Soviet Jokes Under Stalin

Hello and welcome to Eurasian Knot. I'm your host Sean Guillory. I'm happy to announce that Rusana, if everything goes well, Rusana will be back next week. So hopefully we'll hear her voice again and we'll hear about what she's been up to and how things are going with her. The Eurasian Knot is sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and patrons out there who give us money every month to help us keep this podcast going, show us how much you appreciate the show, if you're willing to invest in it. It really gives us a good, you know, good feeling to know that people are willing to give their hard-earned cash to this project. So if you want to become a patron, please do so. And I want to thank a couple of patrons out there who recently gave some money, some good amounts. People are actually very generous when they do give, so I really, really appreciate it. 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So when Rusana comes back, so get them ready. You can do that by going to Euronot.org and go to the contact page where you can fill out that form and send us your file or a link if that's what you have. So a few days ago, I was on social media and a friend of ours who has been on the show, I won't identify him because I haven't, didn't ask permission. So but anyways, he posted a Soviet joke. And he says for no reason at all, the joke goes like this. Every day, a guy comes by a newspaper kiosks and asks for Pravda. He looks at the front page and he gives it back. What are you looking for? The clerk asks. An obituary. Obituaries are on the back page, but the one I'm looking for will be on the front. I got me thinking about jokes, particularly if you watch a lot of American late night comedy, there's a lot of jokes about our current administration. And, you know, I started thinking more about what role they play in society. You know, are they a safety valve? Are they criticism? Do they matter? Do they have power? And then I was starting to think about this, particularly in authoritarian societies, because, for example, the Soviet Union is famous for its jokes. There's tons of collections of them. So I decided to go back through the show's catalog and dug out my interview with John Waterloo from way back in 2018. And this is a conversation I had about his book, It's Only a Joke, Comrade, Humor, Trust, and Everyday Life Under Stalin, 1929 to 1941. And that gave me an idea, of course, thinking about my interview with John and listening to it over. Do you have a favorite joke from communist times? Maybe one that you experienced, that you told if you lived under those regimes, or one that you remember, one you just like, that you've come across. Send it in to us. Send in through our contact page, and we'll go through them. If I get a good number of them, you know, if I need at least, like, I don't know, maybe five, I'll pick out the best one and send a prize. I won't say what the prize is. It'll be secret, but I'll contact you and I can get your address and whatever. Anyways. And it's open to anyone in the world. I'm willing to fork the postage. And you can do that by sending it your favorite joke from communist times. And it could be any communist country, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe, Soviet Union, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Cambodia. Send them in through the contact page at EuropeNot.org and send in your joke. All right. Well, why don't we get to John's interview? John Waterloo received his PhD in history at Oxford, and he's the author of It's Only a Joke, Comrade, Humor, Trust, and Everyday Life Under Stalin, 1929 to 1941. I should say that John published this himself, which I think is totally awesome. I don't know why a press didn't pick it up, but what do I know about presses? But I thought it was really cool that he put it out. And you can find it on Amazon. Just search for the title. I should also say that John is the host of a podcast called Voices in the Dark. It has interviews and conversations about psychology and psychedelics and philosophy, kind of everyday life thinking. And you can find that by searching for Voices in the Dark on your favorite podcast app. Here's John Waterloo. All right. So I thought we'd start by just asking you, you know, what inspired you to write about humor and jokes in 1930s Soviet Union? It's a question that I continually ask myself over the past 10 years going, why? Why did I do that? And I kind of began to make sense of it more as I look back and saw that different interests after there all seem to sort of focus around a similar fascination, which is how do people really make sense of periods of enormous change? How do they talk about it? How do they try and make sense for themselves and for the people that they care about around them? And I was particularly fascinated by 1930s in the Soviet Union because they're trying to make not only a whole new world, but a whole new people to live in it. And I remember the first time that I got my hands on Stephen Cotkin's Magnetic Mountain. I was like, oh my God. And then Jochen Helberg's Revolution on my mind. I was like, oh my God, because I was, I was really excited, but also my favorite kind of history books. I was like, but I also think you guys are wrong. Like it was inspiring to go and ask some other questions and I guess we can get in the details later. My sense of the way that I was taught history at school and then university around this period was, this is a massive period of change and we could look at it as something that was really bad and dominated and crushed people. We could look at it as an exciting experiment and something that some people believed in and yet it seemed to end up around the sort of polarized polls for a long time. Like were people brainwashed into believing or were they just too scared to be able to do anything else? And then when I was reading things like Sarah Davis's book about popular opinion, she found when the archives opened all these different voices, some that were positive and some that were negative. And I was like, but is that, is that it? Do people like it or dislike it? And then the sort of sense I have, tell me if you think it's different, was that over time there's been more kind of statement that, oh, a lot of people are living in a gray zone between affirmation and dissent. And I was