Putin Regime Even Less Tolerant of Jokes than Late Soviet One Was, ‘Important Stories’ Suggests

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 21 – “When times are bad,” a Polish joke runs, “people tell political jokes. When they get worse, people stop.” That observation may help to explain why the Important Stories portal has found that the Putin regime is even less tolerant of jokes than was the Soviet in the Brezhnev era.    

After examining dozens of court cases in which standup comics and ordinary Russians have been charged and convicted for telling political jokes, jokes that the courts often repeat in their judgments, the portal reaches that thoroughly depressing conclusion (istories.media/stories/2026/05/21/o-chem-nelzya-shutit-v-rossii/).

According to its investigation, Russians of all kinds today put themselves in legal jeopardy if they tell jokes about Putin’s war in Ukraine, ethnic Russians and at least some other ethnic groups, religion in general and the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in particular, bribes, and of course Putin himself.

The Important Stories report concludes with a comment by Ekaterina Shulmann, a Russian political analyst now living in Kazakhstan, about this trend. She points out that in recent years, “the genre of stand-up comedy has acquired a certain social significant and its practitioners have come to resemble somewhat the variety show hosts of Soviet times.”

“Do you remember that significant segment of Russian culture? It was officially sanctioned, after all; these were not dissidents,” she asks rhetorically. “Yet, at the same time, there was something about them that wasn't entirely "Soviet." Some did suffer for what they said that sparked laughter but not as many as now.

In Putin’s time, “stand-up comedians began to be weeded out. Some suffered direct repercussions; others, having refused to support the war in 2022, left the country; while still others remained behind and attempted to engage in a delicate balancing act.” But the future for this kind of humor in Russia is not bright.

That is because “an authoritarian regime [like Putin’s] cannot tolerate individual agency in any sphere whatsoever. No matter what your line of work, if you act independently—rather than on official orders—and manage to do something that draws an audience and earns you public affection, that alone is deemed suspicious.”

Telling jokes in that environment is increasingly dangerous and thus increasingly both rare and private.