This page is referenced by:

• 1 2022-11-24T17:12:31-08:00 From STEM to KVN: Soviet Amateur Theater 10 plain 2022-11-25T11:06:50-08:00

  When they created KVN, Akselrod, Muratov, and Yakovlev incorporated elements from pre-existing Russian student theater culture, both pre-Revolutionary and early Soviet. KVN sketch comedy drew on three main Russo-Soviet traditions: kapustniki (skits), "living newspapers" (zhivye gazety) and amateur student theater. While kapustniki have been performed for hundreds of years, mostly in informal and impromptu settings, living newspapers and Soviet student theater had points of clear emergence, popularity, decline, and transformation. These traditions operated alongside one another—and KVN, when it began—as its practitioners tacked between select activities and larger artistic movements, all, of course, structured by overarching Soviet institutions: cultural commissions, youth organizations, trade unions, writers' unions, universities. The traditions that fed into KVN overlapped, competed, and had different relationships with the state. KVNshiki incorporated elements from each, particularly those that they could easily teach others.

  It does not take much know-how, money, or equipment to put on skits, for instance. One only needs a handful of people and a little imagination. Some children I've known do not even require audiences (though parents are welcome to attend). "Kapustnik," the Russian term for skit, comes from the Russian word for "cabbage" (kapusta). Because of this odd name, a number of theories circulate about how kapustnik came to denote a comedy short. In her work on Soviet mass media, Kristen Roth-Ey repeats one of the most commonly-held: poor pre-Revolutionary actors would cut-up at each others' homes in the evenings, eating pies (piroshki) filled with cabbage because they couldn't afford meat. Their informal performances took the name of the cabbage pies (Roth-Ey 2011, 246 n84). But Mikhail Marfin and Anatoly Chivurin, both successful KVNshiki and long-time editors of KVN's Top League, disagreed with this version. They argued that the first "theater parties" featuring parodies happened not in the 1920s among "Vakhtangovtsy," students of the Evgeny Vakhtangov Drama Academy in Moscow (Gosudarstvenniy akademicheskii teatr imeni E. Vakhtangova), but ten to fifteen years earlier, by actors at the Moscow Art Theater (Moskovskii Khudozhestvenniy Teatr) (Marfin and Chivurin 2002, 8). More, though, than splitting hairs over Moscow theatrical communities that likely overlapped, Marfin and Chivurin see kapustniki roots in traditional Russian village life. In their words, 
  
  Long, long before the dark autumn evenings set in, village girls would gather in a large cabin and cut cabbage to ferment it for the winter. The work was hard and boring. And the girls were young and beautiful. So the village guys came to them and entertained the girls as best they could: they composed couplets, told funny stories, and, of course, keeping the themes local, poked fun at the spectators. So "kapustnik" is in fact a pure Russian folk genre. And a passion for timely humor, apparently, sits in us at the genetic level (Marfin and Chivurin 2002, 9).
  
  It is difficult to authenticate informal performances such as these, either in villages or student collectives. Soviet student theater is better documented because the state was so heavily involved in student amateur activities. This meant that it was in a position to standardize and promote activities like kapustniki and, later, KVN, among students across the USSR. But oversight also meant censorship, obligation, and, perhaps, fear; laughter is healthy, but political jokes might stir up trouble. Yunisov reports that government involvement ruined much of what people loved about kapustniki:
  
  In the 1920s and 1930s, the creation of the state institute of culture's club initiative meant that instead of kapustniki as cheery, cooperative, leisure activities and the informal responses of intellectual amateurs (local and significant), events became censored by communist cells—cultivated, like wall newspapers and agit-estrada in the form of living newspapers, and, later, artistic-agitation groups (Yunisov 1999, 162).
  
  "Living newspapers" were skits that depicted current events of the day, often in an amusing way (Von Geldern and Stites 1995, 238). People began acting out current events on the Armenian front of the Civil War as a way to transmit news (Kukshanov 1978, 88). The living newspaper trend got a boost in 1919, when the Central Committee of the Soviet Union Communist Party decreed that newspapers be read to the illiterate, along with "visual aids" and "concert numbers for the purpose of attracting a large number of guests" (Cosgrove 1982, 7). Mikhail Pustynin, director of a Moscow firm that produced agitprop posters (Rosta), took this edict to heart. In 1919, he established the Terevsat (Theater of Revolutionary Satire), which aimed to dramatize the messages of Rosta posters in skit form (Casson 2000, 108). There were, thus, multiple influences, originators, and styles of living newspaper performances circulating in the 1920s. Living newspapers were not limited to the intelligentsia, either. The performance style spread not only among university students—the typical kapustnik crowd—but became popular in factory towns.  