like, what does it mean this gray zone? I think Martin Mahler said it meant people had to live in a constant state of schizophrenia, essentially. I'm like, I don't really buy that. I don't think that people in the past and in that time were so unlike us that they weren't trying to make the world that they were living in make some kind of sense to them. So why jokes, I guess? Well, when jokes turned up in the books that I was reading, I'd see them and go, oh, that's fascinating that that doesn't sound like people who've been crushed, who don't have any sort of critical spirit or a playful ability to laugh at their situation and that they're in. But it also didn't seem to sound to me like people who are committedly against the regime and were resisting it. And yet when the jokes turned up in various books on popular opinion, they're kind of this little dash of creative seasoning like, oh, here's a funny story to lighten the mood. Now I'll get back to my argument. And I thought, wait, there's something very strange about the fact they're telling these jokes in a time that's meant to be so repressive. And I wanted to find a way to look at how people are grappling with judging, trying to make sense of adapting to a situation that they didn't have a power directly to change themselves, but they had to find ways to get used to one way or another. So I thought, okay, let's find out about like some of the psychology of humor and let's see if I can find, are there more jokes under Stalin? And most people said, no, there weren't, but I did anyway. Right, right. Yeah. About this issue of the people living in the gray zone. One of the things that I've always been uncomfortable about both the polarization, but also people living in the gray zone is it seems to impose a level of social and political consciousness on people in the past and people in Stalinist Russia in particular that I don't think has ever historically existed. And so what I found interesting about your use of the joke and maybe have you go into more the way that the function of the joke as you see it within Stalinist culture in general is that it's a very normative practice in the sense that people have humor, people find humor in all sorts of strange situations. People make jokes about all sorts of things, but that doesn't mean it has to be imposed with any kind of political content. When you're looking at all these jokes and you've uncovered many, many, many, how did they function within everyday life of the 1930s? That is a huge question. I think they function to try and take a broad way to answer that question. They function in the same way they do in the societies that we're used to. But because jokes depend on the context, the significance of them changes in every given context. So we might tell a joke because we're angry. We might tell a joke to charm a stranger or break the ice. We can do it because we don't like our boss. We do it because we're in a situation that we can't escape. Humor is just a part of social communication, which is as broad as social communication itself. It's something really inherent to the human condition, which is why people have been trying to study it since as early as we can look back. Cicero wrote about humor, trying to understand how it made sense. And humor theorists have ever since then and before then as well. There's something really human about this. Why? What is it for? And I guess a little bit of background is things tended to for a long time have crystallized around three broad schools of thought. There are those who look to Thomas Hobbes and others who say, oh, humor is laughing at someone who seems inferior to you because then you feel better about yourself. Freud, who thought that it was like a release of psychic energy, that we have tension that we want to let out and resolve that sense of tension. And then there's Henri Bergson, who said it's well, it's about incongruity. It's about how our expectations are upset. And that gives us a kind of delight when we lead ourselves down one expectation and it turns out to be something else. And those are the big three around which everyone else since then has built their theories of how humor works. And they all like, it seems I've read so many and they're so boring, these books about humor. This is this bitter irony. And they're all like, well, none of these theories is good enough on its own. But let's try and mix a bit of that and a bit of that together. But at the end of it, those theorists themselves and Freud in particular, were very aware that it is deeply entwined with the human experience in a social setting. And as soon as we try and have a grand unified theory of what humor is, we might as well try and have a grand unified theory about what fiction is and what storytelling is. And so it's a much broader question about the human condition, which is why I wanted to look into this in the first place. Your point was, I think that it's not simply a case that people are super politically minded when they're making these jokes. And I definitely agree with that. There's many parts of that we can get into, but say, telling a joke about the fact that you had to wait in line again from 4am to get any food, and you're like, this is the beautiful way that we march towards socialism. Or you've just found out there's no bread rations again, and your wife has been arrested. And you're like, thank you, Comrade Stalin for this wonderful life. It's kind of an assertion of agency. It's an assertion of self, like, I'm not so dumb that I can't see what you're doing to me. And I'm going to, because it's something I cannot change, I'm going to laugh at it, because I feel that Hobbes-style superiority by doing so. I am also able to look at the incongruity and highlight it between what you, the regime, promised me is meant to be the case and what I'm experiencing at the everyday level. In the process of doing this, I have the Freud part, which is, I can try and discharge some of the angst by shoving something scary and unchangeable into a genre where nothing is even meant to make sense. And I can laugh at it because it's so absurd to me. I want to ask you about your sources, because you have just, I don't know how many of these jokes you've collected, and then others have collected them too. And you collected a lot just from your archival research. So what types of sources record