In a country where childhood icons once danced joyfully across the screen, a beloved creator dies quietly, leaving behind a world of soft plush heroes—Cheburashka, Gena, and their innocent tales.
But something stirs in the shadows of his passing.
In his absence, the puppets are reanimated—not by love or nostalgia, but by propaganda. The hands that now pull the strings belong to his supposed literary heir, a grinning man in a fur-lined coat who reads bedtime rhymes to children in war zones.
He comes not with peace, but with a suitcase full of books soaked in gasoline, each page whispering loyalty, each story twisting into fables that glorify conquest.
In Luhansk, they say the toys started walking. Soldiers joke about it over vodka, but the local children refuse to go near the puppet theatre. They've seen the way Cheburashka's eyes glow red under Russian floodlights. They've heard Gena's accordion playing by itself at night, in sync with the shelling.
And somewhere deep underground, in a bunker lined with cracked murals of fairy tales, the Puppetmaster reads his poems into a static-filled microphone, rewriting dreams for an empire that devours its young.
The village of Starodetsk had stopped keeping calendars. Time was now measured by artillery.
Children knew the lull between mortar fire meant thirty seconds to run for water. The old men, those left, could judge range and payload by the tremor in their tea.
In the basement of a collapsed school, behind sandbags and ration crates, Anya, ten years old and feral-eyed, discovered an accordion. Its leather was cracked, the buttons stiff, but it still wheezed when she pulled it open.
That night, she swore she heard someone playing it.
Her babushka said it was the ghosts. Her older brother, a conscript gone rogue, said it was "just nerves." But Anya followed the sound anyway.
She climbed through the broken window of what once was a puppet theater. Paint peeled from the walls in long, curling strips. The velvet curtain, miraculously intact, fluttered gently despite the still air.
And then—there it was.
Gena, or what had become of him, sat center stage. A massive crocodile in a faded red coat, hunched over an accordion. He wasn't made of felt anymore. His limbs had the texture of wet paper and charred bone. He played with slow, aching movements, his buttons clacking like distant gunfire.
Each note he played echoed with a new shell landing miles away.
Boom.
Push.
Clack.
Screech.
And with every crash, the building shook but did not fall.
Cheburashka was there, too—sitting silently on a box labeled "Educational Literature." His ears hung low. His fur was mottled and dark with soot, his smile stretched too wide.
They both looked at Anya.
She couldn't move. Not out of fear—but because the music rooted her in place, winding invisible strings around her limbs like a marionette. Behind her, the curtain rose. In the wings, dozens of forgotten toys waited. Soldiers. Dolls. Bears. Puppets. Each one twitching with unnatural life, eyes lit with static.
Gena stopped playing.
The silence was thunder.
And then, in a hoarse, unnatural growl that shook the theater walls, he spoke:
"We kept them happy once… now we teach them silence."
A new note. A new shell.
This time, it landed closer.