Published by
The Moscow Times
The Moscow Times
In the dying days of the Soviet Union, a satirical TV show called Fifth Wheel (Pyatoe Koleso) aired a subversive episode that stunned audiences unused to such transgressive broadcasting. Now a classic, “Lenin Was a Mushroom” argued exactly what its title suggested. Despite using questionable data, fake experts, obviously falsified evidence and lying blatantly throughout, host Sergei Sholokhov and his guest, the musician Sergei Kuryokhin, were nevertheless a little too convincing for their relatively naïve Soviet audience, and many viewers took the satire at face value. Three decades later, it’…