"For us, KVN is not what's on television. For us, KVN is here [pats heart]. It's what's inside."
—Team Kamyzaki, Kamyziakskii Krai, Russia, Top League 2016 Gala Concert in Sochi

Valentin Krapiva joked in his memoirs, "We all love rhetorical questions like, 'What came first, the chicken or the egg.' In answer to the question, 'What came first, cheerfulness or cleverness?', any KVNshik would answer, without hesitation, 'Censorship'" (Krapiva n.d., 18).

Censorship worried artists of all media in the USSR. And humor's habit of speaking truth to power rendered it especially risky. In 1971, at a Moscow competition celebrating KVN's tenth anniversary, the Odessans once again broke rules. They were not, in fact, supposed to attend at all. A new cadre of Communist Party leaders in Odessa had categorically banned the team from going. However, Mikhail Shedrinskii recalled, "Right or wrong, as they say, the Odessans went on their own dime and appeared on the recorded footage" (Shedrinksii 1996, 26). The team put on a wonderful performance and got called back to the stage for not one, but two encores. The audience demanded more razminka (question-and-answer prompts). In response, the game's presenters gave the team a scenario to respond to: "There is a room with a doctor sitting in it. A lion walks in. The question: how would you react in this situation?" The team answered, "Hunters argue that if you put your head in a lion's mouth and hold it there for just a second, the novelty wears off for the lion" (Shchedrinskii 1996, 26). It is absurd, of course, but the audience went wild for the joke (rukhnul). None of the TV viewers at home ever saw the Odessans, though. Censors excised them from the show. "Not a single trace of them remained," Shedrinksii wrote (Shchedrinksii 1996, 26). Censorship became even easier after 1968, when producers began pre-recording KVN instead of broadcasting the shows live. Aleksander Masliakov said, "They started to cut more and more from each show, and later all but disfigured them" (Masliakov 1996, 20).

Central Television cancelled the KVN television program entirely in 1972. The intellectual elite (particularly the Jewish elite) got cast as threatening during the conservative Brezhnev era. Masliakov remembered the changes the new Central Television director, Sergei Lapin, introduced when he took over in 1970: "People with beards weren't allowed, because they looked like Lenin or Marx; Jews weren't allowed; this wasn't allowed, that wasn't allowed" (Shchedrinksii 1996, 19-20). Lapin schemed for two years to shut down KVN. He started by mandating that senseless games be played in KVN, such as "who can spit the farthest" or "who can crow the loudest." Such contests carried no risk of political missteps. Or humor. Lapin also barred a successful team from Azerbaijan, led by captain Yuli Gusman, from competing at all. In response, a Kyrgyz team performed the following couplet during their performance:

I brought you a gift from the heart
This little volume by Gogol is the reason
No inspector could strangle KVN
With his dead soul 

After the performance, Lapin began shouting, "Does that mustachioed [kid] think that I don't understand who the "inspector" is? I'm the inspector!" (Shchedrinksii 1996, 20). In addition to barring Gusman from competing, censors now began cutting his image as an audience member from all broadcast footage. "I never missed a KVN performance. I came with my ticket and sat in the 9th row, in the center," he said. All the same, producers edited him out of even panorama shots of the audience. While well-intentioned, Kyrgyzstan's show of solidarity helped sink KVN. Gusman recalled, "Then someone, I think from the KGB, began to seriously work to discredit KVN: there was a wave of rumors about KVNshiki sending diamonds to Israel. Processes began in all cities. There were denunciations of Masliakov." No one got reprimanded, though; all accusations were found baseless. Gusman attributed this to the inherent goodness of KVN and KVNshiki, saying: "KVN is and was a holy thing" (Shchedrinksii 1996, 20).