jokes in the Soviet Union? Well, first off, when I tried to find some jokes, there's dozens, if not hundreds, of anthologies that have been published since that claim to be based on the circulating joke culture of that period. But it's all pretty dodgy. And many of them, you can see they're from emigre publications and they're probably made up after the fact. And there's this incredible compendium that someone called Dmitry Melnichenko put together, which cross-references all of them and shows the ones that are most likely to have actually been in the Soviet Union as the living culture. So first of all, I found those and thought, well, this is good. Then I thought, I can't really use these because they don't seem to be part of the culture truly. So I decided, okay, we've got some diaries, some published diaries. I can hopefully find some more that are from that period. So there's a few diarists in the book that I try and keep as our companions through the narrative. But in the archives, the documents, first off, I looked at those reports on the mood of the population, which a lot of people had looked at before. And one of the big criticisms about them as a source is that they often exaggerate or just brush over what people say, like this person said something terrible, this person says something else. And it's all through the regime's lens of what they're worried about at any given time. But thankfully, I found quite quickly that jokes were essentially recorded as evidence, obviously, of anti-Soviet agitation, because the regime is very suspicious of humor in general. But because the jokes were actually recorded in many of these documents, like in full, we don't have to look through the regime's eyes and go, look, it's an enemy of the people. We can go, oh, actually, this is really ambiguous. They seem to be mocking the regime in relation to its own promises. Like they're saying, why won't you live up to what you're promising to be? Or like saying, look, a lot of jokes compared Lenin and Stalin, and basically Lenin is actually the good guy and like, Stalin, you suck. One of the most popular ones is, or it seemed to be the most popular anyway, I found it so many times, why did Lenin wear shoes and Stalin wears jackboots? And like, well, because Lenin knew where he was going. But in these documents, do they ever give you a sense of the context in which the jokes are being used in? Like you said, you know, they're certainly jokes referring to, you know, standing in line or particular events, whether they're somewhat personal or something like this. But when they are recorded, do you get a sense of where they're heard, the reactions of people to them or any of this other kind of contextual material? Sometimes in the Svodki, yes, it will say like when and where. Sometimes it's clear because the Svodki are actually generated by all sorts of different bodies from like your local factory, right up to regional and so on levels. So if it's a more local one, it's often like, yes, in this room at that time, whilst this political educator was speaking, this person did this. But the much more rich sources for the context were criminal case files that I looked at several hundred of. I wouldn't say it's the principal source base, but it's probably the richest. I thought it was unfortunate that I could only see these particular cases because these were when people's criminal cases were reviewed by the procuracy. There was a big database that I managed to get access to at the state archive. I thought, OK, so supervisory, they quote from the original investigations. They sketch out pretty much exactly this person has been reported to have said this in this setting to these people. They reacted like this. People have been called on since as witnesses. And these are their versions of the events. And we've looked back at this person's history. Here is where they were born, their family scenario, like lots of details like that. And I thought, OK, well, this is pretty good. I'd like to see the originals. But they are, as far as I can tell, in the FSB archive these days. But when I went to Kyiv, I worked in the former KGB archive there and saw a bunch of the original investigation reports. And they weren't any better. If anything, the supervisory documents at GAF were richer because they kind of had the wider view. Like over time, they collated documents from different bodies and reporters, got new statements, collated and contextualized things even better. We think that the more secrets in the, you know, higher up or within the secret police and not in these more accessible levels. Given I have more access to the supervisory documents. Right. So one of your chapters deals with the response to the assassination of Sergei Kirov and the mocking of Soviet leaders in general. And Sergei Kirov is assassinated in December 1934. And as you note, his murder, of course, becomes kind of one of the impulses for the terror in 1937. But you also note that Kirov became fodder for a lot of humor and ridicule. And you call this really cleverly Kirov's carnival. So what is this Kirov's carnival? And what does it say about the mocking of the Soviet leadership? I'm glad you think it's clever. I was like, ah, alliteration. Here we go. Instant bestseller. I called it that because there's this whole idea of the carnivalesque that Mikhail Bakhtin talked about as part of folk cultures around the world of a certain day or moment in the year where we have carnival, where we turn the world upside down and we mock the leaders. And it was maybe more like outrageous humor and behavior is allowed. It certainly wasn't allowed in the Soviet Union at this time. And yet what we see in the prescribed and demanded mourning for the murder of Kirov, these kind of impulses coming from the ordinary people who decide that, well, it's a holiday and I'm going to have fun. And in this dramatic event, perhaps because of the heightened drama of it, the impulses come out all the more intensely that people choose to look at things from a more comic way and turn to traditional motifs and ways of dealing with leaders and situations that they don't like. Tons of jokes appear that are the kind that Bakhtin looked at. They're scatological, they're sexualized. They imagine degrading the corpse of Kirov and mocking him for being so fat and talk about eating his body, like saying, oh, it's