Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling by Ryan Tucker Jones

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today’s oceans. In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales’ destruction.

As other countries – especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway – expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission’s rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment.

Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today’s cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behaviour. And in a final twist, Red Leviathan reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country’s whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling – not long before the world’s whales might have disappeared altogether.

five minutes with ryan tucker jones

INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)

How did you become interested in Russia?

I took history as an undergraduate and made a trip to Russia in 1995 while studying in Austria. I was absolutely fascinated. It was such an incredibly interesting time. I grew up in small towns in Oregon and Northern California, so Moscow and St Petersburg seemed the most different way possible to live. I really fell in love with the place – the literature and history – and I moved there after graduating in 1999 to teach English. I remember it as a period of immense hope, when everything was possible. Then I enrolled for a PhD at Columbia, took intensive Russian and went back every summer for the next few years as I studied Russian environmental history.

Why did you focus on environmental history?

I managed to do a lot of travelling in the Russian Far East, in Kamchatka, a really inspiring place. It reminded me a lot of home, since I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and spent a lot of time in Alaska. I was coming full circle. My first book was on the Russian fur trade and the way in which scientists formulated the first ideas of anthropogenic extinction in response to the changes to the environment there.

Where did the idea for this book come from?

It was from my personal experience travelling through the Russian Far East. I was doing a lot of kayaking, being on the ocean and interacting with whales. I had a couple of flashes of inspiration. One was a very brief mention of the scientists who had come forth with the hidden data collected on the extent of destruction of whales during the Soviet period. I had no idea the Soviet Union was so intensively involved in killing these animals, which I feel are such an important part of the oceans I really care about. The other flash was the images of Greenpeace campaigners using their tiny boat to shield whales from harpoons on the Dalniy Vostok whaler in 1975, the year I was born. I began peeling back the layers, thinking about why this happened.

Why did the Soviets carry out this “genocide” of whales?

There were so many different strands that made whaling really hard to give up. It was successful politically, domestically and as a foreign policy strategy, even though it was never really successful economically and was ruinous ecologically. The Soviet state made a not entirely rational trade-off. It had high hopes for whaling and was determined to do it differently as a better and more responsible society. But it couldn’t shift focus. The system liked the good things it had brought them too much, and they sacrificed their own ideals. Whaling fleets were immensely popular: in many cases the only experience of interaction with the Soviet Union for people abroad. The state was very conscious of that fact, and made sure to present to foreigners the society in the way it imagined as its best form – of equality between the sexes and the nationalities, of worker democracy and a commitment to society.

How did you carry out your research?

This was a deeply archival project, so I spent a lot of time in Odessa and Vladivostok – the two biggest whaling ports – and a fair amount in Kaliningrad. Plus in New Zealand, and at the International Whaling Commission in Cambridge. Not all the records are available in the Russian archives; some have seemingly been purged. A lot were preserved from the ships and not kept by the fisheries ministry. Some of the scientists kept their documentation, not necessarily with the idea of revealing the true extent of the killing but because they wanted to make sure their science was good. I also spent time with the whalers, and scientists like Yuri Mikhalev in Odessa. He’s a complicated figure, who helped reveal the under-reporting and was punished by the state.

What is your own assessment of those involved?

The people on board the ships experienced the best of the Soviet dream. Their labour was rewarded, they were highly educated and they felt they were part of something bigger than themselves. But they were deeply troubled at times. Their successes were underlaid by violence against whales. That could be fitted into a different mental category, but oftentimes whalers really struggled with the scale of the slaughter. I sought to balance throughout the book what I saw as a cynical and reckless crime with the complex motivations and human stories. The whalers were incredibly kind to me, and my heart goes out to those in Odessa who have been trying to establish a museum to bring together recollections of their history. It was such an important part of the city’s history and there is a certain sadness that that generation is passing away, whose memories of those times will be lost.

What is your view of Greenpeace in campaigning against whaling?

They were of enormous importance. They had an entirely black and white view of the world, where you had evil on one hand in the Soviet fleet and themselves on the other as crusaders. That’s a very limited point of view. They risked, for example, side-lining indigenous people, as indeed they would do with later campaigns. But their influence was truly revolutionary. I have enormous respect for what they did, even as I acknowledge the situation was more complex. They probably saved some whale species from extinction.

Do you see any connections to Russia’s war in Ukraine?

One of the motivations behind whaling was Russia’s deep sense of grievance. There were two periods: the Moby Dick heroic age of sail whaling; and the awful age of industrial whaling. Russia was essentially absent from the first, while they had American whale ships on their shores destroying whales and harming their indigenous subjects. There was a strong sense in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union that this was a real historical injustice, that they stood by helplessly. It would be too much to say that the second period was blind revenge, but the sense that the West would try to restrain them from their own killing struck them as just another chapter of their own subjugation even when they had outstripped everyone else’s capacity to kill. And they weren’t wrong. But, the solution was nihilistic, it wasn’t a solution: revenge or, a refusal to be restrained because of past injustices, only caused more damage to world and the Soviet Union. When I talk to my friends in Russia who support the war, there is that same sense of grievance.

