THE WIFE OF a key aide of Russian leader Vladimir Putin has raised eyebrows by performing a ‘Holocaust dance’ on a celebrity ice-skating programme.
Tatyana Navka, a former Russian Olympic champion figure skater who is married to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, performed the dance on Saturday night along with her partner, actor Andrei Burkovsky, in striped uniforms reminiscent of those worn in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
The outfits even bore the Star of David, a yellow star which persecuted Jewish people were forced to wear to mark their religion during the war.
The programme, ‘Ice Age’, is broadcast on Russian State-run station Channel One.
Navka says that the dance was assembled with only ‘benign’ intentions, and that it is based upon Roberto Begnini’s Oscar-winning drama from 1997 Life Is Beautiful, a song from which the dance was choreographed to.
The pair won maximum points on the show and praise from judges, while Navka wrote on Instagram that it was one of her “favourite routines”.
“You must show this movie (Life Is Beautiful) to your children,” Navka said in her Instagram post defending the dance.
Our children need to know and remember that terrible time, which I hope, God willing, they will never know.
The routine prompted a wave of discussion online and in international media.
“Have you gone mad? Smiles in prison uniforms with yellow stars! The audience erupting in applause… No taste, no, tact, no understanding,” wrote viewer Mihael Ratinsky on the Channel One website.
“This is terrible, people don’t understand what they are doing. This is blasphemy,” wrote another viewer, Viki Reznik, in a comment on a YouTube video that had been viewed more than 36,000 times by today to a mostly highly-negative reaction.
Head of the Moscow-based Holocaust Fund Alla Gerber told Moscow’s Govorit Moskva radio station it was “very complex” to depict the Holocaust appropriately.
Primarily I think there must not be mockery, there must not be irony, there must not be a crooked smile.
Russian ice dancer Ilya Averbukh, who choreographed the routine, angrily defended it to Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid this morning, saying “I would call all this reaction a sign of the craziness of today”.
Navka was already a popular star and television personality before marrying Peskov in a plush ceremony on the Black Sea coast last year, but their marriage has made them one of Russia’s most-watched celebrity couples.
With © – AFP, 2016
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