The origin of Russian
puppetry is far from clear. It is often attributed to Italy, because of similarities between
Petrushka and
Pulcinella. Other theorists believe that their puppet theaters might have migrated from
Byzantium into the East Slavic regions known as
Kievan Rus' or that the
Mongols could have brought the approach from
China. Puppet theater had been popular in the west by the twelfth century and evidence indicates that it had begun to flourish as early as the sixth century in the Byzantine Empire. Because of the nature of itinerant performers, many cultural traditions may well have been influenced by foreign interaction. Ancient Slavic customs to celebrate
solstice cycles show that there was a tradition of using masks and manikins in ceremonies to mark the end of one season and the beginning of another. In one such ceremony for
Kupala Night, male dolls, called
Kupalo, and female dolls, called
Marena, are made of straw. The female dolls are repeatedly kidnapped forcing the women to renew their supply, until in the back and forth tug-of-war, the dolls are torn asunder and scattered. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the word used for theater in Russia was
pozorishche, which was a distinct term from
igrishche, a dramatic performance including live actors.
Kukla, the modern Russian term for puppet theater, was first used in 1699. Itinerant minstrels known as
skomorokhs were the original
puppeteers in Russia and by the thirteenth century had relocated from Kievan Rus' to
Novgorod. By the mid-sixteenth century, they shifted their activity to
Moscow when
Ivan IV ordered them to be taken there with their performing bears. By the 1630s, puppets had become an integral part of the performances of the minstrels, including an innovative means of creating a stage with blankets tied at the waist and lifted over their heads with poles so that their hands were free to move their puppets. In 1648, the
skomorokhi were barred from further performances by a law that sought to wipe out superstition in the interests of Russian morality. From then on, puppets and traditions were increasingly imported from
Germany and
Denmark. By the mid-eighteenth century, regular performances by French, German, and Italian puppetry companies were also common in Russia. Surviving playbills from the period show that by the 1730s, Petrushka had largely been replaced by Western heroes, though the twenty-three plays in which he was still featured show that he had certainly not been forgotten and had been largely unaffected by foreign influences. By the eighteenth century,
rod puppets were regularly seen performing in booths. The tradition arose in Russia and in surrounding countries including
Lithuania,
Poland and
Ukraine when
Nativity performances were banned from being held in churches. As the
portable mangers were set up in more secular settings, the performances themselves also became less religious. Ivan Finogenovich Zaitsev was one of the nineteenth-century Russian puppeteers who worked with flat puppets cut from metal. These appeared on the stage through slots cut into the table and performed scenes of the
Turko-Russian wars or comedies. One of his contemporaries, Jocovlevich Siezova, made similar puppets of wood, but performances with such puppets died out in the late nineteenth century. A 1908 parody of
The Blue Bird which had been produced at the Moscow Art Theater was performed with puppets by
Stanislavsky at the cabaret "The Bat";
Andrei Belyi and
Nikolai Evreinov both failed in their attempts to stage puppet theaters; and two women, and
Liubov Shaporina, created dolls but were unable to achieve success with their marionette theater in the pre-
revolutionary period. In 1916, when
Nina Simonovich-Efimova performed for the Moscow Fellowship of Artists, there were few practicing the art. That same year,
Yulia Slonimskaya Sazonova created a
marionette performance called
The Forces of Love and Magic with opulent costuming, orchestration and staging, which garnered note. Shaporina began sketching scenes and costumes for a puppet theater which she successfully launched in 1918 in
Petrograd. Both Slonimskaia and Efimova worked not only to elevate the art of puppetry but wrote theatrical theories about puppets, their application, design and development. By 1918, Efimova and her husband,
Ivan Efimov, a sculptor, had been asked to set up a children’s theater in line with the government's
socialist restructuring policy, becoming the first professional puppetmasters in Russia, earning themselves the title of the Adam and Eve of Russian puppetry. Taking their
hand puppet show on the road, the Efimovs sole means of support for six years was earned from their theater. Through the course of her career, Efimova, who was the driving force behind the puppets, patented innovative designs for
shadow plays using
silhouettes,
rod puppets as well as life-sized manikins, in her attempts "to establish puppetry’s validity as a unique discipline". Slonimskaia's work focused mainly on marionettes, which she later took to
France,
Portugal and the United States. By 1924, politically-motivated theaters had spring up in several locations, such as the Petrushka Theater, founded by in Saint Petersburg. That theater merged with the Petrograd Marionette Theatre and was later renamed the Leningrad Puppet Theatre. In 1929, the Children’s Theatre Book opened and in 1931, the Bolshoi Puppet Theatre opened in Leningrad. By the 1930s, state regulations required that all performances, i.e. circuses, variety shows, music performances and puppet theaters be controlled by GOMETs, the State Department created specifically for their regulation. One of the measures GOMETs put in place was that performances must be held in established theater venues and could no longer be itinerant street performances.
Sergey Obraztsov gave his first solo performance as a puppeteer in 1923, but worked mainly as a stage actor until 1931, when he was approached by the managers of the Central Children’s Art Studio to form a puppet theater. Becoming the art director of the Central State Puppet Theatre, Obraztsov staged
parody-plays with themes geared toward both adults and children. He performed with both
glove puppets and marionettes, traveling in and around Moscow until 1938, when he established his own theater. After his theater was bombed during the war, he relocated to
Novosibirsk until the war ended. Obraztsov characters evoked a realistic expression and performed both classic
folk tales and sophisticated literary works. During the Soviet era, theaters spread throughout the
USSR to provincial towns like
Arkhangelsk,
Ivanovo,
Nizhny Novgorod,
Rostov,
Rybinsk,
Samara and
Yaroslavl, as well as to other Soviet states. The
Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic developed a strong marionette tradition and in the
Khakassian Republic, a puppet theater in
Abakan gained note. There was an effort made to veer toward making puppets more
humanistic and away from their
folk art roots, which led away from use of marionettes and focus almost exclusively on glove or rod puppets. In 1959, the Leningrad Institute for Music, Film, and Theater created a puppet department, formalizing state training for puppetmasters. During the
policy reforms in the
Gorbachev era, experimentation began with puppeteers appearing on-stage with their manikins and even with actors portraying puppet characters.
Revaz Gabriadze was one of the most widely known puppeteers from the end of the Soviet era. ==Present==