Dan Snow's History Hit - Joking About Stalin

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

Jonathan Waterlow joined me on the podcast to explore how ordinary people used political jokes to cope with and make sense of their lives under Stalinism in the 1930s.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everyone and welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got a podcast about humour today. Luckily it doesn't involve many attempts by me to be funny. I'll leave that up to the heroic population of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s who had the nerve, who had the gall, the courage to make jokes about Stalin and the terror. This is such an interesting subject. It is Jonathan Waterloo, he's a historian of the Soviet Union and author of a new book about joking about Stalin. And we talked about some of those jokes and tried to work out whether humour is as subversive as people think it is. I mean, at the end of the day, people might have been laughing at Stalin, but I think he had the last laugh. For more podcasts about Stalin, the Soviet

Union, in fact, all of Recorded History, please go to History Hit TV. It's a new digital history channel with audio and video. You can go on there, you can look up Soviet history, Russian history, you can do all sorts of things, and you'll have a plethora of things to watch and things to listen to. So go and check it out. If you use the code POD1, don't forget P-O-D-1, you will get a month for free, and your second month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. In the meantime, everyone, let's tell some jokes about Stalin. In the meantime, everyone, let's tell some jokes about Stalin. John, thank you very much for coming on the pod.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. How did you get the idea to write a book about people making jokes about Stalin? Where did that come from? I think it was just the sheer paradox of it, because immediately we think, how could that be? That doesn't sound right whatsoever. Surely the risk would be too great and people wouldn't do that. And yet when I was an undergrad and after that, I kept coming across these little bits of like creative seasoning in the books about popular opinion. They would say, oh, and this joke was told and then they'd move on. And I thought, wait a minute, this doesn't fit with anything I think I know about this. And it seems that very often we still think of the people must have either

been silent dissidents hating the regime, or they must have been brainwashed into loving Big Brother. And that didn't make much sense, because I don't know where in the world you could find a population that either 100% believes or 100% disbelieves in the regime and the life they're in, because then life is going to be intolerable. And jokes seem to be a way in which they were talking about that. And I wanted to know, okay, so how did they make sense of their lives? And maybe jokes would be a way in. There would also be a lot more fun than statistics or figures and things like that. Where do you find these jokes? Where are they preserved?

I mean, that was the difficult starting point, because I knew the jokes were there. I mean, even by the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was getting the CIA to collect Soviet jokes and was retelling them. And you can see him do that saved on YouTube now. And there's all these collections out there that are just kind of folklore anthologies. So the jokes are there. But if you want to use them as a historical source and know who said it, when and to whom, you need to go a bit deeper. So a lot, unfortunately, in some ways, a lot of the ways that I got to these jokes was to look at criminal records. And it's possible to see that people were being put away under perhaps the most notorious part of the Soviet

criminal code, Article 5810, which is the code that Solzhenitsyn was put away for and other dissidents. But joke tellers were too. And then in these criminal records, I'm able to go through, see the words usually that people were put away for. Also, because the state had closed off every kind of public venue for saying and sharing what they thought, the state became really interested in knowing

what are the people thinking? We need to know, what are they responding to? What are they upset about? And so they start compiling right down to the local workplace level, these little summaries of what are people saying. And they're worried about jokes because they take themselves very, very seriously. So jokes pretty much always make it into the reports, even though they just see it as straightforward signs of being an enemy of some kind. Why are jokes so dangerous? See, I don't think jokes necessarily are that dangerous,

but I think you're totally right that the people who are in positions of power, especially if they want total power, think that they're dangerous. I think they take themselves very seriously and they fear that if they become laughable, they'll lose all their power as if suddenly their secret police or military might becomes irrelevant. Maybe they just want the people to genuinely fall into step with this beautiful vision in their minds that they've created. But I think another aspect is that often, say in the Bolshevik case for certain,

they saw humour as a political weapon that had helped them get into power in the first place, be it satirical magazines which made fun of the Tsar or spread malicious gossip about Rasputin and the Tsarina. And in the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the anecdote, which is essentially the Russian word for joke, but usually political, is defined essentially as a political weapon, which gains particular significance during times of revolutionary struggle. So after they've seized power, they see this, the proliferation still of political jokes as a sign. It's as if, I think, one of the

first commissar of enlightenment says something like, just as we wouldn't want machine guns to be lying around in the streets for people to pick up and use, we don't want this sort of material going around either. First of all, we talk, why was joking necessary? Just give me the headlines about what modern scholars like you think Stalin did to his own population in the period we're talking about? Well, I'm looking at the 1930s, which is Stalinism before the war and where it's gaining his full ascendancy as the dictator. And in this time, it's a fascinatingly contradictory and intense period where there's this incredible vision of the future being proposed. And they're saying we need to industrialize, we need to collectivize agriculture, everything has to be planned from above. But this is going to create essentially a utopia of equality for everybody.

