Mikhail Lipskerov

Mikhail Lipskerov was born in Moscow on 1 July 1939. His father, Fyodor Aleksandrovich Lipskerov (1911 to 1977), was a compere, playwright and director of circus and variety shows, and his mother, Ruf Rafailovna Lipskerova (1912 to 2000), was an economist. In a 2018 interview he recalled that his father, at the time of his birth, was a director at the Moscow Satire Theatre and later worked with leading performers and visiting foreign stars, while his mother was a senior economist at the state circus who worked until she was 80. His grandfather was the well-known lawyer Aleksandr Lipskerov.

He graduated from the Institute of Non-Ferrous Metals and Gold as a geological engineer, and from 1957 to 1963 he worked in the Urals, Tuva, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.

From 1963 to 1968 Lipskerov worked as a variety performer and writer for the stage, and from 1968 to 1970 he served as an officer in the Soviet Army. From 1971 he became a screenwriter for animation, while also working in advertising and public relations. He was also known as one of the creators of the comic revues staged at Moscow's House of Cinema.

His animation scripts included "Cowboys in the City" (1973), "What Is Scarier?" (1973), "How Mushrooms Fought the Peas" (1977), the "Littlest Gnome" series (1977 to 1983), "Sin and Laughter" (1978), "Robbery by..." (1978), "The New Aladdin" (1979), "Last Wizards" (1979), "Oh Sea, Sea!.." (1983), "The Wolf and the Calf" (1984), "The Hare Who Loved to Give Advice" (1988) and "Dear Leshy" (1988). "What Is Scarier?" won a large silver medal at the Varna festival in 1975, "The Littlest Gnome" won a large silver medal at Odense in 1979, and "The Wolf and the Calf" was named best children's film at Zagreb in 1984. In the 2000s he wrote the series "Babka Yozhka and Others", which earned a diploma at the Open Russian Festival of Animated Film. He appeared in the documentary series "Factory of Miracles" in 2006.

From 2008 he published a run of novels with AST and other publishers, including "Delirium Tremens" (2008), "Black Square" (2010), "Journey to the Centre of Moscow" (2010), "On a Hot Night in Moscow" (2012) and "All That Rock and Roll" (2013), as well as children's books based on his cartoons. He said Jewish themes ran through almost all of his novels.

Lipskerov was married twice. His first wife, Inna Lipskerova, was a music editor at the State House of Sound Recording, and their son Dmitry Lipskerov became a writer and entrepreneur. With his second wife, Olga Lipskerova, he had a son, Aleksei. The theatre director Andrei Morgunov was his cousin. In March 2014 he signed the KinoSoyuz open letter "We Are With You!" in support of Ukraine.

Mikhail Lipskerov died in Moscow on 24 October 2026, aged 87. His son Dmitry Lipskerov announced his death on Facebook, and it was reported by NEWSru.co.il. The cause of death was not made public in the reports available.

Lipskerov's cartoons, from "The Littlest Gnome" to "The Wolf and the Calf", remain part of the childhood of several generations of Soviet and Russian viewers. His second career as a novelist, begun in his late sixties, made him an unusual figure in Russian letters, and he is remembered for satire with a warm, humane heart.