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• 1 media/KVNseryzniy1967.jpeg media/ChechelnitskyCover.jpg 2022-11-24T15:53:02-08:00 Chapter One: Origins 15 plain 1313042 2022-11-25T11:01:13-08:00

  On the given day
  At the given time
  We're happy to see you again
  Cheerful, brainy friends
  —KVN theme song, 1960s and 1970s

  
  Eduard Arkadievich Chechelnitsky was twenty-five years old when he became, in 1962, the director of Odessa State University's Student Club. Like similar clubs across the Soviet Union, Odessa State's (Odesskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, or OGU) organized dance groups, amateur theater performances, and musical ensembles. Eduard Arkadievich himself had danced as a soloist at Odessa's Palace of Students, a place where "all the talented young people in the city got together" (interview with author, April 26, 2017). Soon, activities for a new game sweeping the nation fell under his purview, as well.
  
  In 1961 the first KVN game aired on Soviet television. Viewers loved the funny, live, largely improvisational competitions, and students across the USSR rushed to form their own Clubs of the Cheerful and Clever. By 1963 Odessa was already hosting city championship matches. Representing either their universities or departments, students and professors played together on KVN teams. But OGU, the oldest, most prestigious university in town, could not compete in the 1963 championship. OGU's departmental teams held contests against one another, the activity was popular, and young people considered KVN "fashionable" and "interesting."  But the OGU students' jokes proved too controversial. "Our writers (avtory) were wonderful, but we were required to go to the Party Committee of the University (PARTKOM) and show them [what we planned]," Eduard Arkadievich recalled. "And they forbade us from performing." Some of their jokes had been "uncomfortable for the government," so they were limited to interdepartmental games until 1972. "At that time we were supervised by the Party Committee," Eduard Arkadievich continued. "I wasn't a member of the Party, but we still had to start with them. Or get round them (obkhodit') somehow." Perhaps out of longtime habit, he then lowered his voice and said out of the corner of his mouth, "It wasn't that hard to get round them." In a representative example of fooling the censors, OGU students put the script that had gotten them banned into the city championship competition anyway. They gave it to the Medical Institute team, who happily performed their material (interview with author, June 2, 2017). 

  The young director could not have known, then, that he would lead his KVN teams to become some of the most beloved celebrities in the Soviet Union. Speaking near his eightieth birthday, in the same Student Club office he'd occupied for fifty-five years, Eduard Arkadievich recalled the height of of the OGU students' popularity: "We performed for, I don't remember the name of the Party Congress, but we performed for Gorbachev. In the State Kremlin Palace...we had a police escort. All of that happened" (interview with author, June 2, 2017). In the 1980s taxi drivers gave Odessa's famous KVNshiki free rides. They toured the entire Soviet Union and, in the 1990s, Europe, Israel, and America. 
  But before it became one of the most popular extra-curricular activities in the Soviet Union, KVN was the most popular television show (Evans 2016, 193; Roth-Ey 2011, 270). Three men, Sergei Muratov, Albert Akselrod, and Mikhail Yakovlev, sketched out the rules for the game at the direction of Soviet Central Television's Youth Programming Desk (Evans 2016, 186-187). They based it on a short-lived but very popular program called Evening of the Cheerful Questions (VVV, Vecher veselykh voprosov), which was itself based on a Czechoslovakian quiz show called Guess, Guess, You Guessers (GGG, Gadai, gadai, gadal'shchik). Much like the American game show The Price is Right, in VVV members of the audience were called up on stage to answer questions for the chance to win small prizes. But producers cancelled the show after a uniquely chaotic live broadcast. It only ran for four months, from May to December 1957 (Roth-Ey 2011, 246-247). Youth Desk editor Elena Gal'perina, though, wanted to channel the best of VVV into a more controlled format. KVN, with its structured games and a pre-selected students, satisfied censors and thrilled young people, too (Roth-Ey 2011, 253-254). Recalling his youth in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, Alexander Grushko claimed, "Its popularity was crazy. At that time, not all families had televisions, and they would go over to others' houses just to watch KVN" (interview with author, January 9, 2018). By 1966, nearly ninety percent of those between fourteen and eighteen years old "always" watched KVN, and 74% of the aggregate fourteen through thirty age group watched religiously (Roth-Ey 2011, 270).

  Most scholarship on the history of KVN focuses on these TV matches (Evans 2016; Janco 2013; Roth-Ey 2011). Accounts end, thus, with the 1972 cessation of televised central league KVN games, based in Moscow. Russian writers and a French researcher have written about KVN as a student activity after 1972, but, with the exception of KVN legends Mikhail Marfin and Andrei Chivurin, largely outlined the ways KVN's popularity declined once the central league dissolved (Iunisov 1999; Marfin and Chivurin 2002; Ostromooukhova 2003). Instead, I focus on how widespread KVN remained, looking in particular at traditions in internal university games. While KVN did not return to airwaves until 1986, oral history interviews reveal that students continued playing KVN in (non-televised) university leagues and, more informally, in primary schools and summer camps, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Banning the show did not end its practice, any more than banning the World Cup would stop people from playing soccer. As soon as 1963, two years after the first KVN broadcast, the game had become a folk activity. The state invented a game, and people crafted of it a tradition. The story of KVN reveals the mechanisms involved in reproducing tradition, demonstrating the complex interplay between state policies, cultural values, and individual agency. This chapter details the institutional and interpersonal interactions that led KVN to become not only popular in the 1960s, but prestigious, all while linked to Soviet systems of value whose influence can still be felt. 
  
  Here, I examine how state-level policies on education, socialist morality, and recreation became realized in two cities outside of European Russia, Irkutsk and Odessa. Odessa, self-styled "capital of humor," hosted some of the most successful KVN teams of the Soviet era. Irkutsk teams have consistently competed at top levels in the post-Soviet era, and KVN has had a strong community presence since the 1960s. Historical accounts from these two cities illustrate how individuals worked with and within local All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Komsomol) cells to play a game that often featured subversive content. After discussing how the KVN movement developed in the USSR, I outline trends in KVN's history during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, paying attention to the ways in which government policies shaped KVN practice. Jokes that criticized the government were, in principle, not allowed, and KVN was, in some spheres, banned as well. But students continued playing KVN, using Aesopian language in a game that was, as Russians say of many activities, "forbidden, but possible" ("nel'zia no mozhno").