‘Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia‘
By Natasha Lance Rogoff 
Rowman & Littlefield, 302 pages

The premise of “Muppets in Moscow” sounds like the setup to a joke: How did Kermit the Frog, Big Bird, and a new cast of Slavic Muppets expand the Sesame Street neighborhood into the former Eastern Bloc after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Yet the television producer and filmmaker who brings the story to life, Natasha Lance Rogoff, delivers not a punchline but a feel-good story that is as timely as ever as East is once again divided from West, riven by a wall of distrust.

 When I interviewed Ms. Rogoff for the “History Author Show,” she said she was intrigued by the challenge of bringing Sesame Street to the Russkiy Mir. Obstacles ranged from brushes with death to cultural clashes, such as one Russian producer declaring that in her country puppets wear clothes and are “not naked like yours.”

Rare is the book that rewrites a touchstone of your childhood, but you’ll never look at Kermit and friends again without something in the back of your mind whispering that they’re wearing nothing save their felt birthday suits.

Ms. Rogoff had no background in this kind of cultural diplomacy when the Children’s Television Workshop tasked her with this mission, something that makes her book appeal to a broad audience, adding depth to this unique fish-out-of-water story.

Another challenge Ms. Rogoff faced is that under communism, humor could cost you your life. “Soviets always had something in the back of their minds that maybe they should not laugh,” the Soviet-born comedian Yakov Smirnoff, who wrote jokes for President Reagan, told the Washington Post in 1986. 

“Gorbachev and Reagan connected the right way,” Mr. Smirnoff said in 2013, “and laughter was the result.” Over time, the two leaders beat their swords into rubber chickens and the Cold War ended, he said, when the two men learned to laugh together.

Ms. Rogoff’s desire to tap into that same common well of humor, in addition to her experience living in Russia and a love for its people, helped her carry the day. “Muppets in Moscow” details how she and her team applied all these qualities, refusing to bow even after a car bomb struck their studio and gunmen armed with AK-47s stormed in to kidnap Elmo.

Dogged hope kept “Ulitsa Sezam” alive. If adapting this “icon of American culture for Russian and post-Soviet society” was successful, Ms. Rogoff said, she knew “it could help children by modeling idealistic values, tolerance, freedom of expression, and then also providing skills that they needed in order to thrive in this new open society.”

Auditioning the child performers was Ms. Rogoff’s favorite experience, though that too held surprises. The youngsters auditioned with songs of death and destruction, not the dulcet tones of “sunny days keeping the clouds way.” They had sung those dirges with their grandparents.

Another eye-opening moment for Ms. Rogoff was the reaction to depicting children living fulfilling lives in wheelchairs. The local producers called it “exploitative” and a mockery, as few in their country could afford chairs. Someone asked why “normal children” would watch “not normal children.”

It’s a description that Ms. Rogoff found “disheartening,” as will readers, but then came the words from a woman who worked with children from a region the Soviets had used as a dumping ground for hazardous chemicals. Her testimony is too powerful to spoil here and rob readers of experiencing its full impact.

Ms. Rogoff told me of feeling “many, many times that we could fail — that we probably would fail — and then for it to succeed at the end and become such a hit and be embraced by the Russian people across the whole former Soviet Union was a surreal experience.”

 “Ulitsa Sezam” ran between 1996 and 2010, when Russia began turning inward again, but “Muppets in Moscow” reminds readers that today’s enemies can be tomorrow’s friends if we find ways to connect our global streets and learn to laugh together.