It’s only a joke, comrade! Why even Stalin couldn’t kill the political quip

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, one wrong word could spell disaster. Even a harmless joke could lead to the secret police hammering on doors in the middle of the night, confiscating the occupants’ possessions and hauling them off to the cells. There, these unlucky joke-tellers would face violent and often days-long interrogation by NKVD officers determined to transform an off-the-cuff remark into evidence of a counterrevolutionary conspiracy.

David Sigua, a young doctor, told the following joke in the canteen of the clinic where he worked:

Sigua was denounced, arrested, and sentenced to eight years in a forced labour camp. Harsh as this was, his fate was not unusual: the Gulag system held countless more like him.

Nevertheless, diaries, memoirs and even the records typed up by stony-faced bureaucrats reveal that, like flowers pushing their way through concrete, laughter could never wholly be suppressed.

If the regime promised a glittering future of abundance to be achieved through five-year plans, the population responded with a song:

If the Soviet media crafted a cult of personality for Stalin which tried to place him beyond criticism, some ordinary citizens hung his portrait in the toilets, mocked his heavy Georgian accent, or replaced the “t” in his name with an “r”, making him “Sralin” – not the “Man of Steel”, but the “Man of Shit”.

While the newspapers raved about Bolshevik achievements, most people had to wait in line for hours each day just to receive basic rations. As one joke ran: “How’s life?”, with the caustic reply, “Like Lenin – unfed and unburied”. Another turned the chronic food shortages into a mock victory for socialism: “Two people argue over who is the greater leader, President Hoover or Comrade Stalin. One says ‘Hoover taught the Americans not to drink.’ The other responds, ‘That’s nothing – Stalin taught the Russians not to eat!’”

Food was not the only thing in short supply. Eugene Lyons, a foreign correspondent who lived in Moscow in the early 1930s, heard another joke about a group of peasants complaining they barely had anything to wear. A Soviet official reassures them, “You put too much emphasis on clothes, comrades. Take the Hottentots and other Africans. They are perfectly happy and they wear nothing but loin-cloths”. One of the peasants immediately responds, “I suppose, comrade, that these Africans must have had socialism far longer than us!”

Jokes like these provided vital oxygen in a life of stifling conformity and grinding poverty, but, like authoritarians everywhere, the Soviets cracked down on humour because they considered it a form of unacceptable resistance to their new world order. The Bolsheviks had themselves used humour with the intention of undermining the old regime, supporting and distributing satirical pamphlets that mocked the tsarist system by sharing anekdoty, or political jokes, which, as the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia explained, were “a special kind of weapon for political struggle.”

But after their dramatic seizure of power in 1917, the Bolsheviks struggled to force the genie back into the bottle. In 1921, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Commissar of Enlightenment, summed up the dilemma: “Words are weapons,” he said, so “just as the revolutionary government cannot tolerate everybody running around with handguns and machine guns […] the state cannot tolerate freedom of printed propaganda.” By the 1930s, this approach had expanded to include any joke aimed at the regime. As a delegate at the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress summed up, the task of Soviet comedy was not only to “kill” enemies with laughter, but to “correct with laughter” those loyal to the regime. Any other, unauthorised use of political humour had now become “anti-Soviet agitation” and was punished under Article 58-10 of the criminal code – the notorious legislation used to silence the regime’s enemies, real or imagined. As a result, during Stalin’s reign, for anyone except the regime’s chosen and carefully-controlled satirists, a single political joke was treated like an act of terrorism.

Even true believers could fall victim to this paranoia. Card-carrying Communists also shared anekdoty to vent their frustration with a government that constantly fell short of its glittering promises. In early 1934, Paraskovaya Pomelova, a Party member in her late 20s, shared a popular joke with one of her colleagues:

Pomelova was arrested at the height of Stalin’s purges and barely escaped a firing squad. But was she truly being disloyal to the Soviet cause by mocking “The Boss”?

After all, the Bolsheviks were demanding the impossible: they wanted absolute conformity to a party line that endlessly contradicted itself, and was increasingly spiralling into outright paranoia, seeing “hidden enemies” in every shadow. Pomelova was no fifth columnist – she was simply another victim of a puritanical ideology which had begun to cannibalise itself (in fact, just a year after Pomelova appeared in court, the judge who convicted her was himself sentenced to 25 years in the gulag).

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this purity spiral was the regime’s use of retroactive justice. Just as modern zealots comb through tweets from 10 years ago, the NKVD and its network of informants scoured their information reports to find jokes and wry comments that a few years ago had been no more than dicey, but were now reinterpreted as the tell-tale sign of a hidden enemy. Pomelova told her joke about Stalin’s swimming expedition in 1934, but she was only arrested for it in 1937, when the mass arrests of the Great Terror reached their peak.

But in their frenzied scramble to uncover imagined conspiracies, the Soviet authorities failed to appreciate how useful political humour was for them. Because telling jokes could provide temporary relief from the pressures of daily life, even the most caustic humour actually helped ordinary people do precisely what the regime wanted: to keep calm and carry on.

Like many of us today, the Soviets misunderstood what humour is and what it actually does for the people who share it. To joke about something is not the same as condemning or endorsing it. More often, humour helps us test out opinions and ideas, recover a sense of autonomy, and avoid feelings of isolation, fear, or loneliness.

More importantly, when we look at political humour under Stalin, we find that the jokes’ targets were often the joke-tellers themselves. When ordinary people sarcastically repeated propaganda slogans like “Life has become better, comrades!” when they heard bad news, or celebrated Stalin for teaching them “not to eat”, they were taking the edge off their suffering by treating it as something laughable. They were, as we all do, using humour to share the burden of difficult circumstances, and make fun of the elephant in the room, rather than being trampled beneath it.

Jonathan Waterlow is the author of It’s Only a Joke, Comrade! Humour, Trust and Everyday Life under Stalin. The book is available to buy here.