the mourning celebration or the mourning process for Kirov. Go to the canteen today. They'll be serving his brains. It's like this really kind of perverse suggestions. There's like, oh, where's Kirov buried? I'm going to bury him. going to go shit on his grave. It's just, it's that immediate. And I kind of use that event to highlight these themes in the humor that carries us on throughout the 1930s aimed at all of the leaders. And what I think it highlights in turning to these sort of traditional base motifs is that people certainly aren't just speaking Bolshevik, that they are using simple human everyday language to try and mock their leaders. And sometimes it's a bit, it's more political in the sense of like saying, you're super fat, you clearly get more than us. So if we kill Kirov, everyone is going to be able to have tons of food in Leningrad. This kind of imagined version that the people are going to get fed because the leadership are becoming fat like the former landlords. So it's political and talking about the regime's own promises. But simultaneously, it's just this much older trope of mocking people on a physical level. There's also though, at the heart of it, something I try and highlight is that whilst this is funny and vulgar and base, but it's also ultimately an admission of weakness that we so lack power in ourselves that the only way that we can imagine a victory or momentary power over the leaders who are determining our lives is to imagine at a physical level like cutting them up, eating them, shitting on them, this kind of stuff. Right. It's like to reduce them to the basest form of humiliation in society. Like if you are of the shit, then that's pretty much as low as you can go. Or if you are chopped up and dismembered and even cannibalized, you are also like not only are you in that process imagining breaking a bunch of taboos, not just legal, but social taboos, you're also reducing the leader to basically useless material. Yeah. Breaking those taboos is also just part of the appeal of the humor in itself. And so I try and be careful not to say, you know, everything is intensely political. And a lot of the response to Kirov's death, too, seems to me as people just want to have a party. They just want to relax. And whilst the regime sees this as very worrying and like a huge political statement, when you get a young female worker whose case that I looked at saying po-faced, and I think she believed it as best I can tell to a party organizer, when will the dancing be? And he's like, what are you talking about? This is a morning celebration. She's like, are you sure there really isn't going to be any dancing? There's food shortages. And I've had to mourn over so many things in the past. Can we really not have a dance? And it's sort of this naive desire for an outlet. Right. And I think this is part of at least Bakhtin's understanding of the carnivalesque and that is, it is a safety valve release. It's to release some of the steam off of a kind of pressure situation by allowing the population to have this moment of turning the tables. It's in a way, it's also another form of social control, right? You just let some of the steam out. And it's interesting to me that the Bolshevik regime didn't understand that. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Now, at the same time in 1930s, you also have the Stalin cult, which is just pervasive. I remember one of the jokes in your manuscript, which was something like Stalin falls in a river, Kolkhoznik jumps in and saves them. And when he gets Stalin out of the river, he recognizes who he saved. And Stalin says, thank you. What can I do for you? And Kolkhoznik says, well, just don't tell anyone I saved you. Yeah. It's like, oh no, why did I save you? It's all a mistake. Right. So what is that? Talk about the ridicule in the context. I mean, because Stalin is the butt of many, many jokes. What does this tell you about the Stalin cult? I think it tells us two seemingly contradictory things, one that the cult doesn't matter and one that it matters a lot. So in the first instance, I think that the conventional view seems to remain even if it's the point where people don't even seem to need to argue about it anymore. They say, well, Stalin had a cult. Even if life was really bad at local level in various ways and local officials were corrupt, people could believe in Stalin because his cult was pervasive. It was hard not to get wrapped up in this image of this mythical great leader and so on, that in a way he was untouchable, even if we could say he's surrounded by evil counselors who might be misleading him. And this is what, you know, is still in the school books. I actually went and at least in Britain, I got a bunch of what's being books to see what's being taught in high school still. And they're like, yes, the cult, it convinces people and so on and so forth. This kind of big brother idea that you love big brother despite everything. And yet in the humor, well, Stalin is public enemy number one. So it's untrue. The cult wasn't enough to make him sacred at all. The people made him profane. But the thing is that why is he public enemy number one? Well, because of the cult, it was effective at making him totally synonymous with the regime. But that wasn't always a good thing to be. There was a Romanian joke about Ceaușescu, which is in laughter as in life, he is at the center. Very good. And people mock the cult, like Orwell said something about this. There's like the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. So my sense of what the humor so focused on Stalin is, it tells us about the cult is that the cult is actually a lot like any other regime policy, that people respond to it selectively and differently at different times. And if part of it works for them, then they accept that bit. But that never means that it's sacred or above criticism. In the way that the proliferation of jokes about Stalin are part of the cult itself, it seems to me what you're saying here. Yes, that's clearer than what I said. Now, the other thing you talk about these jokes is people use them as a way or not use them. I don't want to give that much instrumentalization of them, but they function as a way people coped and understood and explain some of the kind of cataclysmic events of the 1930s, you know, collectivization, forced industrialization