Holy or no, the program had been in peril for several years before the Central Asians stirred up trouble. Elena Gal'perina claimed that every broadcast brought criticism. "Sometimes they wanted to shut us down because we discredited Soviet students by asking questions that were too simple, and sometimes they wanted to shut us down because the questions were too tough. ...And because the students were too good to face the workers and collective farmers, we got accused of discrediting the workers and collective farmers" (cited in Ostromooukhova 2003, 66-67).  KVNshiki stood at the heart of a struggle about the image of ideal Soviet youth. And Masliakov's comments above make it plain that, to many officials, Homo sovieticus did not have a Jewish face. 

Anti-semitic tendencies shaped the first years of KVN's history, as well. KVN's primary creator, Sergei Muratov, recalled how the show's first emcee and co-creator, Albert Akselrod, got replaced by the ethnically Russian Sergei Masliakov in 1963:

The administration pressured us to switch the presenter, Akselrod, with a Russian guy. At that time it was simply glaring that the most popular emcee in the country was Jewish. I didn't want to find out all the unpleasant details, but perhaps they directly told Alek, for instance, you're a Jew and you won't climb to that level (Kasperovich 2011, 39).

Aleksei, though, remembered very little anti-Semitism among KVNshiki in Irkutsk. When Bella Ostromooukhova asked him if he had observed this, he replied,

Never, because [in KVN] the brightest performers were the Jewish guys. And the Russians were good too. Sasha Koshelev—that was a Russian guy...We were all normal guys. We got together in the regional committee of the Komsomol—I was in charge of youth activities for the sciences. All the biological sections fell to me. No one told me anything. And in the theater I was the unquestioned authority. If I said it would be one way, even if they jumped down my throat, it would go my way all the same (Aleksei, interview with Bella Ostromooukhova, May 2006).

Here, Aleksei claimed that even if there had been anti-Semitism, he was in a position to quash it. Later in the interview, though, he mentioned a time when some money went missing from the ticket proceeds. "They looked at each of us," he said. Then, trailing off, "And two of the guys were Jewish..." Luckily the money was found (Aleksei, interview with Bella Ostromooukhova, May 2006). But the fact that Alexei even mentioned that two on the team were Jewish implies that they would have fallen under special suspicion. 

Whether out of anti-semitism or a generalized fear of controversy, Moscow axed the show. A bland youth program called Auction replaced KVN. It valorized wholesome Soviet youth who, according to one television producer of the time, "can't find the right word right away, are shy, can't improvise" (Evans 2010, 152-153). These new role models were, in other words, the opposite of KVNshiki. 

The 1972-1973 KVN season had already begun when Central Television cancelled the program. Albert Akesl'rod's hometown team, Voronezh, had already recorded one competition. Aksel'rod described the disappointment of the young men from the Voronezh Engineering-Construction Institute when the competition did not air:

It was 1972. The team was determined to fight for victory in this new season. We met the opening game with this attitude. Our scripts glittered! Eyes burned! We rehearsed like mad. Our captain, Anatoly Shulik, even shaved because an instruction came out saying, "beards distort the image of the Soviet youth." We played—once! The program was scheduled for November 1st...But November 1st turned into an unfunny April 1st. Despite the TV schedule, the KVN broadcast didn't happen. It was decided that these three letters also distort the image of the Soviet youth (Aksel'rod 1996, 34). 

Canceling the television show did not stop KVN, however. "They only ended the program. The game remained," claimed Mikhail Marfin and Andrei Chivurin, longtime KVN editors (2002, 12). In his memoirs about KVN, Aleksandr Masliakov also wrote, "But there was always KVN. Even when it was not on television screens. People still played it, all the same" (Masliakov 2017, 6). Marfin and Chivurin further noted that although tournaments were "not encouraged," everyone knew the game. "Almost everyone indulged in the game at one point in their lives—at school [in competitions] between classes, in a Pioneer camp, or in a contest between departments at university" (Marfin and Chivurin 1996, 12-13). Ukrainian Alexander Grushko, who worked as head teacher at a Kiev primary school during the 1970s, likewise maintained, "There were, for instance, Pioneer camps where school children—pioneers—vacationed. There was KVN there regularly, always" (interview with author, January 9, 2018). 

