Puppets

[[File:Putin Kukli.jpg|200px|thumb|upright|Puppetss puppet of Vladimir Putin, which was shown in his 2000 autobiography, On Behalf Of the First Person. Talks With Vladimir Putin.]]Puppets''' (, lit. "dolls") was a weekly Russian TV show of political satire, produced by Vasily Grigoryev and shown on Saturdays on the TV channel NTV. It used puppets to represent celebrities, mainly the major politicians. It was inspired by the French show Les Guignols de l'info. The show was well loved in Russia and has inspired spinoffs in other countries. President Vladimir Putin was frequently represented in the show. Closure During parliamentary elections in 1999 and presidential elections in 2000, NTV was critical of the Second Chechen War, Vladimir Putin and the political party Unity backed by him. In the puppet show Puppets in the beginning of February 2000, the puppet of Putin acted as Little Zaches in a story based on E.T.A. Hoffmann's Little Zaches Called Cinnabar, in which blindness causes villagers to mistake an evil gnome for a beautiful youth. This provoked a fierce reaction from Putin's supporters. On 8 February the newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti published a letter signed by the Rector of St. Petersburg State University Lyudmila Verbitskaya, the Dean of its Law Department Nikolay Kropachyov and some of Putin's other presidential campaign assistants that urged the prosecution of the authors of the show for what they considered a criminal offence. NTV was forced to close the show down in 2002 after pressure from the Kremlin.