Sanctioning Laughter in Stalin’s Soviet Union

Fig. 1.

Cover of the first issue of Krokodil, 27 Aug. 1922. The eponymous crocodile is pictured bursting through the pages of Rabochaia gazeta (Workers’ Newspaper), signalling the satirical force Krokodil was supposed to provide.

Courtesy of the Ne boltai! Collection (www.neboltai.org).

Fig. 2.

Stalin was certainly not above sharing a joke, though it was often at someone else’s expense. Here he is pictured laughing with fellow Politburo member K.E. Voroshilov in 1935.

Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

In the ideal future, ‘There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy’.¹ So said the mouthpiece of the ruling Party in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and so our general understanding of official attitudes to humour and laughter in Stalin’s Soviet Union has largely remained. This idea rests upon the belief that a Soviet, ‘totalitarian’ regime simply could not tolerate humour, for it introduced dangerous ambiguities into what was supposed to be a tightly-controlled, monolithic reality: humour forced cracks in the official façade, damaging its structural integrity – a premise dramatically played out in Milan Kundera’s first novel The Joke (Žert,.Prague, 1967).² The equally widespread counterpart of this supposition is that, when ordinary citizens shared political jokes, or merely jokes about everyday, lived experiences of ‘socialism’, this must automatically have constituted some kind of ‘resistance’ to or rejection of the Soviet system.

In this article I argue that both these viewpoints are misleading. Instead, while the Stalinist regime at times certainly used humour against its enemies, official attitudes to this practice developed and varied over time; there were even occasions when ‘official’ humour seemed to overlap with that of the general population. Nevertheless, there were also fundamental differences between the humour of the regime and that of the populace. As we shall see, officially-sanctioned humour in the Soviet Union was always and only conceived of and used as a weapon against ‘enemies’, whereas the humour of ordinary (that is, politically uninfluential) Soviet citizens was predominantly self-reflexive, laughing at oneself rather than rhetorically triumphing over others. Indeed, it is to confuse matters entirely to think that the Stalin years were simply too dark, too harsh and too dangerous for people to joke about. Critical humour was in fact a vital means by which Soviet citizens coped and grappled with the difficulties of life under Stalin and its ubiquitous rifts between official rhetoric and lived realities. Unable to effect real change over their circumstances, joking could still offer a mental sense of agency or superiority, however fleeting. Both ‘above’ and ‘below’, then, humour has much to tell us about the nature of power relations, perceived and actual, under a repressive, ‘totalitarian’ state.³

Utilizing a mixture of published works and extensive archival research, this article begins by looking at the humour of Soviet leaders themselves, and then expands in a series of concentric circles outwards from the epicentre of power. It examines the differing uses of and attitudes to humour in the realms of official policy; published works; the grey zone in which official and clandestine humour appeared to intermingle; and, finally, using for the first time a mixture of contemporary criminal case files and reports on the ‘mood of the people’, ordinary people’s humour which overstepped the boundaries of acceptability and led to arrest and punishment. The image of concentric circles is important because it reminds us that the disposition of each ‘circle’ was always ultimately determined by that of the central point: the Kremlin. Moreover, even though ordinary citizens’ humour contained far more complexity and variety than did official, sanctioned efforts, these two discourses were still intimately connected. As the final parts of the article examine, the limits of ‘sanctioned laughter’ were always ultimately determined by the state, but it was unpredictable and capricious in how it did so.

LAUGHTER AT THE TOP

Whether the Soviet leadership had a sense of humour is a perennial question, often posed with the presupposition that, if...