Stalin Used and Promoted Humor and Did Not Just Punish People for Jokes, New Book Documents

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 6 – There were two kinds of humor in the USSR when Stalin was in charge: the humor that could get you shot or sent to the camps and the humor that the Kremlin leader promoted for his own purposes and actively encouraged Soviet citizens to engage it. The first has been much discussed; the second is the subject of a new book.

            The title of the new book, State Laughter: Stalinism and the Comic (in Russian; Moscow: NLO, 2022, 768 pp.), might seem to be a contradiction in terms, its two authors, Yegeny Dobrenko and Nataly Jonsson-Skradol, say; but it is perfectly appropriate because laughter was for Stalin an important means of repression (polit.ru/article/2022/10/06/ps_gossmeh/).

            Obviously, the two Russian scholars who now teach in Great Britain say, the targets of the jokes and satire the Kremlin selected were typically different than those of unofficial and suppressed anecdotes and they were treated in different ways. But Stalin saw humor properly understood as his ally not his enemy and promoted it as such.

            This new book fills an important gap in scholarship on the subject of humor in Russia and especially in Soviet times; but it is perhaps most important as a reminder that humor is a two-edged sword, one that can build up as well as undermine authoritarian leaders, something that is all too often neglected in discussions of jokes and anecdotes in Russia today.