The People's Laughter: War, Comedy, and the Soviet Legacy

Chapter Two: Traditions

Cold War Heritage
 

Moscow, Suburban Clinic, Spring 2005
— Yes, it's from my boyfriend's cat. It seems like ringworm.
— I'm the doctor, I'll make the diagnoses.
— Okay.
— There's nothing wrong with you.
— It's just that it's spreading along my arm. Maybe a cream?
— Your problem is that you're a foreigner. You're allergic to Russia. Also, foreigners take too many baths. 

She did not give me the cream.

Irkutsk, First of May neighborhood, Fall 2015
"Amerikanka go home!"

Irkutsk State University, University Library, Fall 2016
— Hello, I am a visiting graduate student here (shows student ID). Could I check out Yuri Olesha's Envy?
— You're a foreigner. Foreigners can go to the city library.

I had scheduled an interview with Igor Livant, retired French professor from Irkutsk State Linguistic University, over the phone. He had seemed friendly and eager to talk with me about KVN, and we agreed to meet on the following Thursday. I got to his street, in Irkutsk's old quarter of 19th-century wooden houses, about fifteen minutes early. I walked around while I waited, admiring the neighborhood's lacy scrollwork, and rang Igor at 10:00 on the dot. No answer. He had given me his street address but not the house number, so I wasn't sure which of the houses lining the courtyard off the main road was his. He had said to call. I waited three minutes and called again; then waited three minutes and called again; then waited ten minutes and called again. No answer. Mikhail Rozhansky, the Irkutsk sociology professor who had given me Igor's number had said, as he flipped through a mental Roledex of potential KVN contacts, "Igor's a—theatrical type. He might be willing to talk to foreigners."

Maybe Mikhail had been wrong.

The vast majority of Russians I've met have been friendly, and hospitable. But Irkutsk residents simply don't meet a lot of Americans, in contrast to people in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Not all of them knew quite what to make of us. The first question a lot of college students asked me in 2016 was, "Is it true that Americans hate Russia?" I explained that America was a country of immigrants, that millions of Russians and Russian speakers lived in America, and that Americans had Russian neighbors and friends and teachers and definitely did not hate Russia or Russians. With elections approaching, a lot of students' second question was, "What do you think of Trump?" 

Senior citizens, though, reared in the Soviet Union, thought less about U.S. sanction policies or diplomatic scuffles. Their minds skipped straight to war. I'd been asked once to give a presentation about California at the Irkutsk Resource Center for Pensioners. I decided to talk about neutral topics like the redwood forests and California's 19th century relationships with Russian traders. But after the presentation, a woman in her sixties came up to me and said, "I am afraid Hillary will start a war." (At that time most people still thought Hillary would win.) Another grandmotherly-looking lady with dyed jet-black hair and piercing blue eyes continued, "It is just like with Kennedy. Back then, with Cuba, when the missiles were already ready to go. Sometimes Hillary does not think about what she is saying. She doesn't understand that we can surround [the United States]—like that! You understand, we have a large territory. The United States is small. We are a big country. We have enough. We understand this. We have understood this since back then."

In essence, someone's dear babushka was arguing that Russia could survive a nuclear strike, even a first strike, and the U.S. could not. And she seemed, personally at least, willing to risk it. Kto kogo: who will beat whom? Stalin's catchphrase formulation always functioned as challenge, not rumination.

For some people, any American who (1) claimed to be doing "research" in Siberia and (2) had managed to actually learn Russian somewhere could be nothing but a spy. Even Siberians who did agree to interviews—and, unlike in Odessa, a good many declined—often addressed me warily. "So," a middle-aged museum director said, her eyes flitting nervously towards the door, "what exactly do you want to know?" I wondered if Igor had gotten spooked.

I heard a noise behind one of the houses and went to see if maybe Igor had come out to meet me. Instead, my pacing around the courtyard drew the attention of a nicotine-thin man in a red tracksuit jacket. He leaned out from his window and yelled, "What do you want?" He was too young to be Igor himself. "I'm looking for Igor Livant," I said. The man pointed out the entrance to Igor's house, up some stairs from a sign that said "Auburge d'teatr" ("Theater Hostel").

I rang the doorbell. No answer. I rang again. A man in a blue and white checked shirt, a burnt orange argyle sweater vest, and grey wool slacks opened the door. So he hadn't just rolled out of bed. Igor looked at me for a moment, a slight narrowing at his eyes disclosing a decision process, and invited me in. "How did you find me?" he asked. I told him that he'd given me his address over the phone. "No," he said. "I didn't give you the house number." Ah. I cheerfully said that his neighbor told me.

We sat down at Igor's kitchen table. He started off guarded and unsmiling. "What's your name again?" "How did you end up on a life path that led you to Irkutsk?" "Why are you interested in KVN?" "When was the first KVN game?"

"In 1961," I answered. Igor nodded, lips puckered out a bit in approval. I had passed a sincerity test. For the rest of the interview Igor talked to me like an old friend, reminiscing about KVN, his time teaching theater in France, and life in the Soviet 1960s.

"There was a lot of criticism," he told me. "KVN in Russia, that is, in the Soviet Union, was always an opportunity to criticize...There were some things we could say in KVN that we couldn't say in other places. And that's why when they shut it down—"

KVN never got shut down everywhere, of course. It did end early in one forum, though, where it might not have—if not for one team's recklessness. In 1974, two years after televised KVN had gone off the air, authorities cancelled the Odessa KVN City Championship. "Why did they end the city competitions?" I asked Sergei Ostashko, who had played for both the Odessa Chimneysweeps in 1969 and the Odessa Gentlemen in the 1980s. 

