Tiny Revolutions in Russia

Twentieth Century Soviet and Russian History in Anecdotes and Jokes

Bruce Adams

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415444071
• eBook ISBN: 9781134264841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

This book presents a large collection of anecdotes and jokes from different periods of the 20th century. Anecdotes and jokes were a hidden form of discursive communication in the Soviet era, lampooning official practices and acting as a confidential form of self-affirmation. They were not necessarily anti-Soviet, by their very nature both criticising existing reality and acting as a form of acquiescence. Above all they provide invaluable insights into everyday life, and the attitudes and concerns of ordinary people. The book also includes anecdotes and jokes from the post-Soviet period, when ordinary people in Russia continued to have to cope with rather grim reality, and the compiler provides extensive introductory and explanatory matter to set the material in context.

1
Introduction

They say that if you have to explain a joke, it isn’t funny. But what if the joke does the explaining? What if jokes in all their intricacies contain valuable information and nuances about the culture that spawned them? Then they might be worth telling for what they can teach us. If we’re lucky, clichés notwithstanding, laughter can follow understanding. As a teacher of Russian history and culture, I have been telling Soviet anecdotes to my students for many years in the hope that they would not only leaven a grim history with humor but also teach some of that history.

These attempts have met with mixed success. Not long ago I taught a course in Russian and Soviet Culture. The semester before I had taught my standard survey of Modern Russian History. Whenever I told an anecdote in the culture class by way of illustrating some point or other, the reaction was the same. The one Russian emigré laughed immediately, enjoying the joke itself and, often, the familiarity of a story heard before. A beat or two after him, the several students who had attended the previous semester’s course caught on and joined in. The rest of the class just sat there. (If they’d done their assigned readings, their reaction might have been different!) Finally I would explain the joke and they would get it, but by then it was usually too late for laughter. I asked them late in the semester if they had gotten anything out of the anecdotes. Unanimously they agreed they had, and, finally understanding the context, they were ready to laugh at some retellings.

In my classes I learned that anecdotes were most successful if I told them after we had discussed or I had explained the current topic, be it the Lenin cult, propaganda, de- Stalinization, or anti-Semitism. That is the approach I will follow in this book. This is not meant to be a comprehensive history of the Soviet Union. I hope to explain just enough of the history of a period or of a particular topic to make the jokes comprehensible and then let them speak for themselves. Nor is this a balanced account of the events it describes. The nature of anecdotes determines that this will be an unbalanced, negative account of Soviet history; the anecdotes satirize, parody, and otherwise savage the individuals and topics they address.

As far as I know there is no other such book available in either English or Russian. There are many collections of Soviet anecdotes. Naturally, most are in Russian. The earliest good collection I have found is Evgenii Andreevich’s Kreml’i Narod (The Kremlin and the People) (Munich: Golos Naroda, 1951). It is fairly small and covers only the first thirty years or so of Soviet history, but its chronological organization lets the reader know when the jokes originated. The most useful of the anecdote collections for my purposes was Dora Shturman and Sergei Tiktin’s Sovetskii Soiuz v zerkale politicheskogo anekdota (The Soviet Union in the Mirror of the Political Anecdote) (Jerusalem: Express, 1987). Its large collection of jokes, also organized chronologically with many individual anecdotes dated by the authors, runs up to the Gorbachev years. The funniest, most clever presentation of a large number of these that I have seen is Iulius Telesin’s 1001 Izbrannyi Sovetskii Politicheskii Anekdot (1001 Selected Soviet Political Anecdotes) (Tenafly, NJ: Hermitage, 1986). Telesin arranged 1001 well-chosen anecdotes topically and added humorous rhyming quatrains called chastushki (the Russian equivalent of limericks), excerpts from Soviet dissident publications such as the Khronika tekushchikh sobytii (Chronicle of Current Events) and other snippets to make a very entertaining book. Another large, wellorganized collection of jokes from which I drew some items is Iosif Raskin’s Entsiklopediia Khuliganstvuiushchego Ortodoksa (Encyclopedia of Perverted Orthodoxy) (Moscow: Zvonnitsa-MG, 1996). This alphabetized collection includes jokes, chastushki, and witticisms on a wide variety of topics, political, sexual, scatological and more. Iurii Borev’s Istoriia gosudarstva sovetskogo v predaniiakh i anekdotakh (The History of the Soviet Government in Legends and Anecdotes) (Moscow: PIPOL, 1995) and his Kratkii kurs istorii xx veka v anekdotakh, chastushkakh, baikakh, memuarakh po chuzhim vospominaniiam, legendakh, predaniiakh, i.t.d. (Short Course of the History of Twentieth Century in Anecdotes, Chastushkas, Fables, Memoirs of Others’ Memories, Legends, etc.) (Moscow: Zvonnitsa- MG, 1995) contain more “legends” (apocryphal stories) about real people than anecdotes. These are interesting and some are amusing, but they did not enjoy the same wide circulation and become part of “folklore” in the same way that anecdotes did. Other recent publications, such as I.I. Shitts’ Dnevnik “Velikogo Pereloma” (mart 1928–avgust 1931) (Diary of the Great Upheaval (March 1928– August 1931)) (Paris: YMCA Press, 1991), contain a few anecdotes not recorded in the collections.