What is your next book?

Nothing concrete yet, but I’m considering a few different projects, including the environmental history of the Russian economic collapse of the 1990s and a global history of the relationship between humans and whales.

Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSr by Tricia Starks

Enriched by colour reproductions of tobacco advertisements, packs, and anti-smoking propaganda, Cigarettes and Soviets provides a comprehensive study of the Soviet tobacco habit. Tricia Starks examines how the Soviets maintained the first mass smoking society in the world while simultaneously fighting it. The book is at once a study of Soviet tobacco deeply enmeshed in its social, political, and cultural context and an exploration of the global experience of the tobacco epidemic.

Starks examines the Soviet antipathy to tobacco yet capitulation to market; the development of innovative cessation techniques and clinics and the late entry into global anti-tobacco work; the seeming lack of cultural stimuli alongside massive use; and the expansion of smoking without the conventional prompts of capitalist markets. She tells the story of Philip Morris's "Mission to Moscow" campaign for the Soviet market, the triumph of the quintessential capitalist product – the cigarette – in a communist system, and the successes and failures of the world's first national antismoking campaign. The interplay of male habits and health against largely female tobacco producers and medical professionals adds a gendered dimension.

Smoking developed, continued, and grew in the Soviet Union without mass production, intensive advertising, seductive industrial design, or product ubiquity. The Soviets were early to condemn tobacco, and yet, by the end of the twentieth century Russians smoked more heavily than most most other nations in the world. Cigarettes and Soviets challenges interpretations of how tobacco use rose in the past and what leads to mass use today.

Five minutes with Tricia Starks

INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)

Why did you become interested in Russia?

I’m from a small town in Missouri and have always been a bit of an odd duck. I came of age in the Reagan-evil-empire era, so I thought if I’m going to be a black sheep, I’ll lean in. I fell in love with the language, literature, people and history. I began studying Russian at college in 1989 and ended up in St Petersburg in 1990–91. It was a tumultuous and exciting year. I moved between history and literature, and especially public health because I became fascinated by their system of medicine. It was successful in nearly doubling lifespans with prevention campaigns, but there was a disregard for the no-smoking signs and the rampant problems with alcohol. The obvious failures of their propaganda ended up becoming my dissertation topic.

Did being a reformed smoker influence your approach?

It allowed me to have a unique perspective on tobacco cessation. Most anti-tobacco writing is from committed non-smokers. I could focus more on the sensory world of the smoker. There is an attraction to this repellent habit that people who have not been through it don’t understand – it’s not just physical but cultural – and the smokers have been missing from the discussion. With cessation, one thing we don’t acknowledge is how smokers feel ganged up upon. I remember sitting in the archives in 2016, and the man next to me just reeked of tobacco. When I explained my work, he said: “I hope you will be sympathetic to the smokers”.

Why did you decide to write this book?

When researching the origins of public health, I came across an attempt in 1920 by the first commissar of health to ban tobacco. There were a few efforts connected to prohibition in some parts of the West, especially the US, but nobody had tried at the national level. I found materials showing a discussion that went on for months, leading to the first national cessation campaign long before connections were made between smoking and lung cancer. It was the stench that concerned people then, and a strong connection of smell with poison: it was seen as ruining the system, bringing on nervous danger and sapping strength.

Why did the clampdowns not work?

There was a real concern by the state that fighting tobacco might lead to anger from the population: the cigarette rollers were a volatile and dangerous workforce, and workers and soldiers were heavy smokers. There was anger and even riots when smokers couldn’t get their product in the 1920s,1930s, 1970s and 1990s. Manufacturers were concerned that a ban would result in missing out on so much money and push people to black market sales. In contrast to alcohol, which was seen as addictive with identifiable withdrawal systems, tobacco was considered a small habit that would be easier to break. After World War II, smoking increased – so many got used to it that it was entrenched and part of the lifestyle and identity, especially for men.

What surprised you during your research?

It was striking how much effort was made during World War II to provide tobacco to the frontlines. In the midst of a major offensive in Ukraine, soldiers harvested tobacco and ground it with grain grinders to provide it to those in the field. They were so proud and reported it back as a great expenditure of time and energy. That fits with the idea of the Soviets taking care of their own provisioning, and shows that tobacco was seen as an essential war product, giving soldiers the strength and accuracy necessary to shoot straight, be alert and have the rest they needed. It provided succour to the fighting man: it was about comradely rest, energy and food. The cigarette became everything.

Tell us about the smoking posters you use as illustrations

Finding those in the graphics department of the Russian State Library was an amazing group experience. The ladies who work there gather round when you get a file and look through it with you. You sense discovery and enjoyment, but it can also show jarring cultural difference. They loved a pre-revolutionary poster of a cute little boy smoking his dad’s cigarettes, although I was absolutely horrified. The imagery after the Revolution shows the techniques of Soviet poster design: Communist consumption producing the right political attitudes, the association of consumption to state needs, the triumvirate of worker-peasant-soldier, the red star, communal production: making the habit revolutionary. Russia became a mass smoking society before anywhere elsewhere in the world.

