Afterword: Imagined Communities, Warring Nations
“KVN doesn't give a darn.” (“KVNu pofig.”)
—Mikhail Marfin, 2018 Top League Final
Mikhail Marfin began editing again for Top League at the January 2019 Sochi festival, after a fifteen-year hiatus. About a month before that, though, he cameoed in the December 2018 Top League Finals match for the team Viatka (a city in western Russia). The team asked him near the end of their performance:
—Mikhail Naumovich! Do you know who won?
—I do.
—Who?
—KVN.
—Well—concretely. Us or others?
—You. Or others. Concretely, KVN doesn't give a darn (KVN Top League 2018)
The phrase, ”KVN doesn't give a darn” circulated in conversation among KVNshiki and got referenced in games for nearly a year after the final. In October 2019, a Telegram commenter consoled teams that had not advanced to the Moscow and Moscow Region final round with the words, “Thank you, everyone, for the evening, for the game, and for the battle. And remember— concretely, KVN doesn't give a darn.." It seems the opening line from Marfin’s perestroika number, “Everything passes, and KVN remains,” proves as true for today’s KVNshiki as when Marfin first sang it in 1986. Particular winners and losers matter little to KVN as an institution (though teams would give up if they sensed systemic unfairness). New teams take the stage, new jokes appear quarterly (at least), and editors experiment with new events. But the fundamental game, in Marfin’s definition—“Some number of teams competes in some number of events...who’s funnier?”—could care less about individual winners and losers. Marfin himself did not win his final match, losing to the Odessans, but he has still spent the better part of his life working with KVN, both as an editor and with the channel KVN TV, which broadcasts parts of games, interviews with KVNshiki, and behind-the-scenes specials.
Despite the war, KVN games have remained in Ukraine. But team comedy there has changed in significant ways. Ukrainian teams no longer compete in the main, Russia-based international competitions, leading to competitive isolation within Ukraine and Ukrainians’ marked absence on the Russian stages. In response, Ukrainians established League of Laughter, and, with it, their own set of international League of Laughter competitions in Israel, Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Ukraine also outlawed the use of vKontakte (the Russian version of Facebook) during my 2017 fieldwork in Odessa, which cut off an additional communications avenue. Ukrainian KVNshiki had used the platform to share information both within and across borders, as the social network was organized around communities that people could join (such as the International KVN community, based in Russia). While still possible, of course, to get around technical barriers, vKontakte's use in Ukraine became swiftly unpopular. Finally, of course, Russian KVN games, like all Russian media, are not shown on Ukrainian TV and Ukrainian media is not broadcast in Russia.
Everything, though, is available on YouTube. Russians watch League of Laughter and Odessans, at least. routinely watch Russian KVN competitions. But in the winter of 2018 over 600 people, mostly Russians, gathered online via a YouTube livestream hosted by the video blogger Crafty Sound (Konstantin Belevtsev), a former KVNshik based in Belgorod, to watch a Ukrainian League of Laughter competition together. Some seemed to cringe, during the online chat feed, when the competitors cracked jokes about Russians. Others wrote “Glory to Ukraine!” Maybe the commenters were Ukrainians—it's impossible to say. Crafty Sound has continued hosting viewing sessions, primarily of Russian KVN games, and, as of the autumn of 2019, he was regularly attracting over a thousand people to his streams. “It would be better to watch [this] together,” he said of a December 12th viewing of the 2018 First League first semifinal match, “because emotions are higher.” He added, “And also better with some [hard] lemonade.”
Few young people seem to watch TV broadcasts anymore, and with Russia’s eleven time zones, even television viewership isn’t experienced as simultaneous. Live streams like Crafty’s, though, let viewers watch with others, with commentary from a host, and from each other in the sidebar chat window. Streams and Telegram feeds create coterminous communities of KVN fans that envision their place in relationship to each other. These stream publics, then, do not passively consume KVN media, as when watching YouTube videos alone or aimlessly scrolling through memes.
Streams and Telegram, more even than KVN websites or YouTube, have created a space for KVNshiki across Russia—and, theoretically, the world—to imagine themselves as contemporaries (cf. Geertz 2000 [1973], 355). While both a community and, largely, an imagined, mass-mediated one, KVNshiki don’t make up an “imagined community” in Anderson's (2006 [1983]) sense because they don’t count as even a metaphoric nation, being not politically unified (in many ways the opposite) and not sovereign. The KVN community is, instead, super- and transnational. The Soviet Union’s structure set KVN up to operate across national borders; it still does, now helped along not by the Komsomol’s infrastructure, but by the internet.
KVNshiki found digital platforms to take the place of television and vKontakte. Ukrainian author and former KVNshik Aleksander Sas has begun providing occasional commentary on Russian KVN games as one of Crafty’s invited guests during YouTube streams, for instance. His status as expert matters much more, in this forum, than the fact that he is a Ukrainian—at least to those that join the stream. One of the main Russian KVN Telegram channels also reposted commentary from Yuri Karagondin, of the Ukrainian team Dnepr, when the team lost in the October 2019 League of Laughter semifinals. Karagondin reported that, “Among others, during razminka with the audience there was the following question, ‘What’s the difference between KVN and League of Laughter?’ and we answered honestly, ‘In KVN we would have won a long time ago.’” Karagondin went on to give an account of what had happened in the game, which had not yet been broadcast, and described what the team could have done better in the League of Laughter battles. He then announced Team Dnepr’s departure from competition: “We became stronger. We became closer. We became better. I love Dnepr! ... [We] won't be in the next season.”
And the cross-posting goes both ways. Just two days earlier, on October 9, 2019, Karagondin re-posted a video, shot from someone's cell phone, from the Top League second semifinal match that was held in Moscow on October 8th. On October 7th, Evgeniia Zharikova, wife of Team Snezhnogorsk team member Sergei Zharikov, died. Before the competition all the other teams had decided that, regardless of the game’s outcome, they would give the 500,000 ruble prize money to team Snezhnogorsk. Karagondin introduced the clip with the words, “A video that will give you goosebumps...Yesterday after the semifinals of KVN Top League all the teams hugged, supporting Sergei, the captain from Snezhnogorsk, one day after his wife died...the whole theatre stood...sometimes KVN is still a club, and these moments inspire timid hope.”
I was in that theater on October 8th, and stood too. I cried along with the other 2,000 audience members.
That same week, on October 10th, 2019, President Zelensky held a fourteen-hour press conference. One of the questions he addressed was the possibility of a face-to-face meeting with President Putin. While noting that “everyone is against it,” he maintained that “the meeting must be held if we want the war to end” (Roth 2019). He presented the meeting, and a peace accord, as a question of timing rather than possibility.
February 2023 changed all of that. If before Ukraine would negotiate for peace, now it will accept nothing but victory. As of December 2022, around 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers, 100,000 Russian soldiers, and 7,000 Ukrainian civilians have died. Nearly 8 million refugees have left Ukraine.
KVN is emotion. KVN is joy. KVN is family. I want to believe that comedy can be those things for Ukrainians again.