and the terror. So talk about jokes as a way to cope, about jokes as a way to cope, but also a lens in which to understand. Yeah, there's different tendencies or themes that emerged for each of those examples. So I can talk a little bit about each of them. For collectivization, it's actually quite a remarkably different tone to most of the jokes that I found. The jokes generally in the 30s are pretty dark. And I think it helps me that I have a pretty black sense of humor. So I actually find them funny. But in the collectivization ones, it's even worse. The jokes are sort of the bleakest point of just saying, and we're all starving is kind of the punchline over and over again. But these are jokes, or they're chastushki, these sort of sung little rhymes. Even if the content seems absolutely bleak and laden with despair and giving up to the winds of fate, the fact that they're telling them in these fun forms, to me suggests that it's trying to create a community of suffering, that it's trying to make light things that are unchangeable. It's the kind of humor that you find in concentration camps, or in the gulag. When I was reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, and over and over again, he talks about the jokes people are exchanging with each other, even in Auschwitz. It's that kind of humor, because it's helping people at an interpersonal and psychological level to cope with something that's incredibly terrible. Whereas the more politically minded jokes about a collectivization, because I found those two, which are kind of making jokes about how the correct application of the party line is when there is no food in the town and no food in the countryside. That's how you do it right. Whereas like a Bukharinite one is one way and the other way and so on. And the people who are telling those jokes were the ones in the cities who weren't really directly experiencing it. Or they were intellectuals who were like visiting, like Arthur Koestler records one of those in his autobiography. But the people who are in Ukraine, or people who have only recently come from the countryside or living in places affected, having this kind of bleak, coping, gallows humor. And gallows humor is a really interesting phenomenon in itself, because it's laughing in the face of death, something that's completely inescapable and unchangeable. And you can't change or escape it, but you can change at least momentarily how you feel about it. So in that moment where you say, oh, it looks like we're going to have nice weather today, as you're led to the gallows, you can try and release some of that tension. And when you do it with a group, as various sociologists and psychologists have looked into, you engage in some mutually agreed self-deception. You don't really explain anything, you explain it away. And I would call it a placebo, because it's not a real cure exactly, and yet it works. Right, right. Let me ask you something about gallows humor, because Yigal Halfin wrote an article a few years ago that in quite an obscure journal, and I don't know how much attention it's gotten. I don't know if you're familiar with it. I think I know the one, but I haven't read it in a long time. So one of the things that he points out is while they're denouncing Bukharin, and even in Politburo meetings, or behind the scenes, or even publicly in these conferences, there's lots of gallows humor. There's lots of ridiculing the person that's being denounced into their face. And so what about the gallows humor from, say, I don't know if you can speak to it, but the gallows humor and the jokes told by the leadership too? Yeah, I was trying to, I remember reading that article and really thinking that he missed the point. But I don't think it is like gallows humor to be laughing at someone who is going to be sent to the gallows. That seems like that's just assertion of superiority and mocking and dehumanizing someone else. It's not trying to draw you in a group together so that you can feel better about a situation. But I mean, I could tell you that when I looked at the humor of the leadership themselves, so far as we can tell from interviews or memoirs of some of them, that it did tend to be a much more kind of straightforward joshing for Stalin's favor, or an important point that, say, for example, Stalin did apparently tell some of the same jokes that I found ordinary people telling. I'm trying to remember. I think one example is this like rather surreal joke where a teacher asks the class, who is the author of Yevgeny Onegin? And everyone's like, not me, not me. I didn't do it. They decided they need to find out an NKVD operative is like, here's this. And he's like, I'm going to find out who did this, who wrote this thing that he assumes is a counter-revolutionary tract. And then he finds someone and forces him to admit it. And Stalin tells the same joke. But I think we miss the point if we think that that kind of moment of affinity means that they're kind of engaged in the same process at all, because when Stalin told that joke, he was kind of menacingly doing it in front of his subordinates saying, you better be doing the job that I want you to do. You better be arresting the people I want you to arrest. And why aren't you doing a good job? Whereas people who are laughing about essentially indiscriminate arrests and a climate of fear are the victims. They're laughing at their own misfortune, which is like a crucial distinction. As you started out by saying, one of the things that kind of like struck you when you first started this project was this question of identity and how people understand themselves within this broader context of the 1930s. How would you understand Soviet identity in light of this humor and jokes? How should we approach it? Another good big question. I don't like small questions. No, you don't. Would you mind if before I answer that I circle back to the question of the terror? Absolutely. Yes. It really interests me because I have a problem with the terminology because terror seems often to have been understood as meaning everyone is terrified or living in a state of like constant, like frozen in the headlights of the NKVD's paddy wagons, that kind of sense. And yet what I found is that people were not mutely terrified or unwilling to talk about the terror with others. And they're actively joking, even in the workplace