Was there ambivalence to the arrival of Western tobacco companies?

On the contrary, the authorities laid out the red carpet to try to attract Philip Morris in the 1970s. There was excitement about a return to a once-global image of the former Russian Empire as producers of good tobacco. In imperial times, James Duke, the US tobacco baron, brought in women from Eastern Europe to be his tobacco rollers. Russian-style cigarettes were exported worldwide as the height of quality. Having Marlboro in Russia felt like it was coming back to the global market again. Philip Morris engineered them to be as addictive as possible, adding ammonia to provide a quicker delivery of nicotine and driving dependency. They targeted marketing to children. There was an explosion of the most addictive cigarette you could possibly find, into a market of people hungry for any cigarette. The number of smokers stayed fairly steady but consumption went up by 50 percent.

Do you see any resonance around smoking campaigns with Russia’s current war?

The country’s demographic crisis and crisis of masculinity is tied up with the ways in which the Russians are having problems trying to mobilise the number of soldiers they want. It leads to certain choices in how you pursue war when you are concerned about the number of people you can put on the field. We also see the breakdown of the health system, which has been so long neglected. Medical care is not able to meet needs in the field.

What is your next book?

It’s about the debate after 1968, when the Soviet demographer Boris Urlanis wrote his article “Save the Men”, warning that men needed to change their behaviour, that they were dying younger than women because of alcohol, tobacco and accidents. It set off a firestorm about the male health crisis which still resonates in the Putin era. Part of Putin’s appeal is as the manliest of men, who is healthy, super vigorous and abstemious. I argue this builds on long-standing anxiety over the health of Russian and Soviet men.

Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine by Owen Matthews

The Russo-Ukrainian War is the most serious geopolitical crisis since the Second World War – and yet at the heart of the conflict is a mystery. Vladimir Putin apparently lurched from a calculating, subtle master of opportunity to a reckless gambler, putting his regime – and Russia itself – at risk of destruction. Why?

Drawing on over 25 years’ experience as a correspondent in Moscow, as well as his own family ties to Russia and Ukraine, journalist Owen Matthews takes us through the poisoned historical roots of the conflict, into the Covid bubble where Putin conceived his invasion plans in a fog of paranoia about Western threats, and finally into the inner circle around Ukrainian president and unexpected war hero Volodimir Zelensky.

Using the accounts of current and former insiders from the Kremlin and its propaganda machine, the testimony of captured Russian soldiers and on-the-ground reporting from Russia and Ukraine, Overreach tells the story not only of the war’s causes, but how the first six months unfolded.

With its panoramic view, Overreach is an authoritative, unmissable record of a conflict that shocked Europe to its core.

Five minutes with owen matthews

INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)

Why did you decide to write this book?

I happened to be in Moscow right at the beginning of the war. It turned out that, not because of any journalistic brilliance but having worked there for a quarter of a century, I was quite well connected with past and present upper echelons of the Russian government. I realised there would be many excellent books written by my colleagues in Ukraine but for me what happened there is not really the mystery. The question lies in Russia, because this is a one-person drama: it’s about what’s happening in Putin’s head, and a very small circle around him. This war is about a colonial relationship – not like England and India, but rather England and Ireland or England and Scotland: two countries with interchangeable elites, and when the imperial centre weakens, the local culture is strong enough to break free.

How important were your own roots in writing the book?

I found myself going back into my own history. The conflict exists all the way down from the Kremlin into Russian and Ukrainian families. My mother’s side has roots in Ukraine going back to the end of the eighteenth century. Their story is also the story of the Russian Empire and its tangled relationship with Ukraine. She was born in Kharkiv but never considered herself Ukrainian, although she grew up speaking the language with her mother till the age of seven. My experience living in Russia and with relatives in the country certainly helped give me insight into a profound cultural deafness, dismissiveness and patronising attitude by Russia towards Ukraine. We do think with our blood in many ways, but I have no personal sympathy with the Kremlin’s imperial project.

How have your friends and contacts reacted to the war?

Almost everyone has left – to Tbilisi or Tel Aviv or elsewhere. A whole sway of my social circle just legged it. Others didn’t want to talk. In stark contrast to Kyiv, in Moscow what struck me on my three visits there in the last few months is the invisibility of the war. There’s no easy way to tell which side somebody is on. Among those who stayed, some artist friends who spent their careers flirting with Russian fascism in an aesthetic sense were completely horrified; others who seemed cosmopolitan, well travelled, sound people turned out to be, if not pro-Putinites, then at least to have the view: “It’s not so simple, I hate this war but we were forced into it by America”. A large part of that rationalisation is because they remained in Russia and find themselves in a state of confusion and denial. It’s very hard to explain to somebody there that Ukraine is not run by Nazis. The problem in arguing with people who are fundamentally irrational and refuse to believe basic facts is that it’s incredibly exhausting. It’s like wrestling with treacle.

What are your book’s key messages?

There are three big takeaways, which are not necessarily appreciated in the West. First, the wellspring for Putin and his entourage was not imperialism or trying to recreate the Soviet Union. They believed what they were doing was not about conquering Ukraine but a defensive war to save people they consider their own – even if those people don’t consider themselves to be Russian. Second, they convinced themselves that they were forced to act because the West and America were inexorably encroaching on Russia’s sphere of influence, to undermine it and effect regime change. The 2020 unrest in Belarus was the final straw for Putin. The whole tragedy of the situation, going right back to the invasion of Georgia in 2008, is that every escalation is caused by Putin’s attempts to prevent escalation. In that tragic sense, he’s the cause of his own nemesis. He creates the outcomes that he most fears and doesn’t want. Third was how close Zelensky came to solving this problem in October 2019 when he did a deal with the rebel republics to have a referendum on their status. But he was blocked by the nationalist opposition.

How does the conflict proceed now?

Sanctions have strategically poisoned the Russian economy but it has proved remarkably resilient and adept at overcoming them. There is a degree of stability that makes the war more or less invisible to most Russians. The Putin regime remains remarkably steady. As we saw in the Brezhnev era, the regime managed to survive the loss of its intelligentsia in the 1970s and defeat in Afghanistan in the 1980s. What really did for them was tanking oil prices. As long as oil stays at $80 a barrel, it will continue to muddle on. Unfortunately for Russia, Putin still has quite a lot of potential to continue. The unknown is where the pain point comes: if he loses Mariupol, does that mean Putin falls? Arguably the propaganda machine is highly effective. Putin can’t hope to win this war but he can still hope not to lose it.

How will it all end?

Crimea is unlikely to fall, but the loss of any territory will be extremely hard for Ukraine to deal with. Whatever the outcome of the war, Ukrainians will feel betrayed. However well the summer offensive works out, they still won’t succeed in throwing Russia out of their former territory. Zelensky has the authority and popularity to push through that crisis but the devastation is enormous, and the entire economy needs to be rebuilt from scratch. Unfortunately Russia may just continue to trundle on, whereas Ukraine as the victim will be in a much deeper crisis. The bottom line is neither Zelensky nor any Ukrainian leader can sign a peace deal with the Kremlin. The most likely outcome is a Korean scenario with a line of control and a barbed wire fence.

Russia’s war by Jade McGlynn

In the early hours of 24 February 2022, Russian forces attacked Ukraine. The brutality of the Russian assault has horrified the world. But Russians themselves appear to be watching an entirely different war – one in which they are the courageous underdogs and kind-hearted heroes successfully battling a malign Ukrainian foe.

Russia analyst Jade McGlynn takes us on a journey into this parallel military and political universe to reveal the sometimes monstrous, sometimes misconstrued attitudes behind Russian majority backing for the invasion. Drawing on media analysis and interviews with ordinary citizens, officials and foreign-policy elites in Russia and Ukraine, McGlynn explores the grievances, lies and half-truths that pervade the Russian worldview. She also exposes the complicity of many Russians, who have invested too deeply in the Kremlin’s alternative narratives to regard the war as Putin’s foolhardy mission. In their eyes, this is Russia’s war – against Ukraine, against the West, against evil – and there can be no turning back.

FIVE MINUTES WITH JADE MCGLYNN

INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)

How did you first become interested in Russia?

I don’t have any family connection to Russia. I became interested in Russian history and literature when I was eleven years old and read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. I couldn’t make sense of why the anti-fascists couldn’t get along. I taught myself Russian from a book, and then studied Russian literature and language along with Serbian and Spanish at university. I finally went to Russia in 2008 and then I returned for most of my year abroad, and moved there in 2011. Working there in 2014, I became interested in Russia’s views on Ukraine and fascinated by the use of historical narratives. It all went back to this big knot of what Russianness is in the post-Soviet reality. I did my masters research on Russia’s use of history to explain the Ukrainian crisis through the Great Patriotic War, and then my PhD looking at that bigger knot.

Why did you decide to write this book?

When I finished my PhD, I had a lot of research that I felt was important but wasn’t sure why, perhaps because I didn’t want to admit what it was showing me. With the invasion it became very clear. It was a very difficult time. I had spent a lot of time in Ukraine and had friends there and others who went to Poland to help. But I had a baby two months before the invasion and I wasn’t physically able to contribute in that way. This way I could contribute. Plus, writing this book kept me sane. It was about making sense of things. I don’t think this is Putin’s war, or that Russians are inherently bad people. I wanted to make sense of it in an intellectual way.

Did you feel a tension as a Russianist who then turned to Ukrainian research?

I am a Russianist, I fell in love with the place and thought I would spend my whole life there. There was a big internal tension for me in 2014. I made the decision to leave Russia then and not live there any more. I really wanted to be on Russia’s side and I tried to find a way to sympathise with that position. But I just couldn’t get there.

How did you conduct your research?

I did a lot of media analysis, drawing on previous research and adding Telegram, where the data is uncensored, messages go viral and you can see what people are engaging with – that’s better than just using opinion polls. There were also a lot of people I had been speaking to, who occupied different positions but were broadly supportive of the Russian state position on Ukraine. They viewed Ukraine as basically Russian, 2014 as a coup, and Ukrainians who didn’t want to be Russian as extreme nationalists. It was interesting to track how their views diverged on different points over time.