In recent years a large number of extremely cheap books of jokes have been churned out in Russia. Some are topical (e.g. medical jokes, Brezhnev jokes), others are more comprehensive. Anekdoty i chastushki (Anecdotes and Chastushkas) (Voronezh: Chernozem’e, 1997), for example, is the third volume of a huge collection, and runs to 574 pages. Many of these editions have clearly copied from one another. One small and undistinguished collection by Mark Dubovskii even calls itself Istoriia SSSR v anekdotakh, 1917–1992 (A History of the Soviet Union in Anecdotes, 1917–1992) (Smolensk: Smiadyn, 1992), but it has no historical or chronological organization for its rather random selection of anecdotes. None of these is as comprehensive or as clever as the Tiktin, Telesin, Raskin, or Borev books, and none supplies the sort of explanation an English-language reader might need. Computers have also increased the rate at which Soviet anecdotes have been shared. There are now and have been for a while a number of good websites with and about Soviet and Russian anecdotes. The largest and best in my opinion is Dima Verner’s “Anekdoty iz Rossii” (Anecdotes from Russia) at .

There are a few English-language collections also. Some of these, such as Russia Dies Laughing: Jokes from the Soviet Union, edited by Z.Dolgopolova (London: Andre Deutsch, 1982), and Algis Ruksenas, Is That You Laughing, Comrade?: The World’s Best Russian (Underground) Jokes (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1986) are slim and unorganized. Others are larger but topically limited, such as The Jokes of Oppression: The Humor of Tiny revolutions in Russia 2 Soviet Jews by David A.Harris and Izrail Rabinovich (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1988), Taking Penguins to the Movies: Ethnic Humor in Russia by Emil A. Draitser (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), and Making War Not Love, also by Draitser (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). For language students one bilingual collection, edited by Emil Draitser, Forbidden Laughter/Nedozvolennyi Smekh: Soviet Underground Jokes (Los Angeles, CA: Almanac Press, 1978), is available, but the collection is small and none of the anecdotes is explained.

Up until now there has been no comprehensive collection of Soviet anecdotes for English-language readers. Anyone who knows Russian well would prefer to hear or read Soviet anecdotes in Russian. Translations cannot capture all the shades of meaning in some of the jokes, and there are absolutely wonderful but u ntranslatable puns and other plays on words in many others. On the other hand many readers who don’t know Russian may also have limited knowledge of Soviet history and culture and need help understanding some of the anecdotes. It is for that readership that I have written Tiny Revolutions.

What may you expect to find in this book? You probably wouldn’t pick it up if you knew absolutely nothing about Soviet history, but if you know even a little, you might be wondering what there is to laugh about. Few countries have had such a sad and violent history. None has experienced death by war, starvation, torture, and execution on the scale of the Soviet Union. What then did they laugh at and why did they laugh? It is not my purpose in this introduction to write either a psychological or literary explanation of why this humor works. I have found few things that kill humor more quickly. A young American scholar has recently completed a comprehensive rhetorical analysis of Soviet anecdotes in his doctoral dissertation. See Seth Benedict Graham, “A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot” (PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2003). There you can learn, for example, that:

At its peak, the anekdot enjoyed the status of a carnivalesque genrelaureate in the organic hierarchy of popular discursive forms that had developed concomitantly with the state-prescribed Ars poetica…. An important reason for the genre’s preeminence was its capacity to outflank, mimic, debunk, deconstruct, and otherwise critically engage with other genres and texts of all stripes and at all presumed points on the spectrum from resistance to complicity (or from unofficial to official). The anekdot was able to so function in large part because of the number and variety of contact points between its distinctive generic features and the constituent “epochal features” that defined the cultural moment and informed textual production therein.

(p. 104)

Graham’s dissertation is a very useful explanation of the genre. I have used several of the points he makes in what follows, but the level of explanation I will provide is a good deal simpler and is generally understood by anyone who reads widely or has lived past age 30. If you have read the Diary of Anne Frank, novels about London during the Blitz, Oliver Sachs’ tales about people with Alzheimer’s, or stories about people facing their own death or loved ones’, or if you have lived through any of the experiences they describe, you know that people laugh at the—apparently—oddest times and most incongruous things. Experience and science teach us that people need to laugh at those times and at these things. Laughter is indeed good medicine, a purgative and a restorative. And if anyone knows about purges and restorations, it’s the Soviet people. That’s a joke. If it’s not clear now, it will be before you’re done.

