Russians Don’t View Putin as Sacral but Rather as Eternal, Belkovsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 27 – In Soviet times, Stanislav Belkovsky says, jokes about the rulers was “a powerful channel of popular satire,” one especially powerful because no one knew who the author of this or that joke was and therefore the anecdotes told at that time “expressed not an individual opinion but a collective point of view.”

            A true political joke, the opposition commentator says, is “a classic example of a subject-less statement.” Such jokes exist “in present-day Russia,” but “they don’t take root or develop” because their authorship is always known because it consists mostly of comics who are working for the regime” (pointmedia.io/story/697898f0e657f59b666dceb0).

            According to Belkovsky, “this shows the qualitative difference between Soviet totalitarianism of the past and Russian totalitarianism now. The former was collectivist and retained the romantic idea of a joint movement and the feeling that even bad power was still ‘ours’ and something that could and should be changed including via satire and humor.”

            Russia today, however, is very different. It is “extremely atomized with everyone playing for himself. There is no collective effort or even collective thought. Instead, the powers are alienated from the people just as the people a re from each other. And that means those in power now aren’t so much sacralized as perceived as eternal.”

“Because Putin is eternal,” Belkovsky says, “there is no point in emotionally reacting to his presence or absence. One need only correlate one's behavior with the demands of the regime so as not to suffer, and try to live in a space as independent from it as possible. Those who succeed in this are in a sense free—just as individual people were free in the late USSR.”

And he concludes: “humor, in order to truly work as a tool of desacralization, must be based on inner optimism and an unconscious hope for change. In Soviet society, such hope existed [but] in modern Russia, this hope does not exist: the ruling elite gives no grounds for it and change itself is Vladimir Putin’s worst nightmare.”

Belkovsky’s words recall to this reader of his remarks an anecdote from the last days of the Soviet Union. In it, two Russian meet in Red Square. The first asks “have you heard any good political anecdotes recently?” to which the second responds, “you know, not a one; but my Polish friend has an explanation.”

“What is it?” the first asks. That’s simple, says the second. “When times are bad, people tell political jokes but when they get worse, people stop.”