Did anything surprise you during your research?

It’s a very painful point. I was a bit surprised about some of the data from opposition figures on Telegram and in interviews. They were certainly pro western, with a strong moral compass – but their views on Ukraine were very recognisable from the Russian state’s discourse. It showed the extent to which living in a country that has a certain extreme language can influence even those who are not supportive of the regime, and in other cases might be grounded in an elitism and snobbery towards Ukrainian culture.

Is Russian state propaganda the key to spreading these views?

If Russian state propaganda was so powerful, more people would have been vaccinated against COVID-19. Many Russians are sophisticated media users and don’t listen when they don’t want to. The way state-affiliated media has used popular culture threaded with political messaging is incredible, though. Although propaganda needs a platform, it also needs to resonate. The Soviet Union offered a certain security. There was a sense of humiliation in the 1990s. The state managed to merge that feeling very successfully with a sense of geopolitical humiliation. The idea that Putin is the source of all evil and always hated the West is not borne out if you look to the 2000s. And I don’t think all the answers lie with Russia. There is plenty the West did wrong: like the way Western governments facilitated the political elites so they didn’t need to make a better Russia: they could go abroad to get legal redress, education, to have property rights and make sure their money was safe.

What are the key messages of the book?

If we see this as just Putin’s war, we will make terrible policy. It’s a war made possible by socio-political realities in Russia. “Support” for the war is not the right term, but rather approval or acquiescence, and certainly not opposition. The ridiculously brave opponents of the war are really unrepresentative. We should not expect a democratic liberal uprising. We often only think of Russia as two extreme binaries: bloodthirsty supporters and courageous opponents. We need to look at the spectrum in between, which is much more nuanced.

How do you see the future?

Russia’s war in Ukraine can’t be solved in Ukraine. It’s about Russia’s own identity and conception of its place in the world, which is dependent on its ability to subjugate Ukraine. Unless that fundamentally changes, I don’t see any form of peaceful coexistence. I would encourage the West to facilitate Ukraine to at least get back to a minimal victory with the borders before last February, followed by policed borders with deterrence. We will have containment, and the best option for those opposed to the official Russian position will be to leave and recreate Russia from abroad. It is bleak, but it’s better to prepare for the worst. Nations do recreate themselves but change needs to come from inside. The West has no strategy in its relationship with Russia. We need to stop trying to think about how to get the truth to Russians. It’s not about truth, it’s about identity.

What will your next book be about?

My next book is out in June, based on my PhD, about Russian politics and the relationship with the past. Then I will write on the key historical myths in the mainstream Russian understanding of the past and how it influenced policy today.

Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia by Natasha Lance Rogoff 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the timing appeared perfect to bring Sesame Street to millions of children living in the former Soviet Union. With the Muppets envisioned as ideal ambassadors of Western values, no one anticipated just how challenging and dangerous this would prove to be.

In Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia, Natasha Lance Rogoff brings this gripping tale to life. Amidst bombings, assassinations, and a military takeover of the production office, Lance Rogoff and the talented Moscow team of artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and puppeteers remained determined to bring laughter, learning, and a new way of seeing the world to children in Russia, Ukraine and across the former Soviet empire. With a sharp wit and compassion for her colleagues, Lance Rogoff observes how cultural clashes coloured nearly every aspect of the production – from the show’s educational framework to writing comedy to the new Russian Muppets themselves – despite the team’s common goal.

Brimming with insight and nuance, Muppets in Moscow skillfully 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 even today.

five minutes with natasha lance rogoff

INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)

What is your connection to Russia?

My grandfather left Belarus in 1912 because of the pogroms and came to America via Germany. He lived till the 1970s and spoke Yiddish and Russian, which I found all very mysterious and intriguing. I have five siblings, but I’m the only one who speaks Russian, and my mother and father didn’t. By the time I was in high school, I was already consumed with Russian literature. This soulful, mysterious and sometimes cruel culture just spoke to me. I graduated in Chinese history at Berkeley, but also studied Russian. After studying at Leningrad State University in the 1980s on an American-Soviet exchange program, I did a graduate degree in Soviet foreign policy at Columbia University.

How did you get involved with the Muppets?

It was completely random. I was a TV producer and had been making very serious documentaries for PBS, including a four-part series Inside Gorbachev’s USSR. The first film I directed and wrote was Russia for Sale: The Rough Road to Capitalism. That film predicted the coup of 1991, and excerpts were aired on national television on the night of the August coup, (although we had anticipated September because I thought no Russian would give up their vacation). At one of the film screenings in New York City, two Sesame Street executives approached me and asked if I could help them bring Sesame Street to Russia. I just looked at them completely dumbfounded, asking if they had just watched my film where I had embedded myself with Russian fascists for two years.

What was the experience like?