with their colleagues, about the fact that arrests are spiraling out of control, like to the point where kids know, like in schools, there's a kid using a catapult, firing spitballs, a portrait of Voroshilov. And the teacher's like, what are you doing? And he says, well, today he's a leader, but tomorrow he might be an enemy of the people. It's so prevalent that even a child is aware that this is happening. And I think that the use of the term great terror kind of misleads us into thinking people are terrified into silence or that they could only communicate like Orlando Feige's book is titled In Whispers. But that's not what I find. In fact, in conversations with people that people trusted, and sometimes they get it wrong, which is why it turns up in sources that aren't like in diaries or in the Harvard interview project, they say in the workplace and out loud because it's something that's so worrying and intensely experienced at the time that they feel the need to address it. And because in that gallows humor effect way that I described, they can't control it, but they can try and go, look, it is absurd. So let me put it into a genre of the absurd where things aren't meant to make sense anyway, and I can laugh at them. Do you also get the sense from this humor that there is a kind of a perverse joy in the sense that the people who are being arrested publicly are the leadership or the bosses? So there is a kind of just desserts in this, in the humor towards the terror. I felt like I found more of that in the sense of just desserts about Kirov for some reason, but the ones that seem to be going around at the time of the terror or the repressions or whatever we're going to call them, seem more to focus on the instability of it all, that everything is so uncertain that at a certain point, you're like, this is really spiraling now to the point where the, what people are laughing about is the anxiety over who's going to disappear tomorrow, I guess. But I mean, there's always some sentiment when laughing at the higher ups being removed, that ha ha, good. Right. Because I kind of remember this, not necessarily in humor, but at least in public opinion in Sarah Davies book. But I might be mixing things up. It's been a long time. So yeah, let me ask the question of the identity again. So as you said earlier, you were inspired by this question of what did Soviet citizens believe? What did they understand? How did they regard themselves in this tumultuous context of the 1930s? So what is humor and joke telling? What is its relationship to your understanding of Soviet identity? I approached it in the same way that I said earlier that I enjoyed and was stimulated by reading Stephen Kotkin and ideas of speaking Bolshevik, potentially mouthing the lines of official ideology to get ahead, even if you didn't believe it, the likes of Jochen Helbeck and related but different Egal Helfin saying, well, plenty of people did believe it. And they tried to become the mask that they put on and become that perfect citizen. I thought in these jokes, people are definitely not just speaking Bolshevik. They're speaking some Bolshevik, which is interesting, like I said earlier, calling the regime out in its own language on its own terms. But what I see is a theme that a kind of metaphor that I use throughout the book called cross hatching, which is a drawing technique where you draw parallel lines, like horizontally parallel lines vertically, and you start to shade and create that three dimensional effect. And I see that as a way to think about not a gray zone. But when these two different sets of influences official and unofficial meet, there's something new is created in the middle, that it's not a case of regime ideology always clashing head on with the unofficial ordinary people's experience. But in the process of their meeting, it's not a zero sum game. It's not one discourse winning over the other. But people are trying to see which bits actually make sense in their everyday life, which bits when it's inescapable, they have to live a certain way. How do they find a way for that to make sense and work for them? So people sort of they interweave things like their pre existing values from like personal loyalty to religious convictions and religious language, sexist prejudices and just basic ideas of fairness. There's a lot of jokes which focus on basic ideas of fairness, but also asserting that we ordinary people have better common sense than the leadership. And it's at the heart of that kind of mixing together, there's, I see a pretty profound desire that things should work as they're meant to. And by trying to make the language of the regime make sense in everyday life, people could literally decode it, like take the acronyms of the regime and say what they really meant. Like SSSR, the death of Stalin will save Russia is one of them, or MTS is meant to be machine tractor station, or it could be the grave of comrade Stalin. But I think an important point that I should try and get across is that we can't know for sure the difference between when people are mouthing the words or when they're believing them. But I don't think that many people at the time knew either, that it's kind of experimental that you're saying it and seeing how it feels, you're playing with this idea or this identity, they're exploring and trying to understand where the limits of acceptability are for the things that they want in life, and whether they can align with the things that the regime is going to allow them or encouraging them to do instead. Right. It reminds me of, I have these interactions sometimes when I'm talking to my mom on the phone, and I hear out of her voice are basically the tropes and the very language she gets from re-watching cable news. Yeah. Right. And there's no, it's just, that's the discourse. I mean, it really is kind of a Foucault in practice. The discourse just basically completely structures her speech. So as you also noted, though, that humor, the Soviet regime saw humor as a threat. So how did the government try to control and police humor? Yeah, it's a whole chapter in the book, and it was kind of my least favorite to research, but it was definitely important, like trawling through the documents, since there's not really jokes in them. But it's also quite a funny story, to be honest, because around the late 1920s, there's