Political Humour

The Greeks had their myths, the Elizabethans had their plays. In the postwar period, pop music defined western culture in Britain and America. The communists had political jokes. Of course there was every other kind of imaginative activity under communism – films, rock, punk and classical music, plays and novels ... And of course the communists told the usual gamut of jokes – including ones about sex, stupid people and racial minorities. Yet political jokes were the dominant form.

“Anecdotes were our way of speaking the truth,” Gulag survivor Simon Vilensky told me. “I met people in the camps arrested for just listening to anecdotes.”

“You can tell the whole history of communism in jokes,” said another Gulag prisoner, Lazar Shereshevsky.

“Every day there was a new joke. No one knew where they came from or who invented them, but everyone told them,” explained Ernst Rohl, whose sense of humour earned him half a year in solitary confinement in 1961.

Tickled pink: The history of communism in gags
There are relatively few jokes from the first decade of the Revolution but this is my favourite:
An old peasant woman is visiting Moscow zoo, when she sets eyes on a camel for the first time. “Oh my God,” she says, “look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse.”

Between 1917 and 1921 nationalised businesses were supervised by a bureaucracy that quadrupled in size to 2.4m employees:
An inspector is at a factory conducting an inspection. He addresses one worker: “What do you do here?”
“Nothing.”
“And what do you do here?” he asks another.
“Nothing.”
He writes in his report: “The second worker may be released for unnecessary duplication.”


In 1921 the New Economic Policy reallowed some private enterprise. Soviet industrial and agricultural output crawled back to the level it had been at before 1917:
A Party worker is trying to explain what Communism will be like: “There will be plenty of everything – food, clothing, all kinds of merchandise. You will be able to travel abroad.”
“Oh,” says an old woman, “just like under the Tsar.”

Following Marx’s description of the evolution of communism, Lenin, Stalin and their successors developed a present-tense narrative in which the Soviet Union was always progressing towards “full communism”.
Daddy, have we achieved full communism or are things going to get a lot worse?

Hungarian and Czechs shared a similar joke:
How do the Russians visit their friends?
In tanks.

In 1966 the average age of the Politburo had been 58, but it was 70 in 1981:
What has 40 teeth and four legs?
A crocodile.
What has four teeth and 40 legs?
The Central Committee of the Communist Party.

The government of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics has announced with great regret that, following a long illness and without regaining consciousness, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the President of the highest Soviet, Comrade Leonid Brezhnev, has resumed his governmental duties

In 1995 Gorbachev told a joke on the BBC. He was appearing on the Clive James Show to promote his autobiography. With the help of an interpreter he remembered a joke:
There is a line queuing to buy vodka in Moscow; it is two or three kilometres long and the men are really blaming Gorbachev.
One of them says, “I will go to the Kremlin and kill Gorbachev,” and he goes. An hour later he comes back. The line has moved on a bit but it is still far from its goal, so they ask him: “Did you kill Gorbachev?”
He says, “No, there is a longer queue over there.”
Jokes were not confined to opponents of the regime. The apparatchiks loved them too. Günter Schabowski, an East German newspaper editor and Politburo member, told me: “At the paper Neues Deutschland we told each other jokes in the canteen. We weren’t blind to the failings of the system, but we convinced ourselves that this was only because it was early days and the class enemy was perpetrating sabotage wherever he could. One day, we thought, all problems would be solved and there wouldn’t be any more jokes because there wouldn’t be anything left to joke about.”

I first fell in love with the communist joke on Bulevard Dimitri Cantemir, one of the epic avenues of monolithic apartment blocks that were built in Bucharest in the 1970s. I was talking to Doina Doru, a beautiful blonde woman in her 50s, who had worked as a proofreader for one of the state newspapers when Ceausescu ruled communist Romania.

A colleague introduced me to Doina. I was in the city making a television programme about Ceausescu’s propaganda. I had spent weeks in the film archive surrounded by piles of rusting 35mm film canisters, looking through footage of the shows the regime staged to celebrate its own importance. I watched hundreds of factory workers, filling the stands around a stadium, holding up coloured cards, which would form a gigantic jigsaw revealing one minute a tractor ploughing a field and the next a picture of the dictator’s wife in a lab coat. On some days, I would traipse round Bucharest meeting former artists and poets who’d eulogised the incompetent Romanian despot in their work, and try to persuade them – usually unsuccessfully – to go on camera. “We used to tell a lot of jokes,” my Romanian friends would say to me; “Doina remembers them all.” And, after all the propaganda reels, the jokes seemed like the perfect antidote.

Doina sat in her tiny flat and tried to evoke what Romania had been like in the 1980s for me, who had been growing up in a detached red-brick house in Hampstead Garden Suburb at the time. She recited a list of the shortages in communist economies in their death throes: no meat, no make-up, no toilet paper, no tampons, no heating. My mind dulled as I heard these familiar historical facts. Then she said: “We used to have this joke back then: What is colder in Romania than the cold water? The hot water.”

That was funny. We laughed a particular laugh – the chuckle at unhappy truth which lies at the source of all gallows humour. Doina’s hot water is still my favourite communist joke – as simple, beautiful and true as a Japanese haiku. “We had so many jokes back then,” she continued; “I think they were tiny masterpieces, some of them.