So let's go for it, which many people buy into and think this could be fantastic. And they are prepared to sacrifice and live in times of hardship to get there. fantastic and they're prepared to sacrifice and live in times of hardship to get there. But it becomes increasingly clear that they're not getting many benefits and an awful lot of repression is being used for the slightest dissidence or complaint. So whilst we have all that promise on one side, as the 30s progress, we see increasing levels of repression where an idle word could spell disaster. You could be arrested. You could be torn from your family and sent to the gulag. You could be put in prison. You could even be executed at the time of the Great Terror, as it's called, in 1937 to 38. So people are living with this promise, this grand soaring rhetoric on the one hand,

and then every day they go out into this grim reality where increasingly they can't say what they think. They're being forced to work incredibly hard. There's very limited living space for anybody. You'd be lucky in the 30s if you could call the corner, a corner of a room, your own for you and your family. And it's this kind of disparity that almost calls for a joke. We're being told we're living in utopia, and yet here I am crouched in the corner, huddling with my family, knowing that I can't speak my mind.

Why do we humans, all the research you've done, do you just see a sort of human desire to try and make sense of it through humour? Why do you think we do that? I think it is something innately human. And humour is something that is so innate and yet so difficult to pin down, because it's constantly playing with ideas, playing with perceptions of reality, that we can go back, well, we can go before Cicero, but for example, Cicero is like, well, I need to describe humor, but frankly, I can't do it, but that's no shameful thing because nobody really can. And all the great philosophers seem at some point or other to have thought about this. Wittgenstein said something like, it would be

possible to write a fantastic philosophical work composed solely of jokes because it shows how we think why we think and so on gallows humor you pick out is is really fascinating and there's a lot of psychological literature on this that explores it why is it when we're faced with something dark and scary we turn to a joke and i think some of the best understandings are interpretation so that it helps us take the edge off. It helps us take something we have no control over and allows us to feel superior for a moment. If you can laugh at something, you're not feeling as crushed by it. You laugh at the elephant in the room rather than being trampled underneath it. And it allows us, it's a little bit like a placebo that it doesn't change the objective scenario that you're in, but it allows you to subjectively feel better about it.

And it's also inherently social. I mean, maybe we tell some jokes and laugh about them to ourselves, but mostly we're sharing them with other people. So we gain this sort of mutual reassurance by saying, well, here's what I think of this. Other people laugh. We feel like we've created a new version of reality, even if just for a moment, that lets us move through it. In our current times, there's an awful lot of jokes and memes about coronavirus, for example, which I think are fulfilling some of the same purpose. There's nothing we can do about it, really. And so we turn to humour as a means of coping and making a kind of absurd sense of it.

How did jokes spread before the internet, particularly in a world where these jokes were not allowed on any kind of mass media devices? Was it just word of mouth? Yeah, I mean, this is oral culture alive and well. What's fascinating, I think, is that it's, like I said, it's innately human. So we can see, say, later after the 30s, when there's a larger Soviet bloc, the same jokes are appearing in all of these different countries kind of independently, that when you're faced with the same circumstances, and you're trying to make sense of them as best you can, we seem to come up with similar kinds of ways to make fun of it, to joke about it. But under Stalin, it's much more dangerous to do so. So to tell a joke actually becomes

a really serious statement, which is, I trust you enough that I'm going to share this with you, knowing that you could denounce me. And so it's then not simply just to make fun of circumstances, but it can be an incredible bonding process, where if you and I form this relationship where we can speak freely, tell jokes, we're drawn together because we could both denounce each other. And this forges this powerful intimacy between people. Are you able to trace jokes? I mean, are there some jokes that seem to originate in the Crimea and end up in Leningrad? Like, how does that work? It's really difficult to do that. Folklorists who look at this from a different perspective than a historian really kind of get off on doing this, actually. And they take like a Stalin joke and go, look, there's roots of this back in Byzantium.

