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Appendix Jokes from the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Between 1950 and 1951, the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System interviewed over 300 former Soviet citizens in an effort to assess the nature and extent of social support for the Stalinist regime. Participants were recruited from among ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and other former Soviets in West Germany-mostly former paws, Ostarbeiter laborers, and Nazi collaborators who had managed to avoid repatriation to the USSR at the end of the war. The Harvard Project aspired to use a battery of sociological interview questionnaires to map these former Soviets' views on authority and ideology, as well as their experiences in the workplace, at home and in society at large. Historically, the results of the Harvard Project have been difficult to use and interpret because even though the researchers collected basic information about their informants, they also guaranteed them anonymity in order to ease concerns that participation in the study might endanger family and friends still in the USSR. These concerns precluded the recording or professional transcription of the interviews; instead, researchers took detailed notes in shorthand (often in Russian or Ukrainian) and then summarized and translated these scribblings into a primitive dictaphone for later transcription. Although this unusual way of establishing rapport with the project's participants yielded fascinating information about Soviet society, it did so at the cost of failing to preserve a precise record of the way in which the survey informants expressed their revelationsl Today, the project's "transcripts" remain as they did in the early 1950s and consist of uncorrected, often clumsy translations, littered with mistakes and misunderstandings. That said, they form an incredibly rich repository of raw information on aspects of Stalin-era social history, including political humor. Many interviewers asked their informants about joke-telling under Stalin and recorded what they learned with relish. An ideal source for verifying the authenticity of the jokes published in Andreevich's collection, the Harvard Project also contains several dozen unique jokes that do not appear in The Kremlin and the People. They are reproduced on the pages that follow and cross-referenced against other sources whenever possible. 1 Regrettably, the interviewers' shorthand notes were not preserved. 146 POLITICAL HUMOR U NDER STALI N Party Leaders Stalin went to Georgia on a vacation. There, on a road, he saw a peasant driving a donkey. The donkey stopped and didn't want to go on. The man pushed and screamed and yelled, but the donkey wouldn't move. Stalin said: "You are a very bad leader. You only have one donkey and you can't even get it to move. I have 200 million donkeys and they all listen to me.,,2 *** Churchill came to Moscow to see Stalin. They argued. Each said that his people live better than the other. Suddenly out of a window, they saw a Jew dancing. Stalin pointed out the Jew to Churchill: "See how happy the Soviet people are." Then he brought the Jew to the Kremlin and Churchill asked him "Why are you so happy? Why are you dancing?" The Jew said "Why not? I received a pound of sugar and I can still get another pound.,,3 *** [During] the holiday in October, the Cheka was thinking of ideas how to make people happy. Someone proposed to give the people a pound of sugar. Another said "Give them something else," the third one said "Give them still something else" but none of these suggestions was considered good. Finally a Jew got up and said "Give me 5 rubles and I will make the people happy." They all sat back in amazement and wondered how he could do this. So the Jew said "well I would take the 5 rubles and with it send a telegram to all the people saying Stalin is dead. And this would make the people happy.,,4 *** A foreigner came to talk with Stalin and asked him: "...They say that Voroshilov and Shverniks are not very capable... why do you put them in high positions?" Stalin said nothing, but got up, took one telephone and put it on the floor. Then he took another telephone and put it on the windowsill. The visitor asked: "Why did you do this?" and the answer was "my telephones I can put where I please. My fools I can also put where I please.,,6 2 HPSSS, no. 25, schedule A, vol. 3,68. 3 HPSSS, no. 1, schedule A...

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