  
  Unlike kapustniki, individual skits which were not necessarily thematically connected, the living newspaper performances had a cohesive structure—sometimes following the content of an actual newspaper—and lasted about an hour (Mally 2003, 325). The performances also addressed issues of social concern: alcoholism, hooliganism, homelessness, illiteracy, and the equality of women (Kukshanov 1978, 90). In 1923, performances by the group "Blue Blouses" from the Moscow State Institute of Journalism made a particular splash. They took their name from their signature costumes, blue blouses and black pants, the uniform of agitprop activists. The Blue Blouses (sinebluzniki) punched up living newspapers with vaudeville-style entertainment, adding singing, accordion music, "acrobatic dance," and gymnastics to their comedic sketches (Deak 1973, 38; Kukshanov 1978, 88-89). Blue Blouses began each performance with a "parade" of all the actors on stage. Between ten and fifteen individual numbers then followed (Deak 1973, 38). A report in the Christian Science Monitor from 1928 described a Moscow performance as "fresh" and "lively," writing,

  One of their most effective skits is entitled 'Industrialization'. One after another the actors come out in fantastic costumes, adorned with symbols indicating factory buildings, installation of electrical stations or other items in the program of industrialization. Finally, chanting in chorus lively verses, they scramble on each other's backs and shoulders, forming a structure which is supposed to represent the finished industrial system (Christian Science Monitor 1928, 12).

  The Monitor's Moscow correspondent praised the Blue Blouses' gymnastic elements, as well, noting "handsprings, somersaults, and balancing feats" (Christian Science Monitor 1928, 12). Teams from other universities soon borrowed the winning Blue Blouse formula—often calling themselves Blue Blouses too (though teams took names like "Construction" and "Machine," as well) (Kukshanov 1978, 89-90). Blue Blouse (Siniaia Bluza), then, became became synonymous with the living newspaper genre. Near the end of 1924, only one year after the Blue Blouses started shows, the Moscow City Council of Trade Unions began publishing a Blue Blouse periodical. The Blue Blouse magazine included skit outlines, how-to's, and updates about active Blue Blouse groups (Kukshanov 1978, 89-90). Some luminaries of the avant-garde literary movement contributed to this publication, including poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, writer Osip Brik, and playwright Sergei Tretyakov (Cosgrove 1982, 15; Kukshanov 1978, 89-90). Mayakovsky, incidentally, also painted over 400 Rosta posters between 1919 and 1922, and in 1921 he wrote a script for a living newspaper staged at Pustynin's Terevsat theater (Casson 2000, 108). In fact, the Blue Blouses explicitly styled their aesthetics after Mayakovsky's. They wrote in the group's manifesto, "The text must be clear and sharp without unnecessary words. It should resemble the speech of a good orator, and the poems of Mayakovsky, Aceyev, and Tretyakov" (cited in Deak 1973, 39). The manifesto further underlined the link between political mission, humor, and aesthetics, arguing that skits "[Have] got to be short, compact and ideologically sound, rich in satirical incidents and events" (cited in Cosgrove 1982, 15). The Blue Blouses, despite adopting avant-garde, even Futurist, theater techniques from the intelligentsia, styled themselves as working class. "We are not musical nightingales," proclaimed one song. "We are only cogs, in the great soldering together of one working family" (Leach 1994, 169). An early Blue Blouse, A.M. Argo, wrote that teams would exit the stage singing the following march:
  
  We are the Blue Blouses
  We are trade unionists
  We know everything about everything
  Around the world
  We lift up our satire
  Like a bright torch          (Kukshanov 1978, 89)

