Russian political jokes


Russian political jokes are a part of Russian humour and can be grouped into the major time periods: Imperial Russia, Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. In the Soviet period political jokes were a form of social protest, mocking and criticising leaders, the system and its ideology, myths and rites.
Quite a few political themes can be found among other standard categories of Russian joke, most notably Rabinovich jokes and Radio Yerevan.

Russian Empire

In Imperial Russia, most political jokes were of the polite variety that circulated in educated society. Few of the political jokes of the time are recorded, but some were printed in a 1904 German anthology.
  • A man was reported to have said: "Nikolay is a moron!" and was arrested by a policeman. "No, sir, I meant not our respected Tsar, but another Nikolay!" – "Don't try to trick me: if you say 'moron', you are obviously referring to our Tsar!"
  • A respected merchant, Sevenassov, wants to change his surname, and asks the Tsar for permission. The Tsar gives his decision in writing: "Permitted to subtract two asses".
There were also numerous politically themed Chastushki in Imperial Russia.
In Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, the fictional author of the "Foreword", Charles Kinbote, cites the following Russian joke:
  • A newspaper account of a Russian tsar's coronation had, instead of "korona", the misprint "vorona", and when next day this was apologetically 'corrected,' it got misprinted a second time as "korova".
He comments on the uncanny linguistic parallelism between the English-language "crown-crow-cow" and the Russian "korona–vorona–korova".

Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, telling political jokes could be regarded as a type of extreme sport: according to Article 58, "anti-Soviet propaganda" was a potentially capital offense.
  • A judge walks out of his chambers laughing his head off. A colleague approaches him and asks why he is laughing. "I just heard the funniest joke in the world!" "Well, go ahead, tell me!" says the other judge. "I can't - I just gave someone ten years for it!"
  • "Who built the White Sea Canal?" - “The left bank was built by those who told the jokes, and the right bank by those who listened.”
Ben Lewis claims that the political conditions in the Soviet Union were responsible for the unique humour produced there; according to him, "Communism was a humour-producing machine. Its economic theories and system of repression created inherently amusing situations. There were jokes under fascism and the Nazis too, but those systems did not create an absurd, laugh-a-minute reality like communism."

Early Soviet times

Jokes from these times have a certain historical value, depicting the character of the epoch almost as well as long novels might.
  • Midnight Petrograd... A Red Guards night watch spots a shadow trying to sneak by. "Stop! Who goes there? Documents!" The frightened person chaotically rummages through his pockets and drops a paper. The Guards chief picks it up and reads slowly, with difficulty: "U.ri.ne A.na.ly.sis"... "Hmm...a foreigner, sounds like..." "A spy, looks like.... Let's shoot him on the spot!" Then he reads further: Proteins: none, Sugars: none, Fats: none...' You are free to go, proletarian comrade! Long live the World revolution!"

    Communism

According to Marxist–Leninist theory, communism in the strict sense is the final stage of evolution of a society after it has passed through the socialism stage. The Soviet Union thus cast itself as a socialist country trying to build communism, which was supposed to be a classless society.
  • The principle of the state capitalism of the period of transition to communism: the authorities pretend they are paying wages, workers pretend they are working. Alternatively, "So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work." This joke persisted essentially unchanged through the 1980s.
Satirical verses and parodies made fun of official Soviet propaganda slogans.
Some jokes allude to notions long forgotten. These relics are still funny, but may look strange.

Gulag

  • "Three gulag inmates are telling each other what they’re in for. The first one says: 'I was five minutes late for work, and they charged me with sabotage.' The second says: 'For me it was just the opposite: I was five minutes early for work, and they charged me with espionage.' The third one says: 'I got to work right on time, and they charged me with harming the Soviet economy by acquiring a watch in a capitalist country.
  • Three men are sitting in a cell in Lubyanka prison. The first asks the second why he has been imprisoned, who replies, "Because I criticized Karl Radek." The first man responds, "But I am here because I spoke out in favor of Radek!" They turn to the third man who has been sitting quietly in the back, and ask him why he is in jail. He answers, "I'm Karl Radek."
  • "Lubyanka is the tallest building in Moscow. You can see Siberia from its basement."
  • [|Armenian Radio] was asked: "Is it true that conditions in our labor camps are excellent?" Armenian Radio answers: "It is true. Five years ago a listener of ours raised the same question and was sent to one, reportedly to investigate the issue. He hasn't returned yet; we are told that he liked it there."
  • "Comrade Brezhnev, is it true that you collect political jokes?" - "Yes" - "And how many have you collected so far?" - "Three and a half labor camps."
  • A new arrival to Gulag is asked: "What were you given ten years for?" - "For nothing!" - "Don't lie to us here, now! Everybody knows 'for nothing' is three years."

