties. And they don’t want to fight. They don’t support the war. It occurred to me that’s the age cohort that watched “Ulitsa Sezam.” That’s the “Ulitsa Sezam” generation. Then as I was lying in bed, not able to sleep—it’s been hard with this horrific war and having seen where we were 30 years ago and where we are today—I realized in Ukraine as well, that the young people fighting for their independence now, who are the same age cohort, they are also the “Ulitsa Sezam” generation. So we did make an impact.