The phone call came in the middle of the night. The tape, the caller said, was already online. It was past two, but Viktor Shenderovich, Russia's pre-eminent political satirist, knew he had to move, to get his side of the story out before Moscow awoke to watch video of him, naked, hairy, and vulnerable, having sex with a young woman named Katya, already infamous for luring a who's-who of the Russian opposition to her bugged apartment for kinky sex and drugs. Shenderovich had been anticipating this moment and now it had arrived, two days before his daughter's wedding day.

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Shenderovich, who says he is happily married, fessed up.

Yes, he wrote on his blog, "I fucked Katya."

In any other country, the confession would have hit like a thunderclap. Sure, the first wave of the kompromat had already broken in March, when Mikhail Fishman, the editor-in-chief of the liberal Russian Newsweek, was caught on a clumsy Internet video cutting lines with a half-naked Katya, who apparently also went by Moomoo. The revelation prompted Ilya Yashin, an up-and-coming young opposition politician, and other opposition members to preemptively post their stories of being seduced by the same woman. Yashin, Fishman, and Dmitry Oreshkin, a liberal commentator, were also shown attempting to bribe traffic cops. But the resultant scandal -- if one can call collective eye-rolling a scandal -- focused entirely on the sloppy, dirty tactics used to entrap the young men, not on their behavior.  

With Shenderovich, however, it might have been a different story. Shenderovich is, after all, nothing short of a Russian household name. For well over a decade, he has been speaking truth to power in the best traditions of political comedy. His political TV show Kukly (or "puppets," for the dolls representing the country's elite), running from 1994 to 2002, first needled Boris Yeltsin, then Vladimir Putin. It earned Shenderovich two indictments and the show's cancellation, and contributed to the state's takeover of the show's host channel, NTV. Shenderovich is Russia's Jon Stewart, if Jon Stewart had been on the air longer -- and if the Bush era had never ended.

And here was Shenderovich, on tape and in the lewdest, most embarrassing way possible -- "Well, I guess I'm not hopeless if I'm still a little bit appealing to girls," he says in the tape, as he undresses for the waiting Moomoo -- cheating on his wife with a girl his daughter's age. In a fedora.

Yet nothing much happened that Thursday morning: For the most part, the story sank like a stone. In fact, the main thing people wondered about was why Russia's opposition -- a splintered, leaderless scrum already so effectively neutered by the Kremlin that they don't have a single seat in the Duma -- would be the focus of such an elaborate hit job. There are no elections coming up, and none of those targeted have made a bid for power recently -- because they know they're hopeless. Even Shenderovich is no longer the star he used to be. He lost his television platform when NTV was wrested away by the government, and he has been effectively blacklisted ever since.

Moreover, Russians have always loved womanizers. It is central to the concept of muzhik, the manly salt-of-the-earth man. Whenever a rumor of another Yeltsin woman surfaced, his ratings spiked instantly. When Alina Kabaeva, the rhythmic gymnast with R-rated flexibility, was said to be the new Mrs. Putin -- and mother of his only son -- it did not hurt the prime minister one bit. Even the most recent sex tape scandal -- in 1999, prosecutor Yuri Skuratov, who antagonized both Yeltsin and Putin, was filmed in bed with two young women -- had no serious ramifications. Skuratov was already in trouble for exposing government graft, but the sex tape, promoted by Putin on national TV, just made the Kremlin look bad, and the person deemed responsible for making it was quickly fired.

In typical muzhik fashion, Shenderovich and the two other opposition figures caught on the tape blew the whole thing off with a bravado that seemed to hold only a bit of defensiveness. "I possessed Katya without any particular enjoyment," Shenderovich wrote on his blog. "In the process, my colleague was boring, like all you vile Gestapovites." ("I would have been better off had I gone to the gym," he told me later. "I would have burnt more calories. It would have been better for my health in every sense.")

When we met for coffee the day after the tape hit the Internet, however, Shenderovich admitted that the exposure stung. "I have a reputation, and I treasure it," he said. "Imagine knowing that all those people, everyone you know, have seen this tape." But for the most part he played the unrepentant swinger: "I have never written anywhere that I am a saint. I have never announced anywhere that I am monogamous. If I had and then got tangled up in this, then they could say, like with Clinton, ‘Guys, turns out he's lying!'" Moreover, the brainy, stocky Shenderovich joked, the tape in no way discredits him. "If anything, I'd say I dispatched my male duties satisfactorily."

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