Steve Lipman’s book, Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor during the Holocaust (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993) makes this point better than any other book I have seen. A few other good books that readers might want to look at that make these points in a variety of ways are George Mikes, Humor in Memoriam (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970); Itzhak Galnoor and Steven Lukes, No Laughing Matter: A Collection of Political Jokes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985); Ron Jenkins, Subversive Laughter: The Liberating Power of Comedy (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Christie Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World: A Comparative Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say about the Jews (New York: William Morrow, 1992); and Charles E.Schutz, Political Humor: From Aristophanes to Sam Ervin (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977).

Much of the humor spawned by horrible experiences is necessarily tasteless, some of it what we and the Russians call black humor. There will be a lot of that in this book. If you are easily offended, this book is probably not for you. I read on a bathroom wall very shortly after the Challenger space shuttle disaster that NASA stood for “Need Another Seven Astronauts.” I find that clever enough, but I still don’t think it’s funny. What after all did Christy McAuliffe ever do to me? The characters and situations lampooned in Soviet anecdotes on the other hand are seen to have done immense harm to the tellers and hearers of these jokes, and to countless innocent others, indeed to the whole nation. They deserve what they get. In spades! When Arnold Schwarzenegger married Marie Shriver, we learned it was an effort to breed a bullet-proof Kennedy. Funnier, right? Not because we have come to approve of John’s or Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, but because at the time the whole Kennedy mystique needed a little deflating, and John’s affairs and Ted’s shenanigans (were the events at Chappaquiddick a shenanigan?) made them vulnerable. Moreover the Kennedys are rich, and as Mark Twain taught us, the money of the rich is twice tainted: ’tain’t yours, ’tain’t mine.

Compared to the Kennedys, Soviet heroes were huge and hugely blameworthy. The bigger they were, the harder they had to fall. Lenin, for example, was not only the progenitor of the whole Soviet experience, but he became the object of a cult that made him the Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Jesus Christ of the Russian Revolution as well as its George Washington. He had to be dragged through the mud repeatedly and hacked at in a hundred jokes to chop him down to more nearly life-size. Stalin and the Stalin cult were many times worse. One might think that the things Stalin did were too horrible to joke about, and it was, of course, dangerous to joke about him while he was alive. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for a famous example, spent eight years in labor camps in large part because of derogatory remarks he made about the Great Leader in letters from the front during World War II. The anecdotes were necessarily underground humor shared only with close friends. (The word anecdote, by the way, in the direct translation of its Greek roots, means simply “unpublished item.” I will often refer to them below as jokes, but that is only because I got tired of calling them anecdotes. In Nazi Germany, where jokes about the Nazis were similarly dangerous, they were called Flüsterwitze— whispered jokes. It is important to remember their sub rosa origins.) Nonetheless there are wonderful jokes about Stalin, his government, the camps, and the new culture created by the social revolution of Stalin’s era. Many of the jokes about Lenin and Stalin were made up after their deaths, but a surprising number were coined—and told—in their times. I am sure that many jokes made up in Lenin’s time and some from Stalin’s time have been forgotten and lost, even good ones. No longer topical or relevant, they dropped out of circulation and were forgotten before they were collected. More than enough remain.

The richest periods for inventing Soviet anecdotes were the Stalin and Khrushchev years. These were the most experimental and eventful years of Soviet history. I suspect that more jokes were told by more people in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, however, than while Stalin was still alive. Certainly by that time they were told more openly. Compared to Stalin, the pudgy, folksy Khrushchev and the eventually doltish Brezhnev aroused little fear. And by their time most of the revolutionary enthusiasm, which had been real enough in Lenin and Stalin’s time, had died. True cynicism set in. In those years jokes about the earlier heroes were coined and circulated as well as plentiful jabs at contemporary people and situations. Nothing was sacred any longer. If there are fewer jokes about Brezhnev, it is in part, I think, because so little of great significance changed or was even attempted in those eighteen years. Some of the old jokes recirculated with the names changed.

The Andropov and Chernenko years were mercifully short, but they also left a little spoor on the trail. More recent years produced only a few good jokes, however. Some of these follow the long Soviet tradition of lampooning government ineptitude, but more are aimed at “new Russians,” the semicriminal, tasteless nouveau riche of the 1990s. For one thing life became too hard and too uncertain for the inventors of the anecdotes to find it amusing. We need to remember who made up Soviet jokes, who told them, and why.

