TY - JOUR
AU1 - Belokowsky,, Simon
AB - Abstract As their discussion of its scope has become increasingly nuanced, scholars of the Gulag have recently refocused their work around the prisoner experience. Without examining its merits explicitly, some prominent historians of the Gulag have even begun to invoke the term “Gulag society” to describe their object of study. A study of prisoners’ use of humor provides qualified support for the use of this term. In contrast with many others who have examined humor in repressive institutions, I argue that prisoners’ humor was well more than a strategy for “resistance” or “survival,” and while humor was certainly an element of prisoner culture, it was also a staple of prisoners’ sociability as a means to form and maintain interpersonal bonds, as well as a medium for communicating values, attitudes, and information. A product of its important purposes in helping interpret and structure their society, prisoners’ use of humor is fairly well preserved in the extensive memoir literature, penned largely by those sentenced specifically for political crimes. This is in stark contrast to the humor propagated by NKVD authorities overseeing the cultural and political “reforging” of prisoners, which is scarcely mentioned by memoirists even as an annoyance. This provides still more evidence that prisoners were, to some extent, able to reject officially propagated frames of thinking and shape their own experience in what was by its nature a context of dislocation and horror. Sunlight . . . fell across the gray asphalt yard and the red brick walls. Prisoners walked about silently . . . The guards watched intently. I walked off to the side and looked upward: above the brick wall, at its very top, fresh, young leaves fluttered in the blue sky. A thin, white birch tree had grown through a crack in the brick and extended its limber branches up toward the sky, swaying back and forth, rejoicing. . . . I laughed along with the birch tree: What could the killers do? Even if they gave the order to have it cut down, it would live on within me. . . . What could they do, these killers, to her who understood the blue depths of the sky and the laughter of a birch? —Nina Gagen-Torn1 Over the course of the last decade, historians of the Gulag have demonstrated a surprisingly robust movement of information, goods, and people across camp borders.2 Having most recently turned to the question of its still less tangible social and cultural bounds, scholars have found themselves compelled to examine the social structure and culture of those who inhabited its camps, colonies, and special settlements. Introducing his argument that the Gulag may have differed in degree rather than kind from the many other carceral elements and regimes of the Soviet system, Oleg Khlevniuk observes bluntly that the “object of study [for scholars of the Gulag] has increasingly become Gulag society.”3 Steve Barnes, likewise a prominent figure among the generation of Gulag historians rejecting the archipelago model, employs the same neologism—“Gulag society”—extensively in his Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society,4 and other scholars have recently done so as well, mostly in passing.5 At first blush, it is curious that the cohort of historians challenging the sui generis conception of the Gulag is also bringing attention to what they call “Gulag society,” which implicitly assumes a distinct sphere, into wider currency. On the other hand, it was scholars’ renewed focus on previously overlooked aspects of the prisoner experience that revealed a porous border in the first place, and it should not be surprising that a problematizing of the Gulag’s social and cultural bounds has likewise accompanied efforts toward achieving better insight into the experiences of those who lived in the custody of the Gulag apparatus and their way of life as shaped in the context of Gulag institutions.6 In order to approach Gulag society, I examine here the use of humor by those detained in Gulag camps and prisons as a reflection and manifestation of cultural norms as well as a means by which they ordered and maintained their relationships and social structure.7 If prisoners of the Gulag laughed at similar things and in similar ways, this would help us understand the shared patterns of behavior, thinking, and association common to Gulag society—what Barnes refers to as a “certain amount of uniformity and shared culture.”8 At the same time, if prisoners experienced humor in ways not significantly unlike the broader Soviet population, we must then interpret this as still more evidence in support of the trend toward reconsidering the separateness of the Gulag from the broader Soviet system and society. While the Gulag was about as far as possible from a resort, despite counter-reformers’ snide slogan to that effect, it was generally also not a place altogether devoid of rather typical expressions of human behavior and affect including humor.9 Consequently, traces of humor in the Gulag are preserved within a wide array of sources, including collections of surviving Gulag artwork and manuscripts, surviving poetry and chastushki (traditional East Slavic rhymes, recited or sung), and, finally, directives and reports by the central NKVD political enlightenment apparatus and camp propagandists. In particular, a study of Gulag humor and its implications would be severely limited if not impossible without the vast collections of published memoir literature and manuscripts curated by the Sakharov and Memorial Foundations, and I rely heavily on these sources. Mindful of the possibility that this source base can at times be indicative of the context in which it is published as opposed to the context that it recalls, I make a concerted effort to draw evidence in aggregate from minor instances of humor rather than major plot points, assuming that these are less likely to be reshaped at various levels of the author’s conscious intent. Beyond this, I temper my credulity with basic efforts at comparison and corroboration where possible. A problem particular to this memoir set, a variation of the typical overrepresentation of highly educated voices in historical sources, is that virtually all camp memoirs are penned by a minority group of prisoners: those sentenced under the notorious 58th article of the criminal code reserved for political and counterrevolutionary crimes.10 Such prisoners should not be assumed to have had an entirely representative experience, as they were at various times and places isolated from other prisoners, either physically by authorities or socially by other categories of inmates. Nevertheless, although we must be wary of its limited vantage, it is simply unsatisfactory to ignore the extensive memoir literature as a window onto Gulag society. It is also important to define humor as I will consider it here. For the purposes of probing social practice, it does not strike me as logical to interpret humor rigidly, nor does it appear that prisoners thought of humor according to strict formulations: One prisoner reports in her memoir, “I must say that generally speaking we laughed a lot . . . when a person loses absolutely everything, he obtains a strange ability to make merry [veselit’sia], to find humor as never before.”11 Conversely, another wrote home, shortly before his untimely death, “I have never been able to laugh away misfortune [rasstrelivat’ smekhom sobytiia]. The absence of humor—that is our characteristic family trait, for which we live poorly.”12 In either case, whether significant for its presence or significant for its absence, there is no indication that the prisoner in question perceived humor narrowly rather than as broadly tied to merry-making and laughter, and this carries through the memoir record in general. If we must have a formal definition, then it should be any communication or thought, regardless of medium or ultimate reception that could conceivably have provoked a mirthful smile or laughter for any person privy to it. Other scholars who have examined the humor employed by subjects of acutely repressive institutions have generally offered rich and appropriately sympathetic accounts, although these have generally focused on one particular dimension and purpose of humor. In his Laughing in Hell: TheUse ofHumor during the Holocaust, Steve Lipman has collected an impressive compendium of morbid, mordant jokes told in camps and ghettos. Meditating, often quite poignantly, on this body of evidence, he reaches the conclusion that humor was most essentially a mechanism by which prisoners maintained their spirits and dignity in the face of the most difficult of fates.13 Similarly, studies of humor and joking among military captives recurrently present the use of humor as a mechanism for maintaining a sense of emotional survival or well-being.14 Another promising if somewhat surprising institutional parallel to Gulag humor appears to be the humor of American slaves, a topic broached by Eugene Genovese and explored more deeply by William Tynes Cowan.15 In both this and the Gulag context, for example, one observes a duality between a performative humor and the humor shared when members of the controlling class are not present. For example, humor aimed at work-shirkers belongs to the former, while humor about work-shirking belongs to the latter. And yet, despite several insightful observations about its social role, Cowan too ultimately reverts to discussing humor within a frame of survival, a tendency nearly universal among those who treat humor in the context of oppression. Finally, Anne Applebaum, the rare scholar to consider the phenomenon of humor in the Gulag for so much as a page, categorizes it explicitly as a “mechanism of survival.”16 While an understandable impulse, it seems insufficient to reduce something as pervasive as humor to a mere strategy of survival. At what point does one stop surviving and start living? This seems especially important to ask when sentences could span a decade or longer. Such a narrow conception of humor’s role denies agency to those employing it, failing to satisfy Julie Draskoczy’s well taken admonition to “acknowledge the creativity at the camps in the face of annihilation” by overlooking the way that both oppressors and the oppressed sought to use humor to conceive and structure their society—to live it rather than merely survive it.17 Taking proper stock of the role of humor as a tool of survival, but mostly looking beyond this interpretation, the following sections explore the use of humor in Gulag camps from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, a period encompassing rapid growth for the Gulag system, which reached its apogee in the wake of Stalin’s postwar purges. I first treat officials’ often unsuccessful efforts at wielding humor as a tool toward ends deemed socially productive, finding that the themes and strategies pursued by officials were largely not unique to the Gulag. I then examine patterns and characteristics common to prisoners’ own humor, which collectively suggest some elements specific to a Gulag society, developing organically as a product of the social distortions introduced by the camp experience, although I concede that even these were not altogether unique to the Soviet Union under Stalin. Humor in Camp Propaganda Seeking to forge a new Soviet person in the immediate wake of revolution, Bolshevik ideologists confronted a peculiar question: “Should the proletariat laugh?”18 For many reasons, that question was answered in the affirmative, and ridicule was a particularly potent force in the early Soviet campaigns against religion (as well as the broader campaign for political education).19 As Bell and Barnes have shown convincingly, political enlightenment remained a stubborn, if slightly diminished, marker of the Gulag project, so it is not too surprising to discover satire among the propaganda aimed at the population of the Gulag.20 It is nonetheless striking, though, the extent to which this earnest quest for enlightenment, almost charmingly naïve for a system that has been not-unfairly labeled a “meat-grinder for the useless millions,” overlapped with strategies of naked, utilitarian manipulation.21 NKVD-directed propaganda efforts aimed at Gulag prisoners were similar to general Soviet propaganda in that authorities found satire particularly valuable in times of dislocation. Between 1928 and 1938, the output of major satirical journals printed in the Soviet Union fell from roughly 45 million copies to just over 10 million, a significant decrease; and yet, during the upheaval of collectivization, circulation of the most prominent satirical journal aimed at Ukrainian peasants grew seven-fold.22 Amid all the exigencies and shortages that confronted the Soviet people and state during the Second World War, the total output of satirical journals remained steady—the enthusiastic printing of satirical journals at the front compensated for a dip in the circulation of Krokodil (Crocodile), which had by then consolidated its position as the official Russian-language humor journal.23 Similarly, Gulag propagandists were instructed to use satire as a way to boost camp productivity in the face of an acute crisis: the wartime decline in camp labor-force and welfare.24 By means of a pair of emphatic, ominous memorandums circulated a month before German troops crossed the Soviet border, directors of each camp’s “Cultural-Edification Division” (Kul’turno vospitatel’nyi otdel: KVO) were instructed by NKVD overseers in Moscow to tailor their propaganda toward encouraging prisoners to conserve fuel and materials and were informed that they themselves would need to be more proactive in marshalling their own resources.25 Within this context of wartime shortage, officials would also be tasked with manufacturing patriotic feeling and disdain for the enemies of the Soviet Union. For the latter task, especially, camp KVO officials turned to satire. Camp theater troupes expanded their repertoires to include a genre one KVO director described as “political satire on Hitlerites” (politsatira na gitlerovtsev), while officials at another camp regularly allowed a leading member of the kul’tbrigad (lit. culture-brigade) to freely wander the camp reciting antifascist rhymes and singing satirical couplets about Hitler and Goebbels with the accompaniment of an accordion.26 It is also logical that these tropes would have extended into the camp press. This hypothesis is much more difficult to confirm, however, since surviving Gulag newspapers of the mid-late Gulag period are scarce, and memoirists do not discuss them in significant detail (even in those cases where they worked on them). However, among the camp effects of the cartoonist Konstantin Rotov, who founded a satirical newspaper at Usol’lag in the 1940s, we find unflattering representations of Japanese officers that mimic his pre-arrest work for the all-Russian Krokodil (Figure 1). In this case, at least, the very same artist who produced propaganda aimed at the average Soviet citizen went on to produce comparable propaganda for the Gulag prisoner following his arrest and internment. Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Sketches of Axis military figures by Konstantin Rotov prepared at Usol’lag (pencil on paper, near Solikamsk, USSR, 1940–48). Image © International Memorial Foundation (KP819). Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Sketches of Axis military figures by Konstantin Rotov prepared at Usol’lag (pencil on paper, near Solikamsk, USSR, 1940–48). Image © International Memorial Foundation (KP819). Satire against an enemy living in what was portrayed as a totalitarian, militarized society was a sensitive exercise for administrators of forced labor camps. For example, a former kul’tbrigad member recalls having participated in one particularly unforgiving production satirizing Nazi society, but he notes that it was performed only for camp directors.27 It is not clear whether this was out of an abundance of caution on the part of camp authorities or whether camp officials dictated the choice of audience in response to a previous miscalculation. A memoirist from Ukhtpechlag gives an account of the type of incident that likely gave camp directors pause: I recall how in 1939 an issue of Krokodil fell into our hands. On the front cover—a map of Hitler’s Germany . . . surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers with automatic rifles held in their sights the entire territory of hapless Germany, which had been turned into a total concentration camp. The caption read that Hitler had penned the entire people behind barbed wire! . . . At the sixth lagpunkt, an enthusiastic educator had an artist copy this cartoon onto a large plywood panel and hang it near the campsite. . . . The camp prisoners had a laugh about it, saying that the author of the cartoon had erred: the borders of Germany looked a lot like the sixth lagpunkt. . . . The very first night, [new] captions appeared on the board: Solovki, Kolyma, Bam, Vorkuta, Chibiu, Karaganda.28 Indicating the potency and penetration of this subject-matter, wartime topics made an appearance in unsanctioned prisoner humor as well. Two examples from Koshkin dom (a “satirical almanac” composed largely over the course of the 1940s by medical annex workers at Kolyma, and one of the few surviving original manuscripts of any genre of Gulag literature) further demonstrate how prisoner reactions to war-time tropes ranged between benign and subversive. One satirical story, written just about six months after the bombing Hiroshima, casually describes a “sun shining with [the brightness of an] atomic [flash].”29 The very next entry in the almanac, a parody on Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Sovetskaia azbuka” [Soviet abecedary] contains a verse that may have been more problematic for authorities: “For the bomb, uranium must be mined / Get used to food at dinnertime.”30 Siberian camps like Butugychag at Kolyma were major sources of uranium in this period, and prisoners were, unsurprisingly, entirely aware that the bottom line was extracting their labor, whether they were being fed somewhat less meager rations or somewhat more cutting propaganda. The explicit concern of most satirical propaganda was in fact to encourage labor discipline, an impulse and subject matter that conveniently confounded the extraction of labor with the more noble goal of reforging social parasites into productive proletarians. A 1941 memorandum, for example, advising camp KVO heads to embody their political agitation with a “more effective, sharper” tone, suggested “the use of slogans, banners, signboards of production indicators, and satirical leaflets [karikaturnye listy].”31 Reinforcing this, a 1942 memorandum announcing a regime for the production of stengazety (newspapers placarded or simply painted on walls) recommended “satirical newspapers” (karikaturnye gazety) as one of the “more commonly circulated” varieties; central NKVD overseers intended for these to “expose and harangue [bichevat’] the lazy, those refusing to work, those pretending to be ill, those gambling away their clothes, and other violators of camp regime and labor discipline.”32 Following general Soviet practice for Russian-language satirical publications, such newspapers were frequently given the title “Krokodil” (Crocodile) and often generically referred to as krokodily (crocodiles) on account of what was to be their biting humor; they are mentioned regularly by camp KVO heads in their reports to the central administration about their efforts at political education.33Stengazety were a logical choice, given a shortage of paper, and, what is more, this medium fit well the aggressive humor that authorities envisioned. One KVO inspector recounts an anecdote he hoped could be reproduced elsewhere: A caricature of prisoners Petrov, Pozdniak, and Kuritsyn who had been stealing materials at work and personal belongings in the barracks was placed in [the camp] krokodil. After the publication of this caricature, all three came by the KVCh [lit. cultural edification annex] and declared that there would be no more violations of labor and camp discipline from their end. Petrov, Pozdniak, and Kuritsyn have kept their word.34 It is somewhat difficult to accept that this incident occurred in quite the stark way that the inspector, Vasil’ev, presents it, but he is not the first to describe a similar approach, aiming to create a “den of peer pressure.”35 Tellingly, the overseer of the KVO apparatus for Chita Oblast camps responds to a negative assessment of his third quarter summary for 1946 by composing a particularly lengthy discussion of satirical newspapers for his next report.36 This bureaucrat writes under the firm impression that ridicule is a particularly worthwhile step in the “reforging” process and that his boss in Moscow will agree. Such didactic mockery, “corrective, ‘scourging,’ ‘lashing’ or otherwise castigating” was a staple element if not ethos of Soviet satire.37 While KVO officials were clearly optimistic about the potential of satirical newspapers, it does not appear that they were met with a similarly enthusiastic reception. Notable in itself is that memoirists mention them very infrequently. Even Irina Ugrimova, who headed a group of artists working on such a krokodil in the early 1950s at Inta, describes her experiences in a terse few lines: What else did I do? A krokodil! Yes, above all I supported direct visual agitation [nagliadnuiu agitatsiiu]: “You took on a responsibility, and what have you done?”—say, such a slogan. I would draw some sort of hag doing one thing or another. The entire perimeter [vsia zona] was outfitted with this direct visual agitation—that was me too.38 The passing thought Ugrimova gives to her satirical work may be an indication of the volatility of remembrance. A series of beautiful postcards in the possession of the Memorial Foundation, produced by and exchanged among her team, indicate that the krokodil was a fixture of at least their own lives and humor, even if its rigid themes could be an annoyance.39 Unlike Ugrimova, Aleksandr Morozov seems to have been more proud of his brief tenure writing for a satirical paper, describing his work in phrasing reminiscent of the ways camp officials wrote to their overseers, but he also does not dwell on it.40 But what did readers think? I could find only one review, but it speaks loudly: [The stengazeta also] had a humor section . . . they figured, apparently, that workers in the throes of starvation would be splitting their sides with laughter reading this material. Finally! Someone has acidly calumnied these bums and loafers refusing to pay their debt to the Motherland with honest labor. Suffice it to say, the stengazeta, that staple of the Soviet way of life, was regularly published and never read.41 Whereas Applebaum demonstrates at various points of her survey that prisoners craved stimulation in the form of reading material, this product apparently left virtually no tangible impression on the most highly literate survivors of the Gulag (those who penned memoirs). While it is true that political prisoners did not always have access to the same materials as prisoners sentenced under other statutes of the criminal code, the memoir record as a whole indicates no shortage of cases where these prisoners were housed among the general population (the proportion changed over time), and efforts to keep prisoners away from stengazety on an individual basis would likely have been ineffective. Even if we accept that many political prisoners might have been moved to more restrictive regimes where such camp-produced satire was inaccessible, there is no indication in the memoir record that anyone missed it when it was gone. On this basis, and with deference to Draskoczy’s arguments for agnosticism with respect to the success of the camp propaganda aimed at reforging prisoners, it is reasonable to conclude that satirical periodicals in their varied forms did not connect with their audience, at least in the case of political prisoners.42 Similarly unpopular were the official “production-oriented” (proizvodstvennye) chastushki, which were sampled in official correspondence but are almost completely absent from the memoir record.43 A folk-tradition of coupled rhymes known for their subversive content, the chastushka is simple and impertinent, while the proizvodstvennye chastushki cited by officials are clunky and tedious: One verse belonging to a twenty-three-stanza chastushka set recorded in official correspondence declaimed, “But it’s wonderful to labor / Something not each person knows / It’s not quite the same thing brother / To sit around and pick your nose!”44 I am not convinced that hungry prisoners during (or after) a long shift of forced labor were especially comforted by these words. These stale chastushki are particularly representative of a recurrent flaw in the center’s thinking, one that also extended to broader Stalin-era propaganda efforts where these chastushki could also be found.45 In theory, KVO heads were to be creative and capture prisoners’ imagination with these rhymes. In practice, however, they were stymied in this endeavor. For example, a reasonably earnest chastushka satirizing violent aggression among prisoners from the bulletin of Aktiublag lagpunkt (colony) 14 was savaged in a memorandum by NKVD overseers for its poor grammar (which is, of course, an authentic feature of the colloquial chastushka form): “Such chastushki could only have been put in the paper by a completely careless illiterate,” the head of the KVO mechanism for the NKVD, Kuz’min, declared, “and, as is self-evidevident [sic], they will achieve neither popularity nor influence among the prisoner population.”46 This calculation appears to have been in error, as we can conjecture an at-best-limited relationship between the satirical camp press and its audience, and the sterile chastushki that bureaucrats preferred appear to have been forgettable, if grammatical. Despite these failures, not all KVO efforts at humor flopped. There is indication that the underappreciated institution of Gulag theater could capture audiences’ attention even if the tropes were “official” ones like mockery of otkazchiki (those refusing to work). Kul’tbrigad member Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, for example, recalls performances based on such topics fondly, indicating that he did not find the topic artistically stifling, and he describes a positive reaction to his work, something missing from the accounts of those who produced written and illustrated propaganda.47 Actor Vatslav Dvorzhetskii also recalls a popular routine, “Uncle Klim,” a character of his invention who took on a life of his own among camp prisoners. A sample monologue he includes in his memoir illustrates how theater could combine an “official,” pro-labor trope with the organic, honest humor necessary for a more effective production: Of the Petrov Brigade, I have heard, they feel there’s no need to work: They are thinking, “for God’s sake, we already work so late!” They dig twice into the clay and then go running for their pay. Here we aren’t paid a lot, but that’s the reason we have blat!48 Hanging nightly in the kitchen, and the blat is our permission; A spot working at the baker’s one can only get with favors; favors owed to neighbors! Another one will learn to swear, And scream, “I am no shmuck! I would sure work anywhere (if I could take it easy there). Somehow I’ll catch some luck.” Oh look, the second colony men, Filled three cars with bricks then went, Loaded forty-four tons of cement; Good going second colony men!49 What begins as a straightforward criticism of a lazy brigade turns rather quickly into a frank discussion of camp existence, ending with an ambiguous Mayakovskian hurrah. Who is Uncle Klim’s joke on? The lazy brigade? The blatniki (favor-traders)? The men of the second colony who loaded forty-four tons of cement while their counterparts slacked off? Or perhaps, with its clumsy lines and uneven tone, this is veiled satire of the official chastushki? In any case, the camp authorities found no harm in it, and the prisoners found some solace: “Soon enough, this became not only the most popular number, but turned into a ‘cliché;’ [it] became some kind of ‘talisman,’ a ‘symbol of truth.’ People turned to ‘Uncle Klim’ for help, threatened people with ‘Uncle Klim,’ awaited his intercession and support.”50 What popularity this character found seems due to an effort to reconcile the official line with lived experience, which itself is a product of the spontaneity and creativity of the actor—something more easily achieved on stage rather than in writing and which left fewer traces that might attract censure from authorities. At least in part because of this capacity to provide an ambiguous space where multiple meanings could coexist between “official” humor and prisoners’ own humor, comedic theater and theater in general were particularly popular forms of Gulag art. Through the 1940s and 1950s, the official emphasis on kul’turnost’ (culturedness) persisted as a priority for the KVO apparatus and presented KVO chairs and kul’tbrigad performers with the opportunity to perform apolitical pieces—including comedy—under official sanction. Performances could take place at work-sites by roving kul’tbrigad troops under convoy, at “evenings of amateur artistic craft” (vechera khudozhestvennoi samodeiatel’nosti), or at special clubs for officials, and they could take widely varied forms. Sources from three or more separate camps confirm each: traditional stage comedy, formal recitals of chastushki,51 puppet theaters,52 and klounady (clown acts).53 These performances persisted in no small part because the leadership of the KVO apparatus saw humor as neither frivolous nor especially dangerous. Meanwhile, for members of the kul’tbrigad, it could have great personal benefits. Ida Varpakhovskaia recalls her husband’s first turn as theater director at the Magadan camps: “He needed comedy so that he could set people free [raskrepostit’ liudei], at least on stage . . . the production was light, elegant, bright, and soothed [pokoril] all of Magadan.”54 As skeptical as we should be that Magadan was, in fact, soothed, Varpakhovskaia describes plausibly the way that theater and, in turn, stage comedy coexisted at the intersection of authorities’, artists’, and prisoners’ immediate interests and needs. It occurs, furthermore, that the NKVD put a notable amount of faith in self-censorship in the quest for cultural enlightenment. It is difficult to imagine that no cast-member or viewer of the production “Bestalanna” made the mundane observation that the play’s title was a syllable stress and vowel-shift away from “bez Stalina” (sans Stalin) or that no one thought to generalize the title of the Ostrovsky comedy “The Guilty Innocent” (Bez viny vinovaty) to their own situation. These tongue-in-cheek program choices mirror Moscow director Viktor Tripot’s efforts to stage suggestively named plays (including the Ostrovsky) throughout the 1930s.55 But while these kinds of suggestive episodes might have, in another setting, landed those responsible in the camps, in the context of the Gulag itself, camp KVO officials generally showed no such concern. This is still more surprising given that performers could very well come from among political prisoners. Anton Antonov-Ovseenko notes this irony, recalling his discomfort at being cast as a high-ranking NKVD officer, especially considering he performed for engineers hired from among the non-Gulag population.56 This general attitude appears to have been a risk taken consciously by authorities rather than an oversight. The 1942 memorandum on the camp press mentioned earlier stated explicitly that “editors must accept articles for the newspaper from all prisoners, irrespective of which statute of the criminal code they are convicted under.”57 Quite conspicuously, this would have included political prisoners, and, indeed, those working in the political enlightenment annexes were commonly political prisoners themselves. In the interest of cultural enlightenment, authorities took a permissive attitude, irrespective of a number of significant taboos, to such an extent that those prisoners who desired to push the envelope were sometimes frustrated into discarding it altogether. N. M. Korzhavin recounts a theater performance where a young lady called Shurka, who “had previously shown no interest in politics,” jumped on stage and began shouting undignified chastushki about Stalin before being hauled off, never to be heard from again.58 This incident seems less a case of earnest confusion about boundaries of the sort Waterlow focuses on in his work on Stalin-era humor and more an exasperated effort to violate the surprisingly loose norms at which some authors have expressed surprise.59 The liberality with which political prisoners were allowed to participate in camp cultural production may be surprising to the historian, as it sometimes was to prisoners themselves, but the humor officially propagated in the Gulag itself was largely familiar and banal. The wartime themes and, still more, the stilted exhortations toward labor that can be observed in officially propagated Gulag humor are tropes that hardly distinguish it from the humor any given Soviet citizen may have come across in satirical publications. The same can be said for the ridicule of wrong-doers. It is no coincidence that former prisoner Feldugin’s critical review of the satirical camp press, reproduced above, generalized the camp stengazeta to broader Soviet experience. Satirical propaganda aimed at exploiting the labor of individuals (from imprisoned, socially undesirable groups) toward the fight against totalitarian fascism, while promising them self-actualization by way of (coerced) labor, approached the limits of a cynicism that was by no means unique for the Soviet Union under Stalin. Prisoners’ Humor Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about officially produced and sanctioned humor in the Gulag was how unextraordinary it was within the Soviet context and, within this, how poorly much of it addressed the particular context of its audience. But, and especially because humor is so endemic to human sociability, this only opened the space for a more “local” humor met by prisoners’ own unsanctioned efforts. I observed above that several of the leading scholars of the Gulag have recently come to use the term “Gulag society.” The following section serves in part to illustrate one particular respect in which the term might be preferable to a construction like “Gulag culture.” Whereas the frame of culture suggests a set of practices that reflect values and ideas, it does not necessarily privilege the way a pattern of behavior—such as humor—is also a tool used by those among various parts of a broader Gulag society to structure their relationships and lives, both in relationship to one another and in general. The largely social function served by humor helped prisoners conceive and order their existence in a variety of ways not necessarily subsumed under simple formulations like “resistance” or “survival.”60 That is not to say that these factors did not play a role, even a significant one. The issue is more that they are vague catchalls that do not do justice to the constructive impulses of individual psychology and do not take into account the social nature of humor. If Waterlow had not already stressed the point, I would have: we are not simply interested in humor as an abstract product of existence, we want to know how “society actually functioned.”61 I am not seeking necessarily to dismiss offhand a “hydraulic” interpretation of humor, which would suggest it primarily provided an outlet for internal turmoil, but rather to stress that any relief of tension (personal or social) that humor achieved operated in parallel to its function in mediating discourse among prisoners.62 In this view, it is more than a release of tension when inmates break out in laughter in Tat’iana Aksakova-Sivers’s account, “Each of us was sentenced to either ten or eight years; there were no other sentences . . . Strange though it may be, we met this news with an explosion of laughter—this was not bravado but our earnest reaction. It seemed to us some kind of half-baked joke.”63 Note that Aksakova-Sivers bases her assessment of her cellmates’ feeling based foremost on their reaction: the outburst quickly and officially establishes a shared view that the situation had reached an acute and even perhaps unbelievable point of absurdity, which builds comradery and then also triggers a process of evaluation. Similarly, we can look beyond the most straightforward interpretation of a caricature drawn by Kolyma prisoner Aleksei Merekov, depicting an angry prison guard.64 Most trivially, this can be interpreted as a simple expression of anger or spite: what simpler revenge than to draw a nasty picture of a tormenter? But we should not forget that this image, drawn on an errant scrap of paper was shared with what Waterlow calls a “trust group,” for which this conception of a particular guard’s cruelty became a shared, exclusive good that helped build community.65 Indeed, indulging in one’s own, unshared humor was interpreted as a sign of degradation and was treated with great scorn. Another Merekov work, caricaturing prisoners’ physiognomy after several years in the camps, depicts unsettling, self-satisfied smiles as they become transformed into demonic, antisocial figures. (Figure 2) Daniil Egorovich Alin describes a prisoner in convoy to Kolyma steadily losing himself in silence and developing a strange smile “not directed at anyone around him,” its presence deeply unsettling everyone around and leading officials to reroute him to a psychiatric ward.66 Not letting others in on some cosmic joke is held by Alin to have spared this prisoner the worst fate out of others’ sheer discomfort. Another phenomenon that can be considered to have fallen within the scope of this antisocial humor is the throes of “laughter [and] tears” that marked drug users, described with disdain and perhaps a hint of jealousy by memoirist Il’ia Pavlovich Aituganov as the “criminal elites’ [narcotic] ecstasy.” 67 If there remains any doubt that humor’s release had a social currency, the direct commodification of laughter’s release in this instance is a particularly effective rejoinder.68 Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Sketch by Sevvostlag prisoner Aleksei Merekov, captioned, “In the fifth year at the camps (the survivors),” caricaturing prisoners’ transformation over their time in the camps (pencil on paper, Kolyma region, USSR, 1937–46). Image © International Memorial Foundation (KP462). Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Sketch by Sevvostlag prisoner Aleksei Merekov, captioned, “In the fifth year at the camps (the survivors),” caricaturing prisoners’ transformation over their time in the camps (pencil on paper, Kolyma region, USSR, 1937–46). Image © International Memorial Foundation (KP462). Sharing, not merely of comfort or pleasure but also of knowledge or of commentary, was central to the social uses of humor in the Gulag. The most easily and widely shared tokens were wry proverbs known seemingly throughout the camp system, such as variations of a particular rhyme about the Kolyma camps’ long winters and short summers recalled by some memoirists who never set foot in the Kolyma camps.69 Other jokes made their rounds around individual camps at individual times but reflect general patterns. These include, for example, anecdotes recounting characters ironically and unjustly condemned to the Gulag.70 The narrative format characteristic of Russian jokes allowed prisoners to reflect on (and process) the unfairness of their own situation—a subject never too far from mind but frustrating and painful to discuss—using humor as a medium. Stories involving morbid, ironic misfortune befalling animals were particularly popular among inmates. While tales about animals are a staple genre of Russian folklore, these particular stories recounted in the Gulag were relatively distinct in that they depicted animals as victims of human abuse.71 Boris L’vovich Brainin, who spent several years in the camps of the Northern Urals, recounts a particularly well-received joke in which one man comes home to find another sleeping with his wife. In a panic, the Don Juan jumps out of the window, crushing and killing a dog in the dvor below. The husband ultimately catches his wife’s paramour and demands with all the rage proper to a lover scorned that he compensate him for the dead dog.72 This kind of anecdote put animal lives on an uncomfortable par with those of humans and fits well with an account by Vladimir L’vovich Sosnovskii from his war-time camp experience: a camp director forces hundreds of prisoners to search night after night in inhumane conditions for his lost dog. Finally, a prisoner demands, “Where is your humanity? Four hundred people are worth less to you than some scraggly bitch?”73 The same sentiment is reflected in sardonic verse written on a rag during a prisoner-convoy: “They’re endangered birds! / You can’t shoot swans as game / But men are killed in herds / Our age’s crying shame.”74 In manifestations of this trope, prisoners were not always presented as inferior to animals, sometimes merely equal to them. The title of Brainin’s memoir, Vospominaniia vridola, refers to camp slang for prisoners doing hard labor, an acronym formed from vremenno ispolniaiushchii dolzhnost’ loshadi (temporarily performing the duties of a horse).75 Animal tropes were commonly represented in illustrated art as well. Cards and drawings from Irina Ugrimova’s collection personify her troupe of artists as a menagerie of farm and zoo animals, and inscriptions indicate that they took animal nicknames.76 Other images they produced depict a hatched bird escaping a chain and a cat shown far from home. The latter mirrors an analogy drawn in a 1947 poem written by Elena Tager at Kolyma, describing her older years in the camps as “homeless, like an unwanted cat.”77 (Figure 3) One illustration by an unknown artist from the Inta camp stands out as particularly subversive: three bunnies work collectively to hold a rifle pointed at a wincing hunter, with the caption “Chacun son tour . . .” (i.e., “You are the executioner and I am the victim, but . . . roles often change,” as phrased by the protagonist of a play written at Belbaltlag).78 (Figure 4) This may be a particularly stark example, but there is strong indication that prisoners weighed their plights against animals’ across several different camps and camp types. As Jeff Hardy finds specifically for birds, “inmates [saw] in them a reflection of their own incarcerated existence and their yearning for flight and freedom.”79 What is more, by invoking satire, whether in images, poems, jokes, or stories shared with fellow inmates, Gulag prisoners turned this reflective process into a communal introspection. Figure 3. View largeDownload slide View largeDownload slide Greeting cards prepared at Intalag, from Irina Ugrimova’s collection (watercolor on paper, near Inta, USSR, early 1950s), captioned “Do you recognize this quartet? There is not a difference yet.” and “Happy Birthday!” Images © International Memorial Foundation (KP1956; KP1945). Figure 3. View largeDownload slide View largeDownload slide Greeting cards prepared at Intalag, from Irina Ugrimova’s collection (watercolor on paper, near Inta, USSR, early 1950s), captioned “Do you recognize this quartet? There is not a difference yet.” and “Happy Birthday!” Images © International Memorial Foundation (KP1956; KP1945). Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Drawing by an unknown artist depicting rabbits who have gotten the upper hand over a hunter, originally from Irina Ugrimova’s collection (watercolor and charcoal on paper, near Inta, USSR, early 1950s). Image © International Memorial Foundation (KP1904). Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Drawing by an unknown artist depicting rabbits who have gotten the upper hand over a hunter, originally from Irina Ugrimova’s collection (watercolor and charcoal on paper, near Inta, USSR, early 1950s). Image © International Memorial Foundation (KP1904). Not all exercises in satire were so abstract. Classical works of humor, like Griboedov’s Gore ot uma and Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, were common fare among the group readings and recitals described by Applebaum, and those story-tellers who relied on their own artistic interpretation were valued for their wit and comedic ingenuity.80 Still more popular were yet more accessible genres of humor, often expressed in song and rhyme. Non-official chastushki are mentioned by myriad memoirists as a pleasant diversion, popular among a wide strata of Gulag inmates: “Sometimes, a bunch [of people] would gather and sing together. With special feeling, and even [as if they were] in sort of ecstasy [they would] perform Gop so smykom (criminal with his tool).”81 These ribald rhymes and songs appear to have been spread in part via a relatively simple mechanism, the transit camps. As recalled by Galina Stepanova-Kliuchnikova, “Freedom reigned [there] . . . Painted-up girls played cards, smoked, cursed each other vivaciously, belted out vulgar chastushki. Thieves, robbers, recidivists—they were all being transferred from one set of camps to another.”82 One particularly widespread genre, criminal chanson was primarily sad and longing, but it could also be peppered with irony and counterbalanced by a bawdy humor. Gustav Gerling-Grudzinski’s account in particular sheds light on the tension among these emotions: Never was the word “soul” more comprehensible to me than when I would hear the disjointed, improvised musical compositions in the barracks and see the prisoners listening raptly, gazing intently into nothingness, focused as if in prayer. . . . “Cut it out—the prisoners would sometimes say to a musician who was too sorrowful—you’re tearing [our] souls apart.” And, instantly, from the guitar’s strings would burst forth Ukrainian “chastushki,” or prison songs. Dissonant voices would join in all the more fervently and loudly until the whole barrack began to thunder with song, sending off into the darkness strange words about a convict who was “covered in tears” going to work, about people who got together at night [forming] “a secret select committee,” about the prisoner who wished his friends a happy new year from a Chekist dungeon—“that Cheka, definitely [an] eternal darkness, that makes [one] laugh and cry.”83 This was more than “laughing so as not to cry,” as the “survival” school might have it; the tears bled organically into the laughter in the Gulag barracks, tied together by a cutting existential irony. This emotionally complex phenomenon can be contrasted with an arguably less profound humor stemming from sexual frustration. While in the separation of the sexes, as with much else, the camps varied in their regimes, very rarely was there an unfettered access to the opposite sex, and this became an inspiration for prisoners’ joking. A 1950 sketch by caricaturist Iulo Sooster, for example, depicts three prisoners strewn across an overlook in awkward poses, gawking at women off in the distance.84 A satirical essay from the Koshkin dom almanac, titled “Moi ideal” (My type) extolls the virtues of brutish women, suggesting them to be ideal partners.85 This modest proposal is a comparatively constructive response to a heavily constrained sexuality that could otherwise manifest itself merely in raucous jeering. One prisoner recalls being awoken in her barracks on her first night in a new camp, “Brazen faces look in from every [window]; a laughter resounds: ‘The babes have arrived, but they’ll be useless—intelligentsia, not our kind.’”86 Brainin presents a particularly unsettling depiction of the coarse mockery of sexual conquest: During a regular, clandestine trip from the men’s barracks to the women’s, Nel’ka, a prostitute who has been stricken with tuberculosis, senses it is her time and asks as a final request to be mounted; not long into the act, a laughter reverberates among the men: “Get off brother! She’s dead!”87 This account strikes me as exaggerated for effect, but the underlying premise is not at odds with the general picture of gender relations in the Gulag. Such incidents suggest that humor among male Gulag prisoners responded in part to their precarious or altogether foreclosed access to sexual contact with women. Women’s humor, on the other hand, responded less to the limits on or lacunae of possibilities for intercourse between the sexes. Rather, ironic commentaries by women appear to have reacted more to the destruction of marriage and family, referring recurrently to bemusement or even resentment at being imprisoned for crimes notionally committed by husbands. 88 Memoirists Zinaida Usova and Elena Zhukova include catchy rhymes in their accounts, exemplified by Usova’s limerick-chastuhka: “A wrecker she married, but she was unwary / She tarried to snitch on his crime / Her story unknown, she was in jail thrown / Now she’s serving the same length of time.”89 Meanwhile, Nina Afanasova and Anna Barina-Shilova recall jokes to the same effect.90 These verses seem to make merriment out of absurdity rather than attack the unfairness of the situation, and range between agnosticism and incredulity toward the innocence of the husband. Thus, they cast a wedge between the past and the present. Here, Zhukova’s chastushka is instructive: “Some get five and some get eight / No logic here to contemplate / On whose account is this your home? / Is it on his or on your own? / I’m serving time for my first one / I’m carrying the second’s son.”91 While unmarried men in the Gulag were more likely to direct a lewd humor at those in their midst, at least some married women in the Gulag seem to have taken the extra step of estranging themselves from the men who were still legally their husbands. While a fixated bawdy, sexual humor among men is not at all unusual when the sexes