"Because of one joke," he said. "I can quote it for you...The team of the Construction Institute brought several drummers out on stage, and different kinds of drums—from children's drums to very large ones—and [they said], 'the team of drummers is playing the part of the knockers.'" 

A "knocker" (stukach) is an informer. "A stukach is someone who turns everyone over to the KGB," Ostashko explained. "To snitch (stukachit'), to knock (stuchit')." He rapped his knuckles on the table. "He calls the KGB, on us all." The Construction Institute team had also punned on the words "parts" and "Party," making the joke's final line "the Party (partii) of informers." Ostashko gave some soundless chuckles, saying, "Well, of course, after the phrase 'Party of informers' they shut down KVN [on the city level]" (interview with author, March 25, 2017).

"The leaders weren't idiots, not idiots at all," Top League editor Mikhail Marfin told me, similarly. "They knew that even though KVN was a game, people would make jokes about what they worried about, what they were interested in, and so on." At that time people worried about things like KGB informers, so KVN got relegated to small stages. Marfin, from Moscow, had been one of Ostashko's opponents in a legendary 1987 finals match—the first since KVN's return to TV. "One of my most [vivid impressions of that season] is the story about how Slavik defeated Misha Marfin in the Captain's Challenge," Ostashko had told me, sipping his tea. Drinking coffee in a cafe in Moscow two years later, Marfin, who had been captain of the Moscow Chemical-Technical Institute (MKhTI) team, talked to me about the game in general, saying, "Well, we had ten people and they had sixty" (interview with author, June 3, 2019).

Both teams had shown a lot of guts in that perestroika match. The Chemical-Technical Institute team, calling themselves "the youth," quipped, for instance, "Not everyone needs to learn four foreign languages. Better just to learn how to speak our native language. But freely" (svobodno). The Odessans, in response, said in their skit:

Yuri Kordonskii: I look out on our youth...Look at how freely they speak, how unconstrained they are, how bravely they express themselves. We, surely, wouldn't have done that at their age.
Oleg Filimonov: Yeah, and maybe that's why we're still alive.


The Chemical-Technical Institute team addressed why KVN had gone off the air more or less directly in their opening skit. Presenting themselves as accountants, they clicked off figures on abacuses: 

— For this reporting period, in the Club of the Cheerful and Clever
— We did more than was required twice
— We amassed a surplus of ten percent
— We broke surface no less than five times
— Victims and violations — zero
— For this reporting period, the following measures were taken:
— One group of comrades was fired
— One group of comrades was demoted
— One group of comrades was reconciled
—    And one comrade repaired one television


In the straight reading of this skit, the "reporting period" is simply the 1986-1987 season, in which one group of comrades (a team) got eliminated from competition, another took a lesser place, teams became friends ("reconciled"), and, in a nod to KVN's return, someone repaired the TV. Elements of the teams' performance cue a second interpretation, however. First, this segment immediately followed an exchange about "closing KVN," with its dual allusions to closing out KVN for the season, in the final match, and to KVN's controversial cancellation. The Moscow team had also brought out gates painted with a large padlock and the letters "KVN." They periodically set up these gates and kicked them back down, laughing: "Comrades, please allow the solemn closing—ha ha ha ha ha!" The reporting period in question, then, stood in for both the previous year's season and KVN's fourteen-year hiatus. As Marfin had sung in the skit's introductory song, quoted in chapter one, "Time goes on, and KVN remains, it doesn't spoil or age...it turns out KVN lives, and maybe it was always that way." KVN did live on in university and school games, as audience members would well know. But because one comrade "fixed" the television, or stopped KVN broadcasts, no comrades got fired, demoted, or had need for political reconciliation because of jokes they made on the national stage—jokes about "what they were worried about" during the 1970s and early 1980s.

The Chemical-Technical Institute team reinforced this interpretation with their concluding lines, saying, "We call for the temporary termination of consideration of complaints about the Cheerful and Clever, and authorize the provision of regular furloughs. Ministers. Deputy Ministers. And other responsible workers. Take a rest, we'll wait" ("Otdokhnite, my vas podozhdÑ‘m"). KVN could wait out political crackdowns. 

Censorship required rebellion that shaped KVN tradition, gameplay, and lore. "If audience members worried at some moment, if they started to develop political consciousness, KVNshiki would absolutely make jokes about politics," Marfin said. But contemporary KVN audiences may think less about such subjects than their parents did. "Teams [today] try to make jokes about politics, but audiences just don't get it," Marfin told me. "On one hand, you don't want to take out political elements because, well, they were always there, right? And there are political elements in life, now. And on the other hand, those jokes just don't come off." Marfin might set his standards for risky humor too high. Students do still make jokes about local, national, and international politics, and about agencies from the FSB to the CIA, just rarely with as much seriousness of purpose as during the Soviet era, and perhaps with fewer official reprimands, KGB interviews, and "prophylactic chats" (cf. Cohn 2017).

Still, Cold War reverb affected my fieldwork, even when people didn't think I was a spy. One KVN coach in Odessa, for instance, after initially agreeing to an interview, later snubbed me with, "Oh, I see what you're all about" and ignored all further messages from me when a NATO report which analyzed KVN as information warfare was published (NATO StratCom 2017). He seemed to think I only wanted information that might undermine or, worse, weaponize KVN. Another KVNshik told me, as I neared the end of my time in Irkutsk in 2016, "You have really big balls (u tebia bol'shie iaitsa). To come here, now, with all of this going on." I was struck by the disconnect between his impression of the seriousness of the conflict between Russia and the United States and my own. Yes, Obama had imposed new sanctions. Yes, some leaders in my country had accused some leaders in his country of hacking recent presidential election results. But I didn't see Russians as enemies, past or present. In that moment, though, I realized that a lot of Russians might not feel the same way about Americans, including me.

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