ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the political protests of 2011-12 in Russia from the viewpoint of established cultural production. It reviews the popular satirical show Citizen Poet, which ran first on the TV station Dozhd', then on the radio station Ekho Moskvy, and on the Internet portal F5 from February 2011 to March 2012. The radio show based on Dmitrii Bykov's satirical verse became one of the venues for political protest during the Duma and presidential elections. The weekly broadcasts, which the production team also took on a nationwide tour of live shows, addressed current political affairs and satirized high-ranking Russian politicians, such as Dmitrii Medvedev and Vladimir Putin. The poems were easily recognizable parodies of poems established as canonical school reading in Soviet times. Many recent examples, such as Jon Stewart in the US and Bassem Youssef in Egypt, demonstrate that satire is an important form of politically engaged culture in political media.
