Albert Einstein said, "Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work." Sometimes, though, bureaucracy's institutional infrastructure helps social practices spread. The Komsomol, the Soviet youth organization for those aged fourteen through twenty-eight, proved crucial to moving KVN from Moscow to towns across the USSR. According to Yuri Isakov of Ekaterinburg, a telephone call from one Komsomol cell to another might be all it took to establish a KVN program. The story below comes from the 1980s, after KVN returned to television. It is illustrative, though, of how Komsomol leaders networked to establish KVN in new places in the 1960s too. Isakov recalled,

Socialism even helped. For all of the editors of the departmental wall newspapers at the time were certainly members of the Komsomol committees of those departments...And then a call from Moscow. I can't recall it word for word, but the meaning was something like this:

—Hello, is this the Komsomol committee of Ural Polytechnic Institute?
—Well, something like that, yeah
—We're the ones from Moscow
—Oh, hello!
—We heard that you had some talent that might be able to play in Central KVN?
—What talent? In what KVN?
—Well, in the Club of the Cheerful and Clever...
—Ah, that show they had on TV recently?
—Yes, we've revived it here, and we need one more team. We heard that you guys at UPI have a STEM team that is famous across the country. Maybe you guys could participate?
—Yes, of course we'll take part, but first we have to think a little!
—How long do you need to think?
—A few days is probably enough.
—Great! In a few days we will call you! Goodbye.
—Call us, please. And who is this?
—... Beep! Beep! Beep!
—Ah, got it! It will be done!                                                                           (Isakov 1996, 91)

The Moscow organizer hung up, knowing Isakov would do what was asked. The exchange above seems informal. Two guys chatting. Its backdrop, though, is state authority. This was a phone call, yes. But it was not a social one. Even if the Komsomol official in Moscow did not outrank Isakov (they were both students), the favor he asked was for the state, not for himself or even for KVN. A limit case might make plain how extraordinary it is that a request like this could be made. Could a lacrosse captain at the University of Chicago cold call the soccer club leader at Texas Tech University and say, "Hey, I heard you have some good goalies down there. We need another lacrosse team for the Central League. Would you mind establishing one? Great, thanks!" Soccer and lacrosse are similar, of course, but not the same. Recruiting a team of students, teaching them a new game, and asking them to train for it took effort and organization.

KVN spread across the country because people enjoyed it, but Komsomol cells often brought it to universities in the first place. The game moved from Moscow to Odessa to Bishkek because it institutionally piggybacked on a network of bureaucratically-knitted Komsomol cells. Konstantin, a KVNshik at Moscow State University of Civil Engineering (MISI) in the 1980s, described how, more concretely, Komsomol resources helped create teams. Nearly all university students were Komsomol members; thus, they all participated, to some extent, in an organization with a hierarchy and chain of command. Orders could be issued, tasks assigned (Riordan 1989, 22). Komsomol officers, in particular, had to complete some kind of service, or "ideological work," and KVN could fulfill that requirement. As volunteer work goes one could do worse than comedy. Konstantin explained, "I was the secretary of the Komsomol Committee, and since KVN at the time was considered part of ideological work, I was entrusted with the task of sponsoring a team...This meant helping the team organize rehearsals, traveling, and ensuring communication between the team and the university administration" (Ostromooukhova 2003, 82).

Once universities did establish KVN teams, its association with kulturnost made individual competitors, not just the game itself, popular. The best players became known and loved because KVN talent got framed as prestigious. Yuri, Konstantin's teammate at MISI, points out the link between the cultural capital KVN participants earned and the privileges this secured them within the university—in this case, the freedom to organize events (likely with funding and supplies from the Komsomol). He recalled that, "When we were at MISI [Moscow State University of Civil Engineering], KVN was very prestigious. That's why all university bodies supported us, including the Komsomol, the party committee and the education authority...The club had a lot of activities, constantly. But I feel like KVN had carte blanche" (in Ostromooukhova 2003, 65). Mikhail, his teammate, likewise pointed out that KVNshiki became semi-celebrities, touring in agitbrigades much like the physfak students. He wrote, "Dima and I very often took part in KVN performances, and we came up with our own act. At one point they turned us into an agitbrigade; the university sent us. I remember that we toured military bases by helicopter" (in Ostromooukhova 2003, 65).

Yuri and Mikhail might well have believed in the Komsomol's overall mission. They may have simply enjoyed KVN, however, and considered themselves lucky beneficiaries of state support for their interests. Individual Komsomol officers had a great deal of latitude to organize events, even those that fell slightly outside the bounds of the ideologically approved. Moscow Komsomol leader Igor Karimov, for instance, loved unofficial Soviet bards like Bulat Okudzhava and Aleksandr Galich. While he never hosted these singers at Komsomol events, in the 1960s he did procure funding (and even busses) to organize student hiking trips where students sang their songs. Communist Party officials eventually hauled him in to interrogation about his seeming support for Galich, who wrote quite subversives songs (e.g. calling Stalin a bastard). Despite this misstep he still got invited to join the Party. They offered him a high-paying engineering salary—if he gave up all association with informal music. Karimov turned them down (Karimov 2004, 47). Since KVN is a game of satire, it is easy to imagine that Komsomol KVNshiki played the line between acceptable and subversive in a similar fashion, all the while using state institutions, funds, and networks to promote the activity.