“There was another joke that was almost true – true to life. Ceausescu is very angry because he is not hearing any jokes about him. So he orders a huge mass meeting, and he announces, ‘From now on you are going to work without pay.’ And nobody says anything. ‘Okay,’ he continues, ‘and from now on you are all going to work for me.’ Nobody says anything. ‘Tomorrow everybody is condemned to death by hanging,’ he adds. Nobody says anything. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘are you crazy? Don’t you people have anything to say? Aren’t you going to protest?’ There’s one tiny guy who says, ‘Mr President, I have a question: do we bring our own rope or is the trade union going to give it to us?’ So that was the situation. He was hanging us and we were asking if we should supply our own rope. The situation was so desperate that this kind of joke was reflecting our reality. They were always like this.

“Why, went another Romanian communist joke, did Ceausescu hold a mass rally on the first of May? To see how many people had survived the winter.”

At this historical distance not all of the jokes were funny, but I found I liked the ones that weren’t as much as the ones that were. What mattered most wasn’t the jokes themselves; it was how the people who told them felt about them. Millions considered the jokes an act of rebellion. Doina insisted that joke-telling was “dangerous – you could go to prison for it”.

Doina’s stories were not as horrifying as I had hoped, but the disappointment did not deter me. “Sociologically speaking,” Doina said, assuming a momentary intellectual air, “these jokes were a state of mind and they represented a reaction of a segment of the population to something. So I think they did change something. They changed something in people. The jokes gave them courage.”

In 1934 the First Congress of Soviet Writers was held in the grand Hall of Columns, an 18th-century palace that the Bolsheviks had given to the trade unions. The hall was decorated for the occasion with enormous portraits of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Gogol, Cervantes, Heine, Pushkin and Balzac; every important Soviet writer of the era attended the Congress: Maxim Gorky, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Zoschenko, Karl Radek, Isaac Babel included in their number.

Also among the delegates was Mikhail Kol’tsov, one of the leading Bolshevik journalists of the day, a member of Pravda’s editorial board and the founder of several satirical magazines, including, in 1922, Krokodil.

Kol’tsov was a powerful pro-regime satirist, although today we would describe his style as invective. His bullying columns slavishly followed the party line. But now rivals wanted to sideline the Pravda editor, and they targeted his sense of humour. As he walked towards the podium, Kol’tsov was about to defend the value of satire, not because he believed in freedom of the press but because this genre of writing was the source of his political power.

On the stand at the Writers’ Congress of 1934 Kol’tsov repeated the contorted counter-arguments that had been presented in the past decade. Even if one day, when the system was perfect, he conceded, there would be no need for laughter, there was still a place for it now. Even if the satire took the same forms as old-fashioned Tsarist humour, that was no reason to see it as reactionary. Since the working class were, according to Marxist-Leninist theory, the last class before the arrival of a classless society, their laughter was acceptable because, Kol’tsov said ingeniously, “In the history of the class struggle, the working class will have the last laugh.”

Humour offered the early communists the same philosophical conundrums that every other area of culture offered: what belonged to yesterday and what to tomorrow? Many argued that humour could be used to ridicule the old bourgeois habits that persisted ... But, said others, given that the Soviets were creating a perfect world, there would soon be nothing left to laugh at in Russian politics or society ... No, said others with equal gravity: the liberation of the working classes meant that finally the masses could take control of the language of humour that used to be the preserve of the elite ... No, not quite, a third group of straight-faced critics theorised comically, there would still be laughter under communism, but the new society would invent an entirely new sense of humour.

Kol’tsov would shortly leave for Spain, where he would report on the civil war. Other Congress delegates, among them the Soviet writer Panteleimon Romanov, won the day with a new theory of the future of laughter:

“I would like to express the wish that by the end of the third Five-Year Plan the need for satire will have disappeared in the Soviet Union,” said Romanov, “leaving only a great need for humour, for cheerful laughter.” The Soviet state would inculcate in the “New Man” of communism, a new sense of humour.

“In the land of the Soviets,” continued Romanov, “a new type of comedy is being created – a comedy of positive heroes. A comedy that does not mock its heroes but depicts them so cheerfully, emphasises their positive qualities with such love and sympathy that the laughter of the audience is joyful and the members of the audience want to emulate the heroes of the comedy, to tackle life’s problems with equal ease and optimism...”

By the time of the Congress the outpouring of independent political comic writing in Russia of the 1920s had been brought to a close – its magazines closed and its writers silenced. On his return from Spain in 1939, Kol’tsov was arrested by Stalin and executed in 1940.

Significant arrests for joke-telling probably began in 1933, when “anekdot-telling” is first described as an anti-Soviet activity in the proceedings of the Communist Party at the Central Committee Plenum of January 1933. Matvei Shkiriatov, a Stalinist zealot and future member of the Central Committee, gave a speech which presaged the purges of the Great Terror, warning of “those within our ranks who ... go about clandestinely organising operations against the party”. Among the activities of these unwelcome communists he declared: “I would like to speak of one other anti-Party method of operation, namely, the so-called jokes [anekdoty]. What are these jokes? Who among us Bolsheviks does not know how we fought against Tsarism in the old days, how we told jokes in order to undermine the authority of the existing system? ... [Now] this has also been employed as a keen weapon against the Central Committee of the party.”

As the arrests began, the joke-tellers imagined the following scenario:

A clerk hears laughing behind the door of a courtroom. He opens the door. At the other end of the room the judge is sitting on the podium convulsed in laughter.

“What’s so funny?” asks the clerk.

“I’ve just heard the funniest joke of my life,” says the judge.

“Tell it to me.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just sentenced someone to five years’ hard labour for doing that.”

This is an edited extract from ‘Hammer & Tickle’, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£14.99). To buy it for the special price of £11.99 plus postage and packaging please call the FT Bookshop on +44 (0)870 429 5884; www.ft.com/bookshop