Russia marks Cheburashka's 60th birthday on August 20 amid indications officials in the country may be set to disown the beloved character over claims he represents a dark force corrupting Russia's children, along with debate over the creature's "ethnicity." Amid the record-breaking success of an eponymous 2023 film about Cheburashka and its 2026 sequel, Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent pro-Kremlin political theorist, has repeatedly railed against the character, whom he has variously described as a "lunar demon" and "rootless cosmopolitan" (a pejorative Stalin-era term for a Jewish person) responsible in part for the collapse of the Soviet Union. In December a...