It might be expected that KVN remained popular among university students. More surprising is that school administrators and pedagogical writers recommended this supposedly banned game for primary school children in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1970s, the Novokuznetsk National Pedagogical Institute put out a series of annual handbooks called, "KVN in school and the Pioneer camp" with specific recommendations about how to conduct games, possible themes and competitions, and quizzes that could be used in games (with answers). The introduction to the 1975 edition stated,  

One of the most widespread forms of extracurricular activity among schoolchildren is KVN, which is becoming increasingly popular among students of all classes. KVN takes place not only in schools, but in city and suburban pioneer camps. Fascinating in form and focused on content, KVN games can contribute to the development not only of cognitive skills but of professional interests (Kogan and Kantorivich 1975, 1).

In 1975, then, three years after KVN's ban and eleven years before its return to television, the Novokuznetsk Pedagogical Institute and the Pedagogical Society of the RSFSR promoted the activity as one that could help young people develop creative and cognitive skills. The 1975 manual described a ballet-themed game, complete with detailed instructions for the following competitions: a "homework" skit; a contest for the best humorous story, an artistic contest; a pantomime contest, a dance contest; a stamp-collecting contest (for stamps related to ballet); a medal-collecting contest (for medals related to ballet); a postcard contest; and brainteasers (Kogan and Kantorovich 1975, 28-29). Several of these contests, like stamp- and postcard-collecting, don't lend themselves well to presentation on stage. But they could be judged well within classrooms. This was KVN for education, not for large-scale entertainment. Few game shows likely met with such crossover success. KVN did, though, and the fact that it was embedded in schools and Pioneer camps as well as universities, with the full support of Soviet pedagogues, meant that it thrived in these spaces throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.

Liubov, for instance, now director of the Irkutsk History Museum, recalled that she played KVN in biannual primary school competitions during the 1980s, then continued to compete during the 1990s at the Irkutsk Pedagogical Institute (interview with author, November 11, 2016). Grushko, similarly, reported that at his school students in each class formed KVN teams, then competed against other classes within their grade level. Teachers got involved, helping to plan thematic KVN competitions based on their specialties: chemistry, physics, literature. For one of the chemistry-themed competitions, for example, students had to demonstrate a chemical magic trick of some sort on stage (interview with author, January 9, 2018). The video below comes from a video recording another teacher at Grushko's school made of a KVN competition between classes 9-A and 9-B ("ashki" and "beshki") in 1979, seven years after KVN was "banned."

A KVN competitor in both the late 1960s and early 1980s, Sergei Ostashko, said, "And so, for fourteen years KVN wasn't broadcast on a big stage, but it always continued, at least in Odessa, it always went on on the level of university-internal competitions...on the day of the Physics Department, there was a game between the students and the professors" (interview with author, March 25, 2017). Olga, who was born in the Irkutsk region but attended St. Petersburg's Higher Trade Union School of Culture (Vysshaia Profsoiuznaia Shkola Kultury) from 1979-1983, described an active KVN scene within her university, as well, complete with defined roles for first-, second-, third-, and fourth-year students. Fourth years, for instance, wrote the bulk of a team's material and trained the younger cohorts (interview with author October 20, 2017). Interdepartmental competitions remained popular in Irkutsk, as well, but Irkutsk may have been in the minority of cities, along with Odessa (for a while), that continued inter-university competitions after 1972. Igor, a former French professor at Irkutsk State Linguistic Institute, maintained that between 1973 and 1985 the best teams from city universities would play against each other:

That's why there was a very branched structure. That is, here's a group of ten people, and they could...make up a team. Then each department had a team. And there were competitions between departments. And then between universities. But that was already on the level of the city (interview with author, October 20, 2016).

