Televised and Student Leagues

A team of schoolchildren competing in the Moscow regional KVN festival jibed about the tension between humor and show business by saying, "Jokes aren't the most important in KVN. I know. I watch Top League." The audience applauded heartily. The game's emcee shook his head and said, "You know, the young man is right." Television programs must be sold to mass audiences. Community KVN games only have to make a few hundred people, perhaps up to a thousand, laugh. And it is easier to make people that you know laugh than complete strangers. "In Moscow, in essence, it's not KVN anymore. There it's already show," said Dima, from the Irkutsk State Transport University team Knight's Move. "For Masliakov it isn't even a hobby anymore, it's some kind of business. But for us it is the basic meaning of life, if you want to put it like that" (interview with author, December 3, 2016). Masliakov himself had said the word KVNshik had "achieved some special status, and it is still unclear what lies behind it—either a profession, or a hobby, or a state of mind, or as they themselves say, a diagnosis" (Masliakov 2017, 29).

Dima contrasted money, business, artificiality, and "show" to humor, authenticity, and a way of life. Business and KVN didn't mix for him. Amik is a company, like the NFL (National Football League) or the NBA (National Basketball Association), that administers some KVN leagues. Its association with profit is what Dima found distasteful. Amik, though, does not manage most KVN in Russia, any more than the NBA runs playground basketball games.

Until 2014, Amik's more "pro" league structures spanned Russia and Ukraine (as well as Central Asia, Latvia, and Western European countries like Germany and Great Britain). I will go into detail about how KVN in Ukraine changed after the war began in the next chapter (chapter 3). Here, though, I will present a brief overview of league hierarchies in Russia and Ukraine. Any organization that hosts competitions can form a league. Irkutsk State University holds league competitions, for example, that are "open," or open to competitors from other universities. But Baikal State University held closed, university-internal competitions during my fieldwork, and so could not be said to have a league. The Beit Grand Jewish Community Center in Odessa hosts a league, one of the most popular in the city, attracting competitors from all off Odessas's major universities. 

University, community, and televised leagues intersect and overlap. And in Ukraine KVN leagues run alongside League of Laughter leagues. The next two sections map out league structures based in Russia and Ukraine, as well as the leagues that were active in Irkutsk and Odessa during my fieldwork (2015-2017). From Belgorod to Bishkek, Rivne to Tallinn, the lists that follow illustrate the geographic range and institutional variety of these leagues. Each city that hosts an "official" league implies hundreds of competitors, a training infrastructure, a pool of judges, and, most likely, smaller tributary leagues.

Leagues based in Russia

Leagues in Irkutsk

The following Irkutsk institutions hosted KVN seasons when I conducted fieldwork in the fall of 2015 and the fall of 2016. 

Irkutsk State University
Baikal State University
Irkutsk State Polytechnic University
Irkutsk State Transport University
Irkutsk State Agricultural University
Baikal League
Baikal School League
Amik Leagues

The company Amik is to KVN what the NFL (National Football League) is to football: Amik runs the KVN "pro" leagues based in Russia just like the NFL runs pro football in America. Amik doesn't control local, university, or school games, though, just as the NFL doesn't get involved in high school games in small town America. That said, a number of leagues, both televised and non-televised, do fall under Amik's umbrella. Teams competing at the highest levels, in Top or Premier Leagues, for instance, likely devote all of their energy (and financial resources) to competitions in these leagues. Teams that compete in Central and Official leagues may opt to compete in a variety of Amik and non-Amik local leagues, according to their schedules and interests. University students in Irkutsk, for instance, very often play in competitions at their home universities, a number of other universities, the Baikal League (which is not affiliated with Amik), and the Asia League in Krasnoyarsk, which is in an Amik Central league—and a seventeen-hour train ride away.

The advantages of playing in Amik-affiliated leagues include tougher opponents, often from other regions or countries; advice from skilled editors; and a potential path to the televised leagues. Thus, there is competition to play in Amik leagues, and the process to decide which teams can play outside of their local or university leagues starts at the annual KVN Festival in Sochi, Russia in mid-January of each year. Any team in the world that would like to attend the Sochi festival can try, for three minutes, to prove to a panel of five editors that they are ready to compete on the (Russian) national or international levels. Between four and five hundred teams come to Sochi each year for the chance to compete in one of three sets of Amik leagues:

(1) Televised leagues
(2) Central leagues
(3) Official leagues

The Sochi festival consists of a first round (all teams, 464 in 2019), a second round (95 teams in 2019), and a televised Gala Concert (22 teams in 2019). In 2019, 180 teams got an "elevated rating" (povyshenniy reiting) from the editors. An elevated rating gives teams the right to participate in any of Russia's eight Central leagues. More or less anyone can compete in Official leagues, which numbered 60 in 2019. Local teams, though, even teams without Sochi ratings, get preference over unrated teams from other regions, who cannot exceed 30% of total participants. Teams for Televised leagues get chosen during the Gala Concert and through conversations with league editors afterwards.