  The Blue Blouses were truly avant-garde, if not downright Futurist, in designing experimental political theater. They drew inspiration from some of the pioneers of the early Soviet art world, including Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein. Meyerhold's "bio-mechanical" school of acting appealed to many working-class performers who lacked formal acting experience. This school of thought saw the actor's body as a machine, stressing not only precision (as in ballet), but mechanization, efficiency, physicality, and reproducibility (Deak 1973, 45-46). From Eisenstein the Blue Blouses took the aesthetics of montage, going so far as to add flickering lights to the stage to simulate the look of a film projector (Deak 1973, 38, 45). They also sought to force the audience to re-think the relationships between actor, role, and spectator. They would, for instance, refuse to perform unless the audience joined them in a song. At other times the Blue Blouses would invite the audience to predict how a living newspaper would end or plant actors among the audience (Cosgrove 1982, 14). But the Blue Blouses always framed these artistic excursions in terms of a political project. As Eisenstein put it, "The theatrical program of the Proletkult does not involve the "utilization of the values of the past" or the "invention of new forms of theater" but the abolition of the very institution of the theatre as such, replacing it with...an instrument for raising the standard of the training of the masses in their day-to-day life" (Eisenstein and Gerould 1974, 77). Ultimately, living newspapers, like the literacy and kulturnost initiatives, served a revolutionary function. The Soviets were not just building a state, but (re-)forming its subjects.
  
  By 1927, there were over 7,000 amateur living newspaper troupes in Russia (Cosgrove 1982, 9). The popularity of living newspapers has bearing on the history of KVN for two reasons. First, the Blue Blouses worked to export the format to the countryside. This non-urban focus meant that people even in small towns gained experience staging skits in an organized way. Second, the Blue Blouses strove particularly to dramatize local problems (Cosgrove 1982, 15). Rather than simply creating dramatic shorts about, for instance, history, literature, or the life of Stalin, living newspapers encouraged people to satirize their everyday lives. This would become typical of local (not televised) KVN performances, as well.

  Blue Blouse popularity peaked in 1927. That year several troupes left to tour Europe, where they were so successful that Blue Blouses sprung up, at least briefly, in England, France, Germany, and the United States. Living Newspapers even played a role in New Deal America as an official part of the 1930s Federal Theater Project (Cosgrove 1982, iii). In the Soviet Union, though, the avant-garde aesthetic began to lose ground to socialist realism. Stalin pushed obedience rather than revolution. In 1928 the government shut down the Blue Blouse magazine. Troupes were told to focus on rural areas and, in the 1930s, to write skits that explicitly praised Stalin. By the early 1930s the Blue Blouses had all but disappeared (Leach 1994, 168).
  
  Agitprop, or political proselytizing, did not stop, though. In the tradition of the agit-trains, agit-boats, agit-trollies (agittramvai), and agit-cycling groups of the Civil War era—all filled with activists putting on short theater performances—university students spearheaded agitbrigades in the 1950s and 1960s. The brigade based in Moscow State University's physics department (physfak, from "physics faculty"), for instance, put on shows in smaller towns within the Moscow region during the school year and traveled to more distant places during holidays (Siberia, Sochi). Unlike the agit-trains, though, physfak's agitbrigade staged light comedies. Its standard performance piece was a musical called "Archimedes," which loosely depicted the life and times of the Greek scientist. Physfak students V. Kaner and V. Milyaev wrote the play, which the department staged for the first time in 1960s. Even as part of agitbrigades in the 1960s, though, students seemed more concerned with socializing with the young people they met during their travels than pushing a political agenda. After a performance of "Archimedes" in Leningrad, Svetlana Kovaleva recalls that physics students from Ryazan regaled those in Leningrad, Moscow, and Tallinn with fantastic (skazochno) singing and dancing, then the group "as if enchanted, wandered around the nighttime city, forgetting for a while that in the morning we had to get up early and rehearse the play" (Kovaleva 2003, 243).
  
  Describing a five-day trip to Lipetsk (three hundred miles south of Moscow) in November 1961, Kovaleva writes mainly about the songs and dances they performed. "Valerii Milyaev from somewhere brought into our agitbrigade [Okudzhava's] "Song about Vanka Morozov. We immediately fell in love with it and used it in all keys and in with all people" (Kovaleva 2003, 233). The reference to Bulat Okudzhava, known as a guitar poet, bard, or folksinger, is significant because it invokes the constellation of student amateur activity that fed and was fed by state-sponsored endeavors like the agitbrigade. Okudzhava's songs were not officially recorded (i.e., could not be officially recorded) until the 1970s. While his songs more often dealt with themes like love instead of politics, the Soviet state did not recognize him as a musician. His music spread, then, as young people either learned his songs on their own and played them for others or traded bootleg audiorecordings. Okudzhava lived in Moscow. Trips like those of the agitbrigades helped disseminate his work to other regions, where students would teach the songs to their friends, and so on. The Central Commission of the All-Union Lenin Communist Union of Youth signed off on the physfak train tickets. They used them to have a good time.
  