    Gulag Archipelago

's book The Gulag Archipelago has a chapter entitled "Zeks as a Nation", which is a mock ethnographic essay intended to "prove" that the inhabitants of the Gulag Archipelago constitute a separate nation according to "the only scientific definition of nation given by comrade Stalin". As part of this research, Solzhenitsyn analyzes the humor of zeks. Some examples:
  • "He was sentenced to three years, served five, and then he got lucky and was released ahead of time." In a similar vein, when someone asked for more of something, e.g. more boiled water in a cup, the typical retort was, "The prosecutor will give you more!"
  • "Is it hard to be in the gulag?" - "Only for the first ten years."
  • When the quarter-century term had become the standard sentence for contravening Article 58, the standard joke comment to the freshly sentenced was: "OK, now 25 years of life are guaranteed for you!"

    Censorship

Armenian Radio

or "Radio Yerevan" jokes have the format, "ask us whatever you want, we will answer you whatever we want". They supply snappy or ambiguous answers to questions on politics, commodities, the economy or other subjects that were taboo during the Communist era. Questions and answers from this fictitious radio station are known even outside Russia.

''Pravda'' and ''Izvestia''

From the 1960s until the early 1980s, the Soviet Union had only three newspapers: Pravda, Izvestia, and Krasnaya Zvezda. All three were controlled and censored by the government, leading Soviet citizens to joke: "There's no news in 'Truth', and there's no truth in 'News'.". Variant translations include: "In the Truth there is no news, and in the News there is no truth".

Political figures

  • Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev are all travelling together in a railway carriage. Unexpectedly, the train stops. Lenin suggests: "Perhaps we should announce a subbotnik, so that workers and peasants will fix the problem." Stalin puts his head out of the window and shouts, "If the train does not start moving, the driver will be shot!". But the train doesn't start moving. Khrushchev then shouts, "Let's take the rails from behind the train and use them to lay the tracks in front". But still the train doesn't move. Then Brezhnev says, "Comrades, Comrades, let's draw the curtains, turn on the gramophone and pretend we're moving!". A later continuation to this has Mikhail Gorbachev saying, "We were going the wrong way anyway!" and changing the train's direction, and Boris Yeltsin driving the train off the rails and through a field.

    Lenin

Jokes about Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917, typically made fun of characteristics popularized by propaganda: his supposed kindness, his love of children, his sharing nature, his kind eyes, etc. Accordingly, in jokes Lenin is often depicted as sneaky and hypocritical. A popular joke set-up is Lenin interacting with the head of the secret police, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, in the Smolny, the seat of the revolutionary communist government in Petrograd, or with khodoki, peasants who came to see Lenin.
  • During the famine of the civil war, a delegation of starving peasants comes to the Smolny with complaints. "We have even started eating grass like horses," says one peasant. "Soon we will start neighing like horses!" "Come now! Don't worry!" says Lenin reassuringly. "We are drinking tea with honey here, and we're not buzzing like bees, are we?"
  • : A kindergarten group is on a walk in a park, and they see a baby hare. These are city kids who have never seen a hare. "Do you know who this is?" asks the teacher. No one knows. "Come on, kids", says the teacher, "He's a character in many of the stories, songs and poems we are always reading." Finally one kid works out the answer, pats the hare and says reverently, "So that's what you're like, Grandpa Lenin!"
  • An artist is commissioned to create a painting celebrating Soviet–Polish friendship, to be called "Lenin in Poland." When the painting is unveiled at the Kremlin, there is a gasp from the invited guests; the painting depicts Nadezhda Krupskaya naked in bed with Leon Trotsky. One guest asks, "But this is a travesty! Where is Lenin?" To which the painter replies, "Lenin is in Poland".