One would think it’s impossible for a political scandal to arise from a simple cooking show. And yet it did. Russian top TV host and actor Ivan Urgant got himself in trouble while cutting vegetables for a salad.
“I cut greens like Red Army officers cut Ukrainian villagers,” he said on his TV show Smak (Taste), aired on April 13 on the Russian TV channel Perviy.
The audience in the studio responded with giggles. One of the guests, film director Alexander Adabashian followed up on the joke, saying “I’m shaking down the remains of the villagers” when cleaning the knife.
The joke referred to a historical period from the early 20th century, when the Bolshevik regime was established and the Red Army violently supressed citizens’ revolts.
The reaction was immediate.
Urgant’s offensive joke topped the Ukrainian news, followed by angry comments, including many anti-Semitic and anti-Russian remarks. The Foreign Ministry issued an official condemnation, judged insufficient by Ukrainian nationalist Svoboda Party, which started collecting signatures to ban the performer from entering Ukraine. Some nationalists threw tomatoes at an Urgant poster in front of the Russian Embassy on April 17.
Urgant found the grace to offer an apology.
“I apologize to all Ukrainians who were offended by my inappropriate comment in the last Smak program,” the TV host wrote on Twitter.
However, this was followed by seemingly sarcastic comments, putting in question his sincerity.
“As a punishment to myself, I swear to cook only borshch, varenyky, halushky until the end of 2018,” he wrote. “And I’ll name all my children Bohdan, no matter boys or girls.”
On April 17, Urgant finally offered a meaningful apology in his daily late night show, saying he didn’t mean anything terrible, but made a stupid joke and didn’t expect that it will cause such a strong reaction in a nation he loves.
Urgant’s unfortunate comment came shortly after his colleague and friend, Vladimir Pozner, a TV host employed by the same TV station, shared his own careless opinion.
When interviewed by a Ukrainian newspaper in Kyiv on March 22, Pozner noticed that he never lived among Ukrainians, thus he doesn’t know many of them, but said: “What I do know is – and I won’t be loved for saying this – that there were a lot of Ukrainians among wardens in [Josef] Stalin’s camps. I know that for sure. Does it say something about the character (of the nation)? That I don’t know.”
Pozner was also surprised when his hotel in Kyiv couldn’t offer him a menu in Russian, making him chose from English and Ukrainian menus.
“I wonder, what happened to the English you learned (living) in New York, that you couldn’t read a menu of varenyky?” Ukrainian writer Svitlana Pyrkalo rhetorically asked Pozner in her column at gazeta.ua, in one of many opinion pieces inspired by Pozner’s commentary.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at rudenko@kyivpost.com