this kind of anxiety amongst the leadership about humor, that a lot of them remembered that they use scathing political humor when they were struggling in the revolutionary trenches. And they could easily believe that that actually helped them in overthrowing Tsarism. And so I think of it as though there was this old rifle that you fought the revolution and civil war with, and now you just left it around the house, you know, if you allow humor to remain around. And, you know, someone's going to pick that up and use it. So maybe we shouldn't leave that lying around there. And so there's a debate whether or not we should have humor now that the class war has ended, essentially. It's a weapon of class struggle, is what it was believed to be and defined as. So in typical Soviet fashion, they set up a commission to investigate the question, which Lunacharski leads, because he actually wrote a lot of things about humor and was pretty interested in it. And they get a budget and they're meant to look through the history of it across Western Europe and in Russia. What should we find out about this? And they kind of finished the debate in 1931 by saying, OK, it is a weapon or a tool that will be used in class interests, but we should use it as a weapon to correct with laughter our friends and destroy with laughter our enemies. So as long as it's serving the revolutionary cause, then that's fine. It's kind of an obvious compromise, but it took them a while to get there. Then what happens after they've made these sorts of decisions? I guess we could mention there's outlets for, I think, the equivalent of what you said earlier. The regime doesn't allow there to be carnival letting off steam. But the closest they come is by having publications like Krokodil, the satirical magazine, which mocks figures. is that the regime is okay to mock like corrupt local bureaucrats and people could find some amusement in that because they didn't like corrupt local bureaucrats either and so you try and steer the ire and annoyance of the people onto these scapegoats essentially. But for ordinary people's humor it's dealt with in a changing way over the course of the decade. I created one with all the case files that I had to work out when people were being arrested, what they were being sentenced under and so on. So the headline is that they're sentenced under article 5810 or the equivalent in the soviet republics for anti-soviet agitation and the standard punishment overall was 10 years in the gulag. The weird thing is though that whilst it follows the trends of arrests peaks and troughs that we see say after Kirov's murder there's more arrests for this sort of thing there's a bit of a dip and then it spikes up again during 1937 to 38 and then dips and then before the war it spikes up again. But what I found was they're practicing retroactive justice that you could tell a joke in one year when it's kind of fine and then a year or more later you might end up in trouble for it because people remembered that you told that joke and at the time it was just flirting with the borders of acceptability but then kind of like that they changed the rules and like if you took every tennis match that was played but now you defined it according to a smaller court suddenly all those shots that were on the line are now way out and you get arrested for that. So people in terms of understanding how much risk we think people were taking a lot of the time they couldn't know because at the time they were right but then it was undone when the rules were changed. When they were prosecuted for telling jokes did that usually also come with other kind of violations of you know political norms or social norms so was the joke the central crime or was the joke part of a series of other crimes? It didn't have to be part of a series but it definitely in a lot of cases it would be seen as like evidence that you were clearly an enemy so let's look and find if there's other bad things that you did but generally the only other somewhat common actual prosecution article that was used was 5811 which is saying you are part of a counter-revolutionary group but generally that meant you told the jokes with some friends and they laughed so it didn't have to be that you were then accused of being a spy or a saboteur as well but it was very fluid that these kinds of charges could come up in the process What I found particularly interesting about the change over time is that if at first humor is seen as a weapon that could be aimed at the heart of the party and the revolution by 1935 that changes because there's a document which if I remember right Vyshinski puts out which says that the you mustn't actually quote the anti-soviet jokes that people are making and this is in the same document where it says in the same way you don't quote the details in espionage cases of what secrets people have been so they're as scared of like leaking espionage information as they are of telling jokes so only the top level legal professionals who are super trustworthy are allowed to even see the evidence for which people are being put away in case it infects them Mm-hmm interesting wow one of the other like interesting thing you you talk about and this is in the context of policing joke telling is that you know joke telling of course was risky but also the act of telling a joke was a form of sociability and a form of creating or at least building trust or at least expressing trust and also intimacy with other people like you just said that you know if you're hanging out with friends you tell a joke and they all laugh now you're part of a counter-revolutionary organization so talk about this issue of joke telling as a social practice in terms of sociability for people yeah this is one of the things that interested me the most I felt that a lot of what I was writing in the book was kind of okay let's talk about the actual jokes and now to the stuff I'm really interested in like what did it do for people to tell the jokes and I began to see it through the frame in terms of right you said how do jokes help people create trust in times of maximum distrust and I thought this is a lot like the mafia that I read this great work by Diego Gambetta who looks at the criminal codes of the underworld where the mafia because they certainly can never appeal to any higher government authority to protect them and