  Physfak students illustrate how official university extracurricular activities intersected with other student trends in the 1950s and 1960s. Stalin's death in 1953 ushered in Krushchev's  thaw era, a time when citizens relaxed their guard a bit; they had "missed socializing" under Stalin (Lebina and Chistikov 2003, 288). Svetlana Kovaleva, a physfak student in the 1960s, wrote that, "At that time there was a turning point in the public consciousness, one associated with the death of Stalin and the arrest of Beria. We breathed freely" (Kovaleva 2003, 13). She continued,

  Sixties youth—it's not just an age. It's a way of life, it's an attitude born of the change of epochs, the death of Stalin, the 20th Party Congress, the first timid attempts to feel like a person. It's the first ambition of a people accustomed to total obedience to suddenly live for themselves. The Student Construction Brigades appeared as a reaction against a system of complete bans, a system of the suppression of the individual (Kovaleva 2003, 32).

  The Student Construction Brigades, in fact, were not terribly radical. These were groups of Moscow State University students who went out into the countryside during the summer to help with large-scale manual labor projects. In 1958, for instance, 500 physfak students harvested grain in Kazakhstan. While fully state-run, the students made these trips their own. Kovaleva remembered this time with great nostalgia, saying, "In [our] hearts to this day live memories of the "virgin lands," of the spirit of camaraderie, of brotherhood—of those things which we are now for some reason embarrassed to talk about out loud" (Kovaleva 2003, 32-34).  The fact that so many students did go on trips like these, many of which involved camping, that outdoor activities of all kinds exploded during the thaw: hiking, camping, sports. In the late 1950s people began having campouts attended by hundreds of people, mainly students, often lugging guitars (Lebina and Chistikov 2003, 275). Amateur music, amateur theater, and craft-making all fell under the umbrella of the "do-it-yourself" (samodeiatel'nost'), or amateur, movement that swept the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s. Moscow State University's talent show in the 1960s was even called an "amateur competition" (konkurs samodeiatel'nosti) (Kovaleva 2003, 69).

  In 1960 the Moscow State University Student Construction Brigades began incorporating agitbrigade performances into their work in rural areas. "During the day—work; evening—rehearsal; on rare weekends—performances on our own or a neighboring collective farm," Kovaleva wrote (2003, 68). 

  Between 1961 and 1965, MGU's physfak agitbrigade held 111 performances, most in the Moscow region, but traveling in the summer months as far as Omsk in Siberia (around 2,000 miles away and two days' journey even on today's trains). In 1969 they went to Sakhalin Island, near Vladivostok. These exemplars of communist youth did not depart without guidelines, however. Written rules stipulated that members of the agitbrigade "love work"; "love their agitbrigade comrades"; "observe good hygiene"; and "follow the orders of the leadership." Perhaps underscoring the fact that this was, indeed, a group of young co-eds, the rules also noted that "Every agitbrigadchik has a right to love in his TIME OUTSIDE OF WORK" (Kovaleva 2003, 194; capitalization in original).

  A detailed schedule for the spring of 1966 shows mostly performances in neighboring cities. But Moscow State University also held internal agitbrigade contests between departments, and in April 1966 Moscow State University students competed in an agitbrigade tournament among all the universities in Moscow (Kovaleva 2003, 196-197). This matters in the history of KVN because it demonstrates that competitive amateur theater leagues were commonplace and very well-organized in the 1960s. 

  A number of amateur theater practices, then, flowed into what would become community KVN leagues. People performed kapustniki long before the revolution. Living newspapers were an explicitly revolutionary practice; too revolutionary, in fact, for the political atmosphere of Stalin's purges. The theater format that most directly influenced KVN, though, emerged alongside the agitbrigades in the 1950s. This was a skit style unique to Soviet students called STEM, the Student Theater of Estrada Miniatures (Studencheskii teatr estradnykh miniatiur). According to Marfin and Chivurin, "In the 1950s and 1960s, STEM was crazy popular" (Marfin and Chivurin 2002, 9).  STEM performances typically included short, even ultra-short, skits, and were staged simply for the amusement of the student body. Unlike KVN, STEM was not judged. Skit themes were typical of those in student songs of the time: "homeland, wine, love, wild parties, friendship" (Yunisov 1999, 18). 
  
