It's Only A Joke, Comrade!: Humour, Trust and Everyday Life under Stalin by Waterlow Jonathan

Author:Waterlow, Jonathan [Waterlow, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford
Published: 2018-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

PART 2

JOKING DANGEROUSLY

CHAPTER 4

WHO ’S LAUGHING NOW?

PERSECUTION AND PROSECUTION

T he grim punchline of joke-telling in the 1930s, as recorded in the official documents, was usually ‘s/he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment’. In fact, some of the appeal of sharing this kind of critical humour actually derived from the fact that it was dangerously rebellious to do so. Just as breaking cultural taboos in Kirov’s Carnival by cracking jokes involving scatology or sex could (and can) appeal on a quite visceral level, so did telling political jokes at all in a state which demanded conformity and practised widespread censorship. To an extent, therefore, the regime was actually causing, or at least facilitating, this humour.

But Stalin’s regime was not simply ‘against’ humour. Before the Revolution, the Bolsheviks had used it themselves to undermine the tsarist regime and, after they’d won, they tried to ‘direct’ this powerful force into channels that served the regime’s agenda. They even published satirical magazines like Krokodil , produced musical comedies, and regularly featured humorists in the pages of Pravda itself. But they did so with a specific purpose, and one that was quite at odds with the kind of grassroots humour we’ve been exploring. There were real and consequential differences between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ humour, which was why the famous humorist Il’ia Il’f, who we met in Chapter 3, could produce approved satirical content for Soviet publications, yet was forced to confine his more biting jokes to the pages of his journal.

If the regime was not against humour per se, it was certainly afraid of humour wielded by its enemies, and in the course of the 1930s the leaders came to believe that critical jokes were the telltale sign of the counterrevolutionary. They directly equated anekdoty with ‘antisoviet agitation’, and punished joke-tellers with the notorious Article 58-10 of the Criminal Code. 1 This was the intentionally vague legislation used to suppress all forms of dissent, ranging from everyday bellyaching to outright calls for counterrevolution.

Although the regime tried to project certainty, in practice it was unsure how to grapple with this phenomenon. Unlike cries to overthrow the regime, political jokes were often more ambiguous, but so, too, was the regime’s shifting and inconsistent application of the law over the course of the decade. As ever in the early Soviet Union, we are faced not with a monolith but with a shambles – an operational and very powerful shambles, but a shambles nonetheless. If the previous chapters showed us how the joke-tellers viewed the regime, this chapter explores how the regime perceived the population and how it tried to deal with the forces of humour which it had unleashed prior to the Revolution. It reconstructs for the first time the uncertain perception and treatment of humour from the regime’s perspective, revealing the conflicting views, interpersonal and institutional rivalries, and the crucial shift in their understanding of humour as a consciously-wielded weapon, to considering it a toxic virus that could rapidly infect the minds of the people.

This confusing process

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