Televised leagues

Top League (Vysshaia Liga), Moscow
Premier Leage (Prem'er-Liga), Moscow
First League (Pervia Liga), Kazan'
International League (Mezhdunarodnaia Liga), Minsk, Belarus
Children's KVN

Central leagues

Asia, Krasnoyarsk
Krasnodarskaia, Krasnodar
League of Moscow and the Moscow Suburbs (Liga Moskvy i Podmoskov'e), Moscow
Povolzhe, Kazan'
Start, Voronezh
Tikhookeanskaia, Khabarovsk
Uralkskaia, Chelabinsk
Yugo-Zapadnaia, Kursk

Official leagues

Note: not all official leagues are based in Russia, but they feed into the Russia-based system.

Adigeia, Republic of Adigei
Ala-Too, Bishkek, Kyrgystan
Alania, Vladikavkaz
Altai, Barnaul
Arktucheskaia (ReAL), Salekhard
Armavir, Armavir
Azerbaidzhanskaia, Baku, Azerbaijan
Baltika, St. Petersburg
Black Sea, Novorossiisk
Brianskaia, Briansk
Briukhovetskaia, Briukhovetskaia
Crimean League, Sevastopol
Donskaia, Rostov-na-Donu
Georgia, Tblisi, Georgia
Irtysh, Pavlodar, Kazakhstan
Kavkaz, Stavropol'
KVN.bel, Gomel
KVN on the Yenisei, Krasnoyarsk
KVN Smolensk Style, Smolensk
Kuzbass, Kemerovo
League of Small Cities, Vyshnii Volochek
League of Solov'inogo Kraia, Kursk
Moldova, Kishinev, Moldova
Moscow Student League, Moscow
Moscow Suburbs (Podmoskovnaia), Korolev
Murmanskaia, Murmansk
Nevskaia, St. Petersburg
Nizhniy Novgorod, Nizhniy Novgorod
Omskaia, Omsk
Orenburgskaia, Orenburg
Prikam'e, Perm'
Primorskaia, Vladivostok
Respublika, Kazan'
Riga, Riga, Latvia
Riazanskaia, Riazan'
Samara, Samara
Slobozhanskaia, Belgorod
Sevastopol'skaia, Sevastopol'
Severnaia, Niagan'
Severniy Desant, Surgut
Siberia, Novosibirsk
Siberia-NEXT, Novosibirsk
Stolitsa, Cheboksary
Sverdlovsk, Ekaterinburg
Sura, Penza
Tomsk, Tomsk
Tula League, Tula
Universitetskaia, Lipetsk
Ufa, Ufa
Verkhnevolsh'e, Tver'
Vladomirskaia Rus', Vladimir
Voronezhskaia, Voronezh
Vyatka, Kirov
West of Russia (Zapad Rossii), Kaliningrad
Yaroslav League, Yaroslav'
Youth League of the Republic of Bashkortostan, Sterlitamak
Zabaikal'skaia, Chita
Zapad Rossii, Kaliningrad
Zasib, Tiumenskaia Oblast'

Leagues based in Ukraine

People still play KVN in Ukraine in university, school, and city leagues. In 2017 they also still played, incidentally, in one Amik league, East UA (Vostok UA) in Kharkhiv, in eastern Ukraine (it finally lost official Amik status in the fall of 2019). But no KVN games make it onto TV. Because of licensing issues and bans on Russian media in general, "KVN" is, like in the 1970s, off the airwaves in Ukraine. But League of Laughter is not. Editors Andrei Chivurin, Naum Barulya, and the comedy production company 95 Kvartal, founded, in part, by Volodymyr Zelensky, created League of Laughter to take the place of pro-level KVN competition—and entertainment—in Ukraine. KVN and League of Laughter co-exist in Ukraine, with students very often competing in both formats. Below, I list the KVN leagues in Odessa and the League of Laughter leagues active in Ukraine in 2019.

Even teams from Kharkiv, though, stopped attending the KVN festival in Sochi. Ukrainian teams, instead, vie for spots on TV at the annual League of Laughter festival in Odessa, first held in 2015 (just one year after the war began). The League of Laughter festival happens in late January or early February. Like Sochi, teams at the festival compete in a first round, a second round, and a Gala Concert. There is no rating system. The best teams from the gala concert get selected for the Central League of Laughter, the main televised league. Other teams may apply to or be invited to compete in regional leagues throughout the country.

KVN Leagues in Odessa

Odessa National University
Odessa National Polytechnic University
KVN League of the Odessa Jewish Community Center Beit Grand
Mayor's Cup
Mayor's Cup for Schoolchildren

League of Laughter Leagues based in Ukraine

Central League of Laughter (televised)
Brovary
Dnepr
Kharkhiv
Kiev
Kramatorsk
Odessa
Rivne
Ternopil
Vinnitsa
Zaporozh'e

League of Laughter Leagues abroad

Armenia
Azerbaijan
Estonia
Israel