In response, Russians made vicious fun of their self-important
rulers by using Aesopean language or making up political jokes which were told
and retold in private and spread to every corner of their enormous country.
Political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky suggested recently – as
a joke, naturally – that the Russian people should be collectively awarded a
Nobel prize for literature for their brilliant, sharp and often surreal political
anekdoty.
In the early 1980s, a friend once button-holed a Princeton
Slavic languages professor at a party and told him how he thought Soviet
political jokes could be used to assess public opinion behind the Iron Curtain.
By the end of the evening the professor was urging him to apply to his Ph.D
program, and my friend was even invited to Langley to consult CIA intelligence
analysts.
They say that a nation that has preserved its ability to laugh
can never be defeated.
By this measure, the Russians should be unsinkable. Political
satire flourished in the USSR even though it became quite dangerous to laugh.
The communists demanded not only obedience and compliance but active,
enthusiastic participation in all aspects of public life. They were murdering
you, but you were required to be grateful to them, too.
By claiming authority over the private sphere, the Soviet
government greatly broadened the boundaries of what could be viewed as
political humor.
In essence, Zoshchenko’s extremely funny Everyman monologues
and Yerofeyev’s drunken journey from Moscow to the town of Petushki – via
various liquor stores – became satirical broadsides against communist ideals
and practices.
But there was more to it than that. Humorous works about life
in the Soviet Union in general were far more popular during the Soviet era than
its more serious critics. It can be attested even now by the enduring
popularity of Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita and Heart of the Dog,
as well as the works of Dovlatov.
In the Internet and social media era of the early 21st century,
the gradual tightening of the screws by the Putin regime and the return to many
late Soviet practices have been greeted by a huge outburst of political humor.
Political jokes have been largely replaced by memes, hashtags, pictures with
funny captions, drawings and doggerel appearing on Facebook and Twitter.
After the popular protests in Moscow in late 2011 and early
2012 contests were held for the funniest protest sign.
Laughter, it turns out, is something oppressed cultures have in
common with each other – including jokes at the expense of the oppressors.
African Americans, Jews and the Irish all have a rich comic tradition which
endures to this day even though they are no longer oppressed or openly discriminated
against.
Moreover, while the Soviets and other totalitarian regimes
tended to lash out against satirists, many other oppressors often encouraged
the oppressed to be funny. The truth is that laughter is innocuous. For all the
happy end of Hans Christian Andersen’s King’s
New Clothes, in real life no tyrant has ever been laughed out of power.
Freedom is a serious business and you can’t clown your way to
it.
The Irish achieved national independence when they began to
fight and die for it. The funny sarcastic shtetl characters from Shalom
Aleichem’s stories all perished in the gas chambers; those who survived took up
arms in Palestine and fought all comers for their small chunk of land. In the
United States, African Americans showed their determination to brave redneck
violence and police dogs during the Civil Rights era, and that was how they
gained equality and got rid of Jim Crow laws.
Two years ago, it was the turn of the Ukrainians to get
serious. True, there was plenty of laughter at Viktor Yanukovych’s expense, but
he didn’t take to his heels because he had been nicknamed The Vegetable. He ran
away because the people came down into the streets and refused to leave despite
being charged by the police and shot at by snipers.
We may admire the spirit of “Charlie Hebdo” cartoonists and
their determination to laugh at everything, including their own murders, but
their laughter is not an effective way to counter a mass movement that seeks to
plunge the world into the Middle Ages.
Russia had its share of political humor in its 19th century’s
literature, such as Pushkin’s biting epigrams about Czar Alexander I, the early
surrealist pranks of Kozma Prutkov and wounding satire of Gogol and
Saltykov-Shchedrin. But when the going got serious its popular culture came to
be dominated by writers who wrote about serious things without a hint of
levity, like Nekrasov and Gorky. For better or worse, the guys who took their
causes and themselves seriously were the ones who brought down the Russian
Empire.
Humorous opposition to tyrants is more fun, but it also tends
to be impotent. Laughing at the stupidity, avarice and ignorance of the Putin
government may be very satisfying but it presents no threat at all to the
regime itself.
To paraphrase that old saying, the nation that laughs at its
tyrants will never be defeated -but it will never be free, either.
