25 Years Ago, Russia Had Its Own Kimmel Moment
Why a puppet show could predict America’s future.
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In February 2000, as recently appointed prime minister Vladimir Putin was positioning himself as President Boris Yeltsin’s chosen successor in the upcoming March election, the Russian satirical puppet show Kukly staged one of its most infamous sketches. The weekly program, which had aired 363 episodes since 1994, had built its reputation by lampooning Yeltsin as a stumbling drunk, rambling incoherently—the puppet embodiment of a president everyone recognized but few dared portray so bluntly. When Putin rose to national attention, Kukly turned its sights on him as well, depicting the future president as a stiff judo master, a reluctant groom, and finally as the grotesque gnome “Little Zaches,” a character who by magic appears beautiful to all who look at him.
The backlash was formidable. Within two years, Kukly was gone. Viktor Shenderovich, the show’s creator, later recalled receiving a written directive from the Kremlin demanding that the Putin puppet be removed. Management refused. Not long after, NTV, the network that aired Kukly, was brought under Gazprom’s control. The official reasons were bureaucratic, financial, even technical. But the reality was obvious to anyone watching the slow suffocation of NTV, Russia’s last independent television network.
The show’s demise was not about puppets. It was about power. It was the moment that ridicule of the ruler became unspeakable, and the brief, unruly openness of the 1990s gave way to the silence of a managed public sphere.
Americans have long believed that our culture of political satire rested on firmer ground. From Johnny Carson’s understated humor to Jon Stewart’s cutting monologues and Stephen Colbert’s smirking caricature of political punditry, late-night comedy has been treated as a national pastime, a funhouse mirror held up to the political class. We tell ourselves that the First Amendment, like some enchanted shield, protects late-night comedy as much as it does hard news.
But in 2025, two of the most prominent voices of late-night humor, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, have been driven from the airwaves. Colbert’s Late Show is ending, officially for “financial reasons.” Kimmel’s show has been suspended indefinitely after comments that triggered outrage, advertiser flight, and station refusals to carry the broadcast.
None of this comes dressed in the language of politics. Instead, as in Russia a quarter century ago, the explanations are managerial, technical, financial. Colbert’s audience is aging, they say. Late-night no longer makes money in the streaming era. Kimmel was simply too controversial for affiliates. The words are familiar because this is how institutions collapse in real time: by disguising political decisions as economic necessity.
The story of Russia after 2000 is, at its core, a story of institutional fragility. Anti-democratic episodes that seemed isolated at the time were in fact rehearsals for a new system. Autocracy does not arrive all at once. It insinuates itself through what look like technical adjustments, market logics, and bureaucratic fixes. In retrospect, the end of Kukly was not about whether puppets went too far. It was about how easily cultural space can contract when institutions fail to protect it, and how quickly ridicule of power is transformed into risk.
What we are witnessing in the United States is not yet Putinism or full-blown autocracy. But it is the familiar grammar of autocratic consolidation. It begins when the personal becomes institutional: when a leader’s humiliation or grievance translates into corporate liability or regulatory risk. It deepens when the technical becomes political: when “financial reasons” are offered as neutral justifications for what are, in fact, political acts. And it hardens when the cultural becomes disciplinary: when comedians and networks learn what not to say, and when audiences, over time, internalize the lesson.
The Paramount–Skydance merger illustrates how this logic now operates. To secure regulatory approval, the conglomerate settled a lawsuit with Donald Trump over a 60 Minutes interview. It promised structural changes that sounded procedural—installing an ombudsman, scaling back diversity programs—but which carried a deeper message: the editorial line must bend to political pressure. Russia’s path was cruder. The state handed NTV to Gazprom and made its demands explicit. In America, as in so many other democratic backsliders of the 2010s and 2020s, the tools are subtler: lawsuits, regulatory approvals, mergers. But the function is the same.
There are, of course, crucial differences. The United States has centuries of entrenched legal protections for free speech. Russia in the 1990s did not have time to build institutions capable of defending their fragile independence. Americans also have multiple outlets: streaming platforms, podcasts, YouTube, and independent media that remain stubbornly outside the reach of any single executive. But the lesson of Russia is not precisely that institutions are doomed. It is that they are fragile, and that fragility is exposed precisely in the gray zones where decisions can be explained as economic, strategic, managerial—but are in fact political.
Autocracy is never announced in advance. It is made in a thousand small recalibrations: which jokes survive, which lawsuits are settled, which mergers are approved, which shows executives decide are no longer worth the risk. The silencing of satire is not about comedy. It is about the narrowing of political life itself. When those who mock the powerful are told they are too expensive, too controversial, or too dangerous to broadcast, it is not the comedians who are diminished. It is the society that learns, step by step, to stop laughing at its rulers.
Mike Smeltzer is an expert on democracy and autocracy in East-Central Europe and Eurasia.
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I've never watched the late-night comedians, but I gather they almost invariably punch right. On one level that ought to please me, considering my political preferences; but I can't escape a deeper level on which I want political commentators, be they satirical or serious, to earn my respect by giving punches where punches are due. Progressive dogmatism offers a rich source of material for deconstruction and ridicule, but the late-night hosts seem to have left it practically untouched. Even when it came to the gaslighting about President Biden's fitness, Jon Stewart apparently stood alone as a critical voice. (Again, I haven't been watching.)
All of which pales beside Trump's vanity project against free speech, of course. It's just a pity that the particular speech he's attacking now hasn't ennobled itself a bit more.