The wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman has caused controversy by dressing in a concentration camp uniform for a televised ice dance routine that some have called the “Holocaust on ice.”
Tatiana Navka, a former Olympic ice dancer and the wife of presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, and her dancing partner, actor Andrei Burkovsky, appeared in striped uniforms bearing yellow six-pointed stars and heavy make-up to look bruised and frail on the popular celebrity skating TV show Ice Age.
Their routine for the song Beautiful That Way — by Israeli singer Achinoam “Noa” Nini — was based on the Academy Award-winning Italian film Life Is Beautiful.
In the film, a Jewish father pretends for the sake of his young son that the family’s internment by the Nazis is part of an elaborate game.
In their performance, Navka and Burkovsky smiled and pantomimed shooting at each other in front of an imaginary child, before Burkovsky exited to the sound of machine-gun fire.
“Definitely watch this! One of my favorite numbers!” Navka wrote under photographs from the performance on her Instagram account. “Our children should know and remember that terrible time.”
The judges gave the pair perfect scores for both technique and artistry, but the performance divided media outlets and social media users.
One netizen suggested Navka and Burkovsky be sent to a place “where they give out those kind of pyjamas for free,” while another said they should have “starved for a few months, worked in the freezing cold to get into character.”
Navka and Burkovsky on Sunday told Russian media that it was their way of paying homage to people affected by the Holocaust.
Additional reporting by AP
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