I love the Muppets just as most people did, but I didn’t think I would take the job. But after visiting Sesame Street headquarters, I was just amazed by what they were trying to do. To create an original entire show of 52 half-hour episodes that would not be imported but would grow out of Russia’s own culture and past, what the Russian people were during Soviet times, and what they wanted to become in the future. It was incredibly exciting and seductive, but also scary. I quickly discovered that the challenges were very different from making a documentary or being a journalist writing about it. The interactions I experienced were so emotional. Heated debates ensued among the Moscow creative team about what the show should teach their children. It was the deepest way to understand a culture by trying to create something for their children and the dreams they harboured. There were a lot of conflicts over what the show should look like. The spectre of failing was constant. I always understood I could leave, and yet, witnessing the passion and hope of my colleagues for a better future for Russia, made it impossible to leave.

What were the biggest surprises?

There was the assassination of two of our Russian broadcast partners, the car bombing of our first sponsor, and the takeover of our puppet production office by soldiers with AK47s. Then there was the music. Initially the Russian music director only wanted classical music, given that their children’s animation typically featured that style of music. But the whole idea of Sesame Street was grounded in using innovative, diverse, fresh new sounds, and I envisioned that Ulitsa Sezam (Sesame Street in Russian) could offer tremendous opportunities to a lot of rock and jazz musicians who had been persecuted under Communism and not able to record or earn a living from their music. Part of why I took the job is because I had filmed and written about these music artists in the 1980s, and I was excited to include them in a new show.

What was the Russian attitude towards the Muppets?

I never anticipated that there would be such hostility. The debate went on for months, with the Russians arguing that they had their own magnificent puppetry tradition dating back to the sixteenth century. I respected that, but I was there hired by Sesame Street. It was very complicated moving that needle. The approach was so quintessentially roundabout and abstract. We had to have endless discussions about philosophy and literature before we could come up with a drawing. Traditional Russian puppets are typically made of wood, and some look very scary. The Muppets were soft and approachable. But once they saw how the Muppets were embraced by ordinary people in the US, it somehow shifted their perspective and they understood that the show could have a huge impact on post-Soviet society.

What is your view on the resonance with contemporary Russian attitudes?

A lot of the same themes we dealt with then, are still relevant now: Russian nationalism, contempt for Western values, a view that Russian culture is superior, that its people are more spiritual, and that Russia will save the world. They came up again and again. It’s so important for people to realise that changing culture takes a long time. That’s something the West missed in the 1990s, expecting other countries to mirror our own, which often can lead to war. We were all euphoric about the defeat of Communism. It’s so painful to see where we were 30 years ago and where we are today. Volodya Grammatikov, the chief director of Ulitsa Sezam and a famous children’s cinema director who recently turned 80, said: “My only hope is that the generation that grew up on Ulitsa Sezam will stop this madness.”

What happened to the Russian Sesame Steet?

The final episodes went out in 2010. Once Putin had his TV executives in power, they fired the Director of Russian Research who had been there since the beginning. The rest of the team quit in solidarity. Sesame Street had offered hope that we were able to change people’s minds, teach children skills to thrive in a free market, and encourage freedom of expression, tolerance and inclusivity, including greater acceptance of children with disabilities and more open attitudes towards gender issues. I think about how it influenced millions of children across eleven time zones. It’s incredible how many people I meet in their late 20s, early 30s from Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine and Russia who grew up on it. It was a huge success. And now Sesame Street is producing episodes for distribution in Ukraine, with particular attention to the unique needs and experiences of those affected by crisis.

How important in the story was your husband, Ken Rogoff?

Hugely. I don’t think I could have done it without him. Russia was so unstable at this time and it was incredibly soul crushing to have so many Russian colleagues who had become friends, murdered while fighting to produce the puppet show. And it became more difficult once I got pregnant. Ken was my rock and he never wavered from giving me the support I needed. Also, I wasn’t particularly savvy about Western corporations and navigating how they would react to the challenges and level of risk. Ken always provided a much-needed perspective on this. His grandfather was Ukrainian and Ken speaks some Russian. He is an international grandmaster of chess and – all the chess books were written in Russian when he was competing in high school.

Why did you decide to write the book?

I had written an early draft for the book just after finishing the TV series. After having my second child, I put it aside. This is a key part of why I was able to write this book, I don’t think I would have remembered everything 30 years later. I also had video tapes from the period of the production to refer to. Even when I was talking with my former colleagues on WhatsApp and conducting interviews for this book, many had no memory of things they had said on the video tapes. For example, when I interviewed Sergei, the live-action director about his first impressions of the Muppets, he said he loved them. I reminded him that initially, he hated the Muppets and declared them “scientifically opposed to Russian nature and they could never be unappealing to Russian children” – I played the video of him saying exactly this from 30 years earlier. My colleagues are incredibly proud of what we accomplished together – creating a show that was a huge hit for over a decade and well into Putin’s era, changing the way a generation of children think.

It’s ironic that the children of my former colleagues are now doing incredible work to make the world a better place. The former live-action director’s son is now a lawyer, living in Ukraine and working to expose Russian war crimes. He is on Putin’s hit list. The daughter of the head writer has been volunteering to help Ukrainian refugees on the Polish border. There are so many stories like these. Part of the reason I felt it important to write this book now is that every time I watched TV shows on Amazon and Netflix, every single show presented Russians as caricatures – thugs, prostitutes, serial killers, or oligarchs – there was not one example that reflected the incredibly talented and passionate people I had worked with for five years. That really bothered me. It felt like a free-for-all on TV against the Russian people and I felt it important to write this story about these people who had made incredible sacrifices at a time of extreme instability.