And I think that's kind of fun to do, but there's no way you could prove that. And unfortunately, maybe on the internet, we're more able to go what linked to what, where did this happen first and see a timeline created by Google or something like that. But I think that people come up with similar jokes that originate in different places,

some of which become classics, some of which become particularly memorable. But I think it's pretty much impossible to go right back to the origin and say, this is the first person who said this. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen

to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week tell me about some jokes which a might be funny because i'm guessing jokes have got to be a time and a place but that you feel really get to the root of this sort of describing understanding this period i think you hit on something really important there the jokes rely on on context in many ways so i'm often uh presented with the issue of like how do i present one of these jokes without needing to give an awful lot of backstory? So I'll try and go for some of the more accessible ones. So Stalin was out swimming one day and he begins to struggle, begins to drown in the river.

And there's a peasant passing by and sees this figure splashing around, jumps in, pulls him to shore. Stalin is incredibly grateful. He's like, oh, thank you. Thank you. I'll give you anything. You've saved the leader of the people. And then the peasant realises that it's Stalin that he's saved. And he's like, no, no, no, no, please. I don't want anything. Just don't tell anyone else that it was me that saved you. Very good. Like that. Well, that works. To be honest,

can imagine that joke making the round today about our political leaders as well. That feels a bit universal. Hit me with some other ones. I like a lot of the jokes that are the more sort of subtle everyday kind of thing where people hang the portraits of the leaders in the toilets, or they start graffitiing the newspapers and changing the T in Stalin to an R. So instead of his name being the Man of Steel, he becomes the man of shit. And they just bring him right down in that way. There's also little poems that they throw around to describe the five-year plan, this industrialization drive, and they're back-to-back five-year plans. It never stops. And so they tell these little poems like bread gone, meat gone, the five-year plan is 10 years long, which is grim, but they tell it as a joke, which tells

us something about, you know, what are they trying to cope with? What are they trying to make sense of in this time? And what's funny to them? When the Leningrad party boss, Kirov, was assassinated by a lone gunman, there was meant to be this enormous state of mourning across the whole of the Soviet Union and in Leningrad in particular. But it turns into a kind of carnival for many ordinary Soviet people who get a day off work, the canteens especially stocked, and they start trying to have parties. They don't seem to understand that they're meant to feel sad about it. So there's a five minute silence going on. And people try and make as much noise as possible and

set off the fire alarm so that they get to go outside earlier on. So there's a lot to humour just beyond the call and response kind of jokes where people are putting on this kind of subversive carnival almost all the time. Are there pro-starling jokes in this period? Have you ever found one? I don't think I have, but then maybe those wouldn't have been reported, right, in the same places. I think later you can get almost affectionate jokes about Stalin. Say under Putin today there, I think, I'll try and remember it right, there's a joke that's been recycled from the Soviet period where the ghost of Stalin visits Putin and says, okay, I'm going to tell you what you need to do to get the people on your side.

You need to do an enormous number of arrests and you need to paint the Kremlin blue. And Putin says, why should I paint the Kremlin blue? And Stalin says, I knew that was the one you were going to ask about. So maybe Stalin in that way is like this sort of old man of history comes along and it's not so negative. But usually, if there is someone who seems to be held up as a good example, Lenin becomes that under Stalin very often, that there'll be jokes of one of the most common ones I came across was, why did Lenin always wear shoes? He wore proper shoes, but Stalin wears these jackboots. And the answer is, well, Lenin tried to avoid obstacles. Stalin just walks right into them. So they have this sort of

affection for the previous leader and he becomes this sort of nice reference point where they're like, no, no, no, compared to Stalin, Lenin was the man. You mention in the book that young people faced denunciation for repeating these jokes. I mean, some of the jokes that you have just told me would have landed you up in deep shit in the 1930s in Russia. That's right. The most common sentence that I saw looking at these criminal files was 10 years in a forced labour camp. That was the price that people were possibly going to pay.

And yet, what's strange about it, or really unsettling about it, is that they use, the regime use retroactive justice. So if in 1932-33, before we're in the time of mass arrests and summary executions, say you and I shared a joke, which was kind of off colour, a bit on the line, and so on, but nothing really happened. We judged right that it wasn't going to be a disaster to share that. But then five years later, as the terror is in full swing, people remember that we said that and they're looking for possible enemies in any sign of them.