  Although KVN competitions included a variety of games, some strictly verbal responses, some, especially those on television, requiring a physical task, the heart of KVN from the 1970s forward was STEM-style skits. The two formats were so similar that Marfin and Chivurin lay out the advantages of transforming and existing STEM group into a KVN team in a section of their book called "How to Form a Team":
  
  First, KVN still has some STEM roots. Second, you already have a group of performers and a writing team. But it would be naive to think that a STEM group is in and of itself a finished KVN team. The fact is, STEM leans more towards estrada-type theater productions, and KVN is, in the end, the art of parody. And that is the primary, most fundamental difference between these genres: the density of humor in KVN is much higher (2002, 110).
  
  The "density of humor" is higher in KVN than STEM mainly because of the conventions of the genre. STEM and KVN co-existed at universities, though KVN's biting wit quickly gained popularity among students. STEM and KVN performances both consist mainly of skits. But in most KVN performances humor, rather than what Marfin and Chivurin call "estrada-type" theater, holds pride of place. Estrada is a theater and music style in Russia that is popular, sometimes schmalzy, often overproduced (cf. MacFadyen 2001, 2002). Estrada is mass entertainment. Satire, with its low production values, subtlety, and requirements for intellectual interpretation, is not. Especially in local performances, song and dance take a backstage to "pure" humor. Teams with simple costumes got high scores if they made judges, and audiences, laugh. On the televised stage, the success of teams such as the duo "Detective Agency Moonlight" (Detektivnoe Agentsvo Lunnyi Svet, or DALS) from Belgorod, Russia illustrate the appeal relatively low-budget teams can wield when they're funny. This two-man team came up with fantastic jokes and very clever skits, winning second place in the Top League both 2014 and 2015. Their clothes were simple. They had no elaborate dance numbers, zero singing ability, and no set pieces. It is common, in contrast, for regional representatives in televised Top League performances to pull out all the stops to showcase their best, with governors and oil companies funding expensive costumes, chorale ensembles, and props. Team Moonlight, with their plain blazers and deadpan delivery, were the opposite of estrada. 

  Elements of STEM comedy beyond the skit endure in KVN, however. The skit format called a "miniature" came from STEM. Miniatures are extremely short skits, as few as two lines. Especially in live KVN performances, "miniatures" are extremely popular. Sometimes miniatures are used transitionally, as well, like palate cleansers between larger skits. The Irkutsk team "Rich with What" ("Chem Bogaty"), for instance, sandwiched an absurdist miniature in between two longer pieces during a 2015 semifinal competition. A young woman introduced the act with, "And now, a miniature about a crab. An incident on the street." One student walked up to another carrying a third student dressed in a crab costume. "Hello (zdorovo)," said the first young man. "Here," said the second, unshouldering his cargo. "Have a crab." The joke came from the fact that "have a crab" (derzhi kraba) is slang for shaking hands. This miniature was one quick embodied pun. The audience laughed out loud for long seconds. You, the reader, probably did not. The moment is not funny when fixed, like a specimen, on the page. Brevity and unexpectedness drive the miniature format.
  "Rich with What" followed the crab miniature with a series of others. In one, a young man tries to guess the age of a woman he is hitting on by asking her questions from pop culture ("What was the first Fast and Furious movie you saw?"). In another, a man distracted by a fireworks show loses his son. He abandons his search with the next round of roman candles. Each of these miniatures lasts less than fifteen seconds, and they are not thematically related. Intentionally or no, they fall in line with Eisenstein's tradition of theater montage—a montage of acts, if not attractions. Information comes quickly, scene after scene. Miniatures are quick and funny, and they delight audiences. 

  Student theater that began as avant-garde went underground almost entirely under Stalin, re-emerged in agitbrigades and STEM under Khrushchev, and pieces of that tradition then evolved into KVN in the 1960s. The Irkutsk region Komsomol sponsored living newspaper competitions in 1977, and it is likely these were holdovers from previous decades. Similarly, the small towns surrounding Odessa hosted agitbrigade competitions in the 1960s. So both Odessa and Ukraine had traditions of skit-making competitions when KVN appeared on television. Komsomol networks and pre-existing amateur theater groups allowed the somewhat bizarre occurrence of a game show leaping from screen to universities across the USSR in only a few years.