They were incredibly passionate about wanting a different, better future for their country and for their children. They worked 12–18 hour days a lot of the time. Often, the financial situation collapsed in Russia and we couldn’t pay them on time. Our team, numbering more than 400 creatives, represented all the different nationalities of the former Soviet Union. These artists didn’t have a voice and I really felt I had to tell this story. It is also a remarkably story of perseverance and grit. Plus, this story illuminates the ways in which the 1990s and Russia’s past contribute to where we are today. The Muppets proved an ideal prism through which to share this story and I hope it gives readers a deeper understanding that bridges can be built across cultures to promote reasonably peaceful coexistence and avoid war.

What is your next project?

After recently signing with CAA in Hollywood, my hope is to adapt Muppets in Moscow as a scripted, fictional TV series and several documentary film makers have approached me. I am also writing another book on my experiences in Leningrad in the 1980s. It’s been amazing to be able to go back to those years and think about this time before any of us imagined the Soviet Union would implode.

I think a lot about the people I met and the decisions made, like marrying a gay man to get him out of Russia and writing about underground rock musicians who, like many in Russia today, were not allowed freedom of expression. It was a very different time and often makes me think about how important it is for the next generation to feel a civic responsibility and understand that every individual can make a difference by respecting the views of others and encouraging human values.

This is Sesame Street’s legacy – Ulitsa Sezam influenced the generation of children who are now adults, marching out of Russia because they don’t want to fight Putin’s war in Ukraine, and also fighting in Ukraine for their continued independence from the Kremlin.

Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg by Olga Petri

Places of Tenderness and Heat is a ground-level exploration of queer St Petersburg at the fin-de-siècle. Olga Petri takes us through busy shopping arcades, bathhouses, and public urinals to show how queer men routinely met and socialized. She reconstructs the milieu that enabled them to navigate a city full of risk and opportunity.

Focusing on a non-Western, unexplored, and fragile form of urban modernity, Petri reconstructs a broad picture of queer sociability. In addition to drawing on explicitly recorded incidents that led to prosecution or medical treatment, she investigates the many encounters that escaped bureaucratic surveillance and suppression. Her work reveals how queer men's lives were conditioned by developing urban infrastructure, weather, light and lighting, and the informal constraints on enforcing law and moral order in the city's public spaces.

Places of Tenderness and Heat is an ambitious record of the dynamic negotiation of illicit male homosexual sex, friendship, and cruising and uncovers a historically fascinating urban milieu in which efforts to manage the moral landscape often unintentionally facilitated queer encounters.

Five minutes with Olga Petri

INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)

What is your connection to Russia?

I was born in Leningrad and grew up in St Petersburg. I studied geography at St Petersburg State University and my long-term aspiration was to work in historical and cultural geography, which is not so developed in Russia, perhaps because it’s always politically sensitive. In many ways, I’m a child of my city – just growing up there was inspiring. All these different, sometimes very painful periods in the city’s history are inscribed on top of one another. Near my apartment when I was growing up, for example, there was a very large, non-descript building that had once been a cathedral. It had been converted to serve as the city’s NKVD, KGB and FSB headquarters and remand prison. Today, my research and many social and family relationships connect me with Russia, but my geographical interests fit better with the work done at Western universities. That is why I did a masters at University College London and my PhD at Cambridge, where I was able to delve deeply into areas of historical cultural geography that interest me.

What inspired you to write your book?

The city itself, St Petersburg. I envisaged this project twenty years ago. When I was fifteen, I visited the places frequented by my literary heroes (and St Petersburg provides a lot of opportunities for that!) I tried to imagine their lives – for instance that of the poet, composer and writer Mikhail Kuzmin. His mysterious, yet bright poetry had initially attracted me, but he also wrote a lot about his walks in the city with his friends and, at times, lovers. When I began to study his life, I became intrigued in particular by his participation in the city’s vibrant queer milieu around the fin-de-siècle. The idea of writing about this experience was long in gestation, but re-emerged as an academic pursuit when I arrived at Cambridge. My better acquaintance with the methods of cultural and historical geography opened up new ways of looking at St Petersburg, a city “where the sky poured some kind of love,” in the words of Mikhail Kuzmin.

How did you carry out your research?

It’s one thing to read poetry, and a very different thing to understand what was happening to these men. The core of my work is the reconstruction and interpretation of four such spatial stories, which between them cover a large portion of the queer milieu as a socio-spatial phenomenon. These are policing, street-life, bathing and cruising. In reconstructing these stories, I tap vastly underutilised municipal archives. These contain mainly incomplete fragments in stenographic shorthand and are organised chronologically by department. The work of reassembling these fragments of internal police correspondence, bathhouse reforms and municipal reconstruction projects targeting the eradication of queer street life took several years. From this research emerged an image of an often surprisingly public queer milieu developing and even flourishing within the administrative, social and spatial constraints of the rapidly modernising imperial city. But along the way it was very difficult turning the pages in the archives, some of them burnt, many never opened, and with coded language and handwriting illegible even for a native speaker. I sometimes asked my mother for help, breaking down words letter by letter. The picture shown in the book emerged slowly.