Practically all jokes are anonymous, of course, but it is safe to assume that most are the product of the urban intelligentsia. For most of Soviet history, but perhaps especially in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, this was a group who felt alienated from, yet at the same time smugly superior to, the government and society. They were comfortably employed and had leisure time in which to amuse themselves; more hard work wouldn’t earn them appreciably more money or greater comforts. In a free society many of these people would have belonged to civic and political organizations and worked to improve their societies. They would have spoken out about injustices and problems they experienced and saw. In the USSR they could do none of those things. Feeling helpless about their inability to affect their world and eventually pretty hopeless that anything in it would change much for the better, they sighed, sat back, and found what pleasure they could in making fun of it. In the 1990s, however, this group found it just as difficult to live as everyone else. Those who didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to emigrate found very little funny in unemployment, inflation, increasing crime, and a very unaccustomed political instability. And others were now beating them to the punch line with public criticism and humor. In post-Gorbachev Russia newspapers, journals, and TV shows have been able to openly criticize and lampoon the usual targets of anecdotes. The traditional Soviet intelligentsia and the anecdote died.

But if people aren’t telling many new jokes, this is a good time for remembering old ones. You will find that I have arranged the anecdotes first chronologically and, within the chronological divisions, topically. This causes some apparent repetition. You will read jokes about Lenin in at least three places, for example, but they are three different sets of jokes. If I had put them all together, they would have told you nothing about the times that produced them. Likewise jokes about shortages, bureaucrats, Jews, and many other topics recur throughout. These are problems that never went away. I have provided some internal guides and an index so you can find favorite categories.

You will also find that I have numbered the jokes. This will make any joke easy to find again for classroom use, retelling, whatever. And once you and your friends have read the book a sufficient number of times, you can employ the convenient shorthand of referring to the joke by number only. You do know the story about the old card-playing buddies (or long-time cell mates) who knew each other’s jokes so well they had numbered them and “told” them by saying only their numbers? Well, they did. Then a newcomer joined the group. He was mystified that everyone would laugh when someone called out 12, or 22, or 34, until he had it explained to him. Then he gave it a try. “22,” he said, but nobody laughed. Later he tried 17, but again no one laughed. When he asked how come, someone told him, “Some people know how to tell a joke, others just don’t.” In another version, when the newcomer tries, only one listener laughs, but he just can’t stop laughing. He finally explains that he had never heard that one before. In yet another version, which I heard in the Soviet Union where there was a great deal more sexism and gender separation than here, no one laughs and someone reprimands the newcomer, “We don’t tell that one with ladies present.” You will find yet one more version in the collection. See #156.

They do say if you have to explain a joke, it isn’t funny. But if you can get through this book and haven’t had many a good laugh, I expect it’s your fault. So lighten up, loosen up, and don’t be afraid to learn a little history along the way.

2
Lenin

The first thing we might notice about Soviet anecdotes is that there are none about the October Revolution or about the Civil War that soon followed. Much later, jokes would poke fun at the way official history had come to glorify and otherwise distort the events of these years. But either the jokes of this period have been forgotten and lost, or at the time no one found much that was amusing about the Bolsheviks, their seizure of power, and the long, bloody struggle they eventually won to stay in power. It shouldn’t surprise us if the latter were true. Conditions in Russia from 1917 to 1921 were about as horrible as life can be. The revolutions of 1917 came near the end of Russia’s involvement in the World War I. By the time Russia withdrew, she had lost over three million citizens, more than all the other combatant nations combined. Trying to fight a “total” war had severely damaged the Russian economy. Modern war usually produces full employment, with soldiers in the army and an augmented factory force producing war materiel, but unemployment was higher in Russia in 1917 than in America during the Great Depression. Inflation had severely eroded the value of money. There were such great shortages of fuel and food that factories could not operate and people went hungry. They fled the cities to find refuge and something to eat in the villages.

Things got a great deal worse after 1917. The Bolsheviks who seized power in October 1917 were themselves a singularly humorless lot. What is most important to understand about them is that they were true believers, that is, fanatics. They were Marxist revolutionaries who had spent their adult lives—in Lenin’s case, for example, over twenty-five years—preparing to make revolution for the purpose of establishing a socialist state. Most had spent years in tsarist prisons and in exile, both in Siberia and in self-imposed foreign exile. Some, like Lenin, came from middle- and upper-class families and knew the deprivation of the proletariat only intellectually or at second hand, but others, like Stalin, came from extreme poverty, and all of them hated the tsarist and capitalist order on which they blamed Russia’s and the world’s ills.

When the Bolsheviks were able to seize power in October 1917 because of the chaos and disillusionment caused by the war, they were not confident that they could ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Tiny Revolutions in Russia
• RoutledgeCurzon Studies on the History of Russia and Eastern Europe
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Lenin
• 3: Stalin
• 4: Khrushchev
• 5: Brezhnev
• 6: Andropov and Chernenko
• 7: Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin