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5. Ethnic Reflexivity
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95 Chapter Five Ethnic Reflexivity Communist ideas and Communist deeds should blend organically in the behavior of every person and in the activities of all collectives and organizations. —Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1961 When news of the Russian conquest of space reached the cosmos, Saturn hid his rings, Mars mobilized for invasion, and Venus put on a chastity belt. —Anekdot reported by Algis Rusksenas in Is That You Laughing, Comrade? RUSSIANS ARE sometimes the butt of their own jokes, as the second epigraph for this chapter testifies.1 Although Russia is certainly not the only cultural space with such a tradition, self-inflicted ethnic satire is far from universal or even widespread among the peoples of the world. In The Mirth of Nations, a comparative survey of ethnic jokes, Christie Davies detects an analogous impulse in the humor of Scots, Jews, Newfoundlanders , and Australians. He is silent on Russians, but his explanations for the presence of reflexive ethnic jokes among those other groups help to illuminate the Russian case, albeit obliquely. Davies writes, for example, that an ethnic group might tell jokes about itself to maintain ownership of its stereotypical ethnic image and thus preempt the use of that image by more powerful and/or potentially hostile out-groups.2 If (as I argue in this chapter ) the image of the Russian in underground anekdoty functioned as an implicit rebuttal of state-produced or state-sanctioned representations of the Russo-Soviet ethnos, then such anekdoty do evince a collective awareness of an out-group. The out-group in question was not an ethnic one, however, and the representations that the anekdot contradicted were not themselves satirical or openly hostile toward Russians or Russianness. On the contrary, by privileging a cluster of behaviors and character traits that were anathema Resonant Dissonance 96 to state discourse, the anekdot served as an antidote to the constant selfaggrandizement of official discourse. Soviet culture was the site of parallel discursive projects with incongruous strategies of representation, including strategies of self-representation. In other words, Russian anekdoty about Russians were in critical engagement with another extant fount of textual production that was itself reflexive: the ongoing official autobiography and ethnography of the country and its citizens. That open-ended descriptive (and prescriptive) project was manifested —especially from the 1960s on—in cultural texts, particularly film and television narratives. It also found expression in mass-media treatments of events and processes in which nationality was underscored: references to the “friendship of peoples” in the multiethnic USSR, heroic accounts of Russo-Soviet empire building (past and present), and news reports of the Soviet leader’s latest meeting with foreign leaders. All of these motifs, of course, were exploited in the anekdot. In this chapter, I examine some of the implications of the characteristics that Russian urban folk humor has ascribed to the eponymous consumers of that humor. I focus first on anekdoty that explicitly feature Russians or Russianness as the comic crux. I then turn to anekdoty that do not explicitly reference the Russian as an ethnic category, but that draw from the same general well of character and behavioral traits as the clearly ethnic jokes, locating those traits in specific archetypal heroes. I examine canonical cycles with superficially dissimilar subjects: the Russian Civil War martyr Vasilii Ivanovich Chapaev, the Chukchi of the Siberian arctic, and, briefly, the fictional Soviet World War II spy Shtirlits. What the cycles had in common —in addition to the fact that they are all in one way or another based on cinematic images—was their protagonists’ day jobs as anthropomorphic Soviet tropes. The post-Soviet cycle about the so-called New Russians, which I examine in chapter 6, is an instructive epilogue to the story of satirical Russo-Soviet self-regard. I am aware of the danger of interpreting as reflexive in-group humor a joke that is actually told by one subgroup about another subgroup in the same country (Russian Jewish jokes about ethnic Russians, for example, or jokes about Russians told in the non-Russian Soviet republics). It is often tricky to establish the trajectories of satirical vectors, especially when studying the satire of a previous period so different from the present. Yet there is no doubt that anekdoty about Russians circulated and continue to circulate within Russian oral culture, and so they can be analyzed as instantiations (of varying degrees of irony) of Russia’s self-image as an ethnic collective. The anekdoty in...