their business they have to make sure they communicate in careful codes know who they can trust have little kind of signs styles of dress that sort of thing that show who they are to each other but not to anybody else and they have certain set phrases and so on to identify kind of like the masons to a degree so I thought okay I don't think the ordinary people in the Soviet Union are criminals but the state thinks they are so why don't we treat them as though they're criminals and think about how criminals communicate and one of the really cool things in Gambetta's work is how he lays out how you can show you can create trust by making yourself vulnerable that say if we're two people who want to do some sort of dodgy business together why should you trust me why should I trust you well if I tell you something compromising about myself then I'm putting myself in your power and so it's very unlikely I'm going to betray you because I've given you something to hold over me and if you do the same then we're bound together in this sense of mutual culpability and it sort of creates an intimacy you're showing like I'm showing you the skeletons in my closet and vice versa so I sort of this is a kind of a fun mixed metaphor that say as part of joking you're often positioning yourself in the same position as somebody else like going just stand here and see the world how I see it do you see that and you laugh like I see that too so you're kind of saying we're all in the same boat but as soon as you've done that in this situation you're also committing yourself to going down with the ship right right interesting what are some of your favorite jokes that you found well that's it's always a question that comes up and I always struggle to answer because I guess what I like about the jokes is what they tell me more than necessarily what's what the jokes are but because you told me to prepare I thought of some some of my favorites are just really the throwaway lines like when you hear incredibly bad news you're just like oh life is becoming jollier one that really cracked me up is as part of the Stalin cult like everything is named after Stalin which is you know noun imini Stalina and so it was discovered I think in Odessa in a factory or something there by the toilet sign it's like toilet imini Stalina I just I just find that very attractive and another one which was one of my favorite feats of translation I had help from David Brandenburger with this one someone's complaining about the reality of communism and co-ops and he says they build all these co-ops and they claim it's freedom but I don't think it's much of a commune if some can come on in but for others it communism and the Russian is like I mean you have so many I was really just blown away by the number that you collected thanks for that and finally so how does your focus on humor change our understanding of life under Stalin another big question what I felt like I was trying to do and find out was to challenge the idea that society was atomized I thought actually you know I look at the 30s it's kind of like a natural disaster we often think during times of national disaster that people turn on each other and it's all man is wolf to man but actually the sociology all shows that the vast majority of people help each other in the face of shared difficulties people draw together more closely they and by looking at everything through the lens of like whether you're a political dissident or not I don't think tells us a useful story but what part of the problem here is that in memoirs and in many of the sources we have people reported that oh yeah it's a society of maximum distrust and Pavlik Morozov who denounced his his father is that was real we couldn't trust anyone and yet in the same breath or interview or passage they're like my family was different my friends were different and there's just so many people who think that they are the exception to the rule they're not seeing the broader pattern that through acts like joke telling which is kind of a thermometer of can we trust each other or proving that we can trust each other can see that there is this sociability that's maybe fragmented but society isn't simply atomized and what I think I see in humor overall is that people are not brainwashed or terrified but it's also not just a gray zone where nothing makes sense in the jokes what I try to show is that people are trying to make sense of the world around them a lot of the jokes kind of function like proverbs to kind of sarcastically tell you what the reality of the world is the life is that you're living saying things like the quieter you are the further you'll go or there is no truth in private and no news and is there somewhere between a joke and just a bit of life advice so that you can try and understand the world around you so I kind of I said earlier a bit this is not a zero-sum game we're actually seeing a mixture of the interaction of the new and old the ideological and the lived realities where people are trying to weave it together and make it make sense both to meet their everyday requirements in a practical sense but also their emotional needs people are trying to find I don't call it a counterculture I say it's more like a counterpoint like in music where you're trying to find a different but pleasing melody that fits with the tune that you're trying to play and find some kind of harmony between the tune that they're expecting you to sing and the one that you are having to sing in your everyday realities that was john waterloo john received his phd in history at oxford and he's the author of it's only a joke comrade humor trust and everyday life under stalin 1929 1941 john's also the host of voices in the dark and you can find that by just searching voices in the dark on your favorite podcast app and as I'm sure you know my name is Sean Guillory Rusana will be back next week and this episode like all our episodes is edited mixed by Daniel Cooper at podcast editing check out Daniel he does some good stuff he's actually uh and I'll reveal this in the next couple of weeks a project I was working on with a friend and another colleague at Pitt and with some students so hopefully I'll be able to reveal that in like a month or so but he's doing that for me too he's mastering it and doing his magic so 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