That could be the grounds to then be put away. It's as if you were a tennis player or something like that, very successful, hit a lot of shots perfectly on the line. And then the new rules come in and they're like, I'm sorry, your entire back catalogue of games is to be judged on this much smaller court we've introduced. Everything is out. You're in trouble. And now you mentioned Putin and modern Russia. Do you see important and interesting parallels with the present here? I do in some ways and not in others. I think that I've heard recently, I was speaking to a journalist about this, that there is an increasing rise again of political jokes like the ones in the

Soviet Union aimed at Putin, I think after the increasing election scandals and so on. So people turn to it as this important means of coping, talking about and not taking seriously the propaganda and the cult of personality around Putin. And yet, for most of them, the stakes are much lower. So I think it's less powerful as this socially binding force, and they do have more spaces to speak openly. What people often seem to think, both historians and political scientists, and maybe we just think intuitively, that when these jokes that the regimes tend to, these authoritarian regimes find so threatening, these jokes must surely be a sign

of resistance, of people desperate to overthrow the current circumstances, the current leaders, and change it. And yet what I seem to find over and over again is that it's really the people are trying to cope. And when there is a genuine push to try and overthrow a system, the jokes really aren't center stage. I think the jokes can erode a sense of the legitimacy of the power, but they're not this, they're not the weapon that the Bolsheviks feared that it would be that does serious damage to the rulers. George Orwell said that every joke is a tiny revolution. But I think that for most people, it's not that. They're not trying to have a revolution, however small.

They're trying to say, I exist. I joke, therefore I am. We share this joke. We exist. We're not brainwashed. We're not foolish. We're going to prove this to ourselves. And then we're probably just going to get back to work

because we have bills to pay. We have our families to look after. And so jokes today about Putin, it's interesting that they're very similar, but I think we shouldn't start reading this as a sign of a massive upswell of revolutionary proportions. Yeah, I guess. And also, let's be honest, joking didn't get the Soviet population that far under Stalin. I mean, so the irony is, as you say at the beginning, jokes aren't that dangerous, really, because we've joked about dictators and it weren't jokes that brought them down in the end. No, I mean, the Berlin Wall didn't fall because of jokes. It was because of David Hasselhoff, as we know.

But that's the thing. That's the story that tends to be told. So I think that a few people have done some documentaries about this, about modern satire, even in Britain. There's the idea that, you know, sitting down and watching Have I Got News For You is therefore some sort of rebellious act. But clearly it's not. Like, we then enjoy feeling a bit superior to the latest things that happen in the government. But then what do we do? We don't do anything revolutionary after this, but it's a way of coping. It's more a means that authoritarian regimes really ought to encourage space for humour, I think, because it allows people in the end mostly to keep calm and carry on.

Now that's true subversive. So jokes are actually a pressure release valve. I think they are. I think that what I found most interesting beyond that in the Stalin period was, as I was saying to you, that it could forge these important bonds of trust. People were trying to work out, we're not the people in power, so who are we? And they would tell jokes like little rhymes like stars to the Stakhanovites, awards to the cadets, money to the Bolsheviks, and an FU to the rest. And the rest is us, you know, the joke tellers. One of the most noticeable things about the jokes at this period is that the targets are often not Stalin and not the leadership. They're the

ordinary people who are suffering when they tell jokes like there are, in the Soviet Union, the population is made up of millions of enemies and only one friend of the people, meaning Stalin. Everyone else, they're possibly on the line right there. Or they say there's only, living in the Soviet Union is like being on a tram.

Half are sitting, which in Russian is like sitting in prison doing time. Half are being on a tram half are sitting which in russian is like sitting in prison doing time half are sitting and the other half are shaking in fear that the arrest is going to come so it's almost like a schadenfreude at themselves they laugh at their suffering it has things in common with a lot of traditional jewish humor i think in a lot of ways that the jokes are incredibly funny and powerful, and yet usually it's laughing at the awful circumstance that they're currently coping with in different points in history. So true. What a fascinating topic.

Thank you so much for sharing it with us. What is the name of your book? It's called It's Only a Joke, Comrade, Humour, Trust and Everyday Life Under Stalin. Well, thank you very much for talking about it on this podcast today. Good luck with it. Thanks very much. Thanks for chatting with me about it. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when

other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and a it. It really helps basically boost up the chart, which is good. And then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't subscribe to my TV channel, I understand if you don't buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favor. Thanks.