Russians Now Joke about Aging Putin Leadership as They Did about Soviet Leaders at the End of Soviet Times

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 5 – Vladimir Putin will be 72 this year and many of those around him because of his commitment to “stability of cadres” are as old or even older. Not surprisingly that has not passed unnoticed in the Russian population, and some people there are now reviving the jokes they told about the rapid turnover of Soviet leaders in the early 1980s.

            There are good reasons for that: Brezhnev died at 75, then Andropov passed from the scene at 69, and Chernenko made it only to 73; and while medicine is better now and Putin is more obsessed with protecting himself from disease than they were, the basis for comparison is obvious (prosleduet.media/details/2024-08-05-seniors-in-power/).

            And such concerns about the age of the leader and the gerontocracy around him – on that, see meduza.io/feature/2022/01/31/vazhnye-istorii-podschitali-sredniy-vozrast-vysshih-putinskih-chinovnikov-oni-pochti-sravnyalis-s-brezhnevskimi-no-vse-esche-molozhe-amerikanskih --are leading Russians to revive jokes from the early 1980s as their way of talking about the future.

            In an article about this, the Continuation Follows portal offers three. The first is a Radio Armenia joke. In it, Radio Armenia is asked “how is a monarchy different from Soviet power?” to which the service replies “In a monarchy, power is passed from father to son, but under Soviet power, it is from grandfather to grandfather.”

            The second picks up on the Soviet proclivity to rename cities after a ruler died. In that anecdote, a Russian seeks to buy a ticket to Chernenko while Chernenko is still alive only to be told that the railways don’t sell tickets in advance. And the third is even more general: Russians say that “wisdom doesn’t always come with age. Sometimes age comes by itself.”

            But the portal doesn’t recount what was surely the classical joke from the period when one general secretary died after another. A man goes to attend Chernenko’s funeral in Red Square. A guard asks him for his ticket. But the Russian responds, “I don’t have a ticket; I’m here on a season pass.”