TV

Крошка Енот is a cartoon about a baby raccoon overcoming his fears. The baby raccoon, who lives in the jungle with his mother, is given the task of collecting sedge by the jungle’s pond for dinner on his birthday. The raccoon sets off into the foliage, eager to prove his bravery and maturity to his […]

The Olivier Show (Оливье Шоу) is an annual variety show broadcast on Channel One Russia on New Year’s Eve. It premiered in 2010 and was originally based on the Soviet classic holiday program, The Little Blue Light which featured popular Soviet artists and figures, including Heroes of Socialist Labor and cosmonauts, all of whom gathered at TV […]

Seventeen Moments of Spring (Семнадцать мгновений весны) is a 12-part Soviet war drama that first aired in 1973. The series recently came back into the news when Vladimir Putin cited it as an inspiration for wanting to join the KGB in his youth. According to his personal assistant, Leonid Brezhnev was also a devoted fan […]

Bitva Extrasenov (Битва Экстрасенсов), Battle of the Psychics, is a Russian-language TNT (ТНТ) TV show based on Britain’s Psychic Challenge. Running since 2007, the show reached peak popularity in November 2013 with a season dedicated to the death of Vladislav Listyev (Владислав Листев), a Soviet TV personality and journalist killed by two unknown assailants in […]

The Zolotoi Gramofon (Золотой Граммофон, lit. “Golden Gramophone”) is one of the most important music award ceremonies in Russia. It was established in 1995 by Russkoe Radio, a Moscow radio station that specializes in Russian pop music. The awards were then attached to a the Russian Hill (Русская Горка) radio show, which aired the 12 […]

Гостья из будущего (Guests From the Future) is a five-part children’s science fiction television mini-series from 1985. Based on Kir Bulychev’s popular 1978 children’s book One Hundred Years Ahead, Guests from the Future became an instant classic. Produced by the prestigious Gorky Film Studio, the show featured, for its time, convincing sets depicting the far […]

History of Kyrgyzstan (История Кыргызстана) is a series of cartoons telling the history of Kyrgyzstan. (I’m sure you didn’t see that one coming!) It was created in 2017. The series will ultimately consist of 20 several-minutes-long episodes, though to date (May 2017) only 11 have been released. The series’s creators have said that they are currently working […]

Doctor Aybolit (Доктор Айболит) is a series of short animated films that aired in the 1980s in the Soviet Union. The central character was created by popular Soviet poet, translator, literary critic and, above all, children’s writer Korney Chukovskiy (Корней Чуковский), and the character has appeared not only in this series but in a number of […]

Treasure Island (Остров сокровищ in Russian; Острів скарбів in Ukrainian) is, among many other things, a 1988 Russian/Ukrainian/Soviet animated full-length film. Though it was produced by the Ukrainian animated film studio Kyivnaukfilm (Київнаукфільм), it’s entirely in Russian, as was common for the Soviet Union. It actually consists of two parts, “Captain Flint’s Map (“Карта капитана […]