But not all universities were able to maintain KVN when the all-union competitions ended. Mikhail, a KVNshik from the Moscow State Institute of Civil Engineering, remembers trying to keep KVN alive at their school, reporting, "We met for a while afterwards in groups of five or six. We even had performances. We tried to tour for about six months" (Ostromooukhova 2003, 65). Aksel'rod's group in Voronezh put on between forty and sixty performances in the year following KVN's closure, but staged no competitions. "Concerts, festivals...Terrible to remember!" (Aksel'rod 1996, 34). In Kharkov, in eastern Ukraine, some university competitors shifted back into activities like STEM (the "theater of miniatures") or other forms of skit-making instead of KVN. While the STEM sketch below comes from the 1980s rather than the 1970s, its content is likely similar to those of the previous decade. Conflicts between students and teachers are common topics at universities—and rarely offend political sensibilities. The STEM group of Kharkov Polytechnic Institute (1987) depicted an exam as a pistol duel between student and teacher:

Teacher:     What is Boyle's law? (Pistol shot)
Student:      You didn't tell us. (Pistol shot)
Teacher:     You should have gone to lecture. (Pistol shot)
Student:      But I...I was sick, I was giving blood, I was in a competition. (Three shots in succession)    (Yunisov 1999, 75-76)

The performance ends with the student taking a crib note of out his pocket and miming pulling a pin with his teeth, as one would with a grenade. He hurls the cheat sheet at the enemy, his teacher, and triumphing over the exam. Skits like these entertain. But they carry no biting humor, no social criticism. Yunisov claimed that, "STEM reigned in the world of student wit until the second half of the 1980s, when KVN returned to TV screens. They continued STEM in institutes throughout the so-called 'stagnation' years" (Yunisov 1999, 4). Yunisov depicted STEM as calm, quiet, and potentially unchallenging—either to the status quo or for students themselves. When KVN came back to television, he wrote, "Suddenly, out of this quiet family of student joy, KVN became one of the most powerful channels of emancipating the mind and realizing creative ambitions" (Yunisov 1999, 4). 

KVN's space for satire set it apart from STEM, especially during the heady glasnost years. Students could speak their minds, and did, with full voice, with both innuendo and brazenness. Vladimir Tertyshnik was a Ukrainian KVNshik in the 1980s who later became a lawyer and judge. In his memoirs he relates some of the KVN songs and couplets he composed during his student days in Kiev. Among them was the following, "New Jokes on an Old Theme." It is set to the tune of the 1953 song "So Many Golden Lights" ("Ognei tak mnogo zolotykh") which tells the story of a woman in love with a married man. The first stanza of "So Many Golden Lights" runs:

There are so many golden lights
On the streets of Saratov
There's so many bachelor boys,
But I love a boy who's married.

In parallel fashion, the first three stanzas of "New Jokes" start off lamenting the narrator's luck in ending hanging out with guys instead of beautiful women:

There are so many beautiful girls
So many with slender legs and waists
And I'm stuck with a chubby mug
With the ugly name Vitaly                                                                (Tertyshnik 2006, 79)

The joke seems straightforward, contrasting the attributes of desirable women with the chubby Vitaly, the lazy Sergei, and the bum Andrei. Tertyshnik flips the meaning in the last stanza, though, revealing that these men he's stuck with are actually government tails:

There are so many nice women
Believe me, dear reader
And I'm stuck with a shameless mug
Either a Censor or a Snoop                                                               (Tertyshnik 2006, 79)

Resuming KVN as a TV show revitalized the activity. But this was not because people watched it on television and suddenly wanted to (re-)establish it in their communities. KVN never left most communities entirely. When the USSSR-wide system of competitions returned to the air students who were already playing KVN or who had, at some point, in school, were poised to step in. Students brought sharp satire to the stage in the more liberal 1980s, too, which pleased fans. They critiqued the Party, censorship, and economic planning—but, overtly, at least, in the context of preserving the system.