Did you come across any surprises?

I tend to think about late Imperial Russia as a bit chaotic, but I found quite a few functioning parts of a system at work. Its objective was upholding at least the semblance of public order and I was often surprised to see how its mandate was effectively negotiated. We know that the city and queerness were very much connected. It is often suggested that the urban environment provides anonymity to explore sexuality. But I came to see how queer men also influenced the city and formed the environment around them. The city changed – or remained unchanged – through them. For instance, the authorities tried to change the public baths to create a very different, modern, hygienic space, but they couldn’t because of the direct, persistent influence of this milieu. In general, the 1917 Revolution creates a temptation to read fin-de-siècle Russia as doomed and ungovernable. But hindsight and foreboding can be problematic and show up problems in the wrong places. In my area of research, I was surprised to uncover a relatively stable and decipherable entente between various municipal governing bodies, the police and queer men. Their interactions illustrate how these men were, on the one hand, subject to the vision of order enforced by municipal authorities, but, on the other hand, able to modify that order to accommodate their seemingly incongruent desires.

What were your key conclusions?

I focus on the street level urban environment, the public spaces. There is a lot of research about attitudes and influences for the construction of queerness. That’s very important, but what’s missing is the management of and negotiation over space. We have to understand which actors are involved: not just queer men but police constables, hooligans and others who overlap.

An emplaced conception of the queer milieu as a network of spatial patterns can be successful where efforts to trace emergent identities or chart degrees of oppression simply tend to hit a wall. Spatial patterns, although obscure and difficult to find for the historian, could be remarkably stable. Identities, according to previous credible accounts, were very often not. The investigation of spatial patterns, therefore, has an important role to play in establishing a picture of what it might have meant to be queer in the city, what one actually had to do to find opportunities for sex and communion without mutual disguise.

As a result, I hope that the book can do more than flesh out the picture of historical St Petersburg. My hope is that some of my methods for what I call the archival archaeology of queer life can be re-deployed in other non-Western cities to help move permanently beyond the stories of “the men who got caught”.

What was society’s attitude towards queerness at the time?

For one, there was the law. Unlike in Britain, for example, where legislation explicitly targeted cruising or male prostitution, Tsarist Russia criminalized only the specific sexual act “sodomy”. But, having grown up in St Petersburg, I was reluctant to interpret a dearth of court cases as evidence of a laissez-faire attitude towards queer encounters. The results of my research, I think, justify my hesitation. Consensual queer sexual practices met with significant resistance from the state in forms other than criminal law. Various actors – not just centralised government agencies – directed sanitary reforms, building regulation, city planning decisions and discretionary policing in such a way as to suppress or hide queer spatial patterns. While not always effective, they all shaped the queer milieu and many were articulated explicitly with queer men in mind.

At the same time, the queer milieu was not entirely underground, so to speak. It functioned as an emotional refuge, as I call it in the book, even while fraught with risks and difficulties. From passers-by to hooligans and even policemen, there instances of positive or at least empathetic engagement as well.

How is the issue treated in contemporary Russia?

I’m not an expert but there are definitely some analogies, even in the way police engage with LGBTQ+ people on the streets. A few years ago I was walking with friends on Nevsky Prospekt and saw a queer couple, with the police targeting them. We came over and pretended to know them, and the constables immediately disappeared. Harassment, then as now, seems to be systematic, and it seems to be directed at the optics of citizenship or the management of public space. There are some important differences, however, and one of these relates to the law. My impression is that laws against certain kinds of propaganda are intentionally vague. This makes life as an openly queer person very risky. The risk is not just criminal prosecution, but also grassroots violence. Such laws, directed not against specific acts, but the supposed promotion of an identity, encourage an “us-vs-them” mentality.

I also haven’t touched much upon masculinity in my research, but manliness is a very important topic in contemporary Russia and flexibly determined identities are, I would say, at least as problematic today as they would have been over a hundred years ago. I considered translating this book into Russian, but in the current political climate, no publisher will touch it with a bargepole and that says a lot about how broadly “propaganda” laws are interpreted.

What is your next book?

I have an edited collection Winged Worlds: Common Spaces of Avian-Human Life coming out this June. Also, I have been working on another nexus of bodies and urban space. For the last few years I’ve researched the interactions between humans and animals. I am especially interested in animal pests and fashionable activities such as bird-keeping and horse racing in late-Imperial Russia. My next book is provisionally titled Beastly St Petersburg: Humans and Other Animals in Imperial Russia, and describes how the city absorbed animals to construct a national myth that revolved around the subjugation of nature. In it I also try to show how policies towards animals were deployed to amplify distinctly human cultural idioms, such as a faith in permanent progress, a disgust and impatience with ‘pests’ and disease, and a schizophrenically competitive fascination with everything foreign or exotic.