are separated (whether among prisoners, soldiers, or even monks producing sexually loaded marginalia in certain medieval manuscripts), the humor by female Gulag prisoners seems to indicate a more active rejection of non-Gulag mental spaces. In both cases, though, sexual needs, as well as those that might have been constructed as romantic, had an immediacy for prisoners and appear to have been incompatible with dwelling on past lives, loves, or conquests, except in rejecting them. At least in this way, Gulag prisoners lived and joked in the moment. Amid the tensions introduced by the acute scarcity that often dominated the moment, there is much indication that humor helped facilitate, build, and maintain ordered interaction. An incident related by Nina Afanasova indicates how membership in a “trust group” could be communicated and even effected using a performative humor.92 Her coat stolen, Afanasova angrily invokes her benevolence as camp medical technician with the camps’ criminal leadership. Upon its return, she is met by two prisoners serving sentences for common crimes who are “laughing merrily, ‘Aha, you got your coat back . . . don’t ever say now that you’re not “one of ours.’”93 Humor did not just mark the creation or acknowledgement of new bonds, it strengthened extant ones. The greeting cards illustrated by Irina Ugrimova and her team regularly included humorous verse to accompany professions of love and friendship. Further, humor could be used to diffuse tension—not internal but social. Alin recounts a case where, in a rage, he picked up a trash can lid with the intention of attacking the barrack starosta (an elder, typically a criminal boss). The starosta’s response is not to have Alin killed, as he expects, but to burst out laughing.94 It is unlikely that the starosta perceived a genuine humor in the notion that he could be attacked, but, instead, he sought to convey his magnanimity and power for the sake of stability. Enter, again, the discursive element of humor, helping to articulate and develop common understandings and shared norms. It can be taken for granted that humor could serve the same general functions in Soviet society in general, but it is worth noting that Gulag prisoners also used humor to form and maintain the social fabric of their camp communities. In other words, humor was more than a mere mechanism of survival, it was a way of building and maintaining relationships by making claims to familiarity, status, and legitimacy. Humor also helped convey norms and information quite specific to camp life. The prisoner who howled “chastushki BOMZHey” (bums’ chastushki) or sketched a man asleep in a chair with the caption “Anton is mopping the floor” reinforced the perception that the proper course of action was to avoid work and responsibility (in obvious contrast to the satirical propaganda produced by camp authorities).95 (Figure 5) Humor also helped spread information on specific sources of danger. A rhyme in one card found in Ugrimova’s collection reaffirms the illicit wanderings into the canteen earlier referenced in Dvorzhetskii’s Uncle Klim skit and embeds a warning: “In the cupboard, bowls, spoons, cups / Once your crumbs are eaten up / . . . [in] returning them be wary / Lest you end up in solitary.”96 Valerii Frid cites two chastushki that used intentionally broken language in a humorous way to depict prisoners of Central Asian origin as “distinguished in their extreme cruelty.”97 Others cautioned against allowing the camp to change one’s person. In a poem recalled by Sergey Romanovich, we find the “Ballad of a Strange Technician” named Shurka who finds himself in the Gulag. After describing a few of Shurka’s misadventures, the final lines of verse stand out: “And who might our bygone Shurka / After his long years are done / Spot within the northern urka98 / Who now goes by ‘Al-the-Gun’?”99 For a political prisoner sentenced to cohabitation with career criminals, this was an apparently plausible fear (it is also reflected in the panels by Merekov cited above). Here, Romanovich has encoded the warning against slipping into the criminal underworld into a witty rhyme that is more likely to gain currency. The evidence of its durability is that he can recall it decades later in the writing of his memoirs. In fact, knowledge of the Gulag system and its complexities was held in high esteem. Based on my reading of several hundred instances of humor across dozens of memoirs, prisoners appear to have regularly aimed derisive laughter at those who were perceived as naively optimistic about what could be expected from guards, administrators, and their fellow prisoners, responding with what memoirists often refer to as a “dry laughter” (sukhoi smekh). Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Sketch by Konstantin Rotov depicting an inmate avoiding his chores (pencil on paper, near Solikamsk, USSR, 1940–48). Image © International Memorial Foundation (KP819). Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Sketch by Konstantin Rotov depicting an inmate avoiding his chores (pencil on paper, near Solikamsk, USSR, 1940–48). Image © International Memorial Foundation (KP819). Finally, it should be noted that memoirists recall surprisingly little explicitly political humor targeted against either powerful individuals or state socialism writ large—certainly nothing resembling the myriad jokes mocking Nazis that Lipman and others have collected from Hitler’s camps and ghettos or even the slightly more wary political humor Jonathan Waterlow finds for Soviet society in the 1930s.100 Memoirists do sometimes recall mocking particular guards and camp bureaucrats, but these instances are infrequent relative to expressions of helplessness, anger, or resentment. Even humor against the oppressive system was in this case localized, yet another indicator that prisoners’ humor was focused on the circumstances and structures germane to their medium-term lives, as opposed to their former lives as Soviet citizens with full rights. Although it seems to have helped some prisoners mentally estrange themselves from their pre-Gulag lives, the evidence does not support the conclusion that Gulag prisoners’ use of humor was shaped by challenges entirely unique to the Gulag. Many aspects of camp life that inspired humor including the separation of the sexes, the contact with unfamiliar nationalities, or the temptation toward shirking work were present to varying degrees throughout the Soviet system and could be said to exist along a continuum as Khlevniuk might have it. Even those elements of prisoners’ humor that seem to point to the ways Gulag humor was a product of the more distinct aspects of the camp experience have analogs in broader Soviet society. The way some women used satire in rhetorically rejecting their husbands is particularly stark, but the Gulag was not the only Soviet institution that could divide families, in some cases permanently. It was not at all unusual to lose track of relatives, particularly siblings, in the tumult of the 1920s and 1930s, as people moved voluntarily and involuntarily across an expansive land.101 It is true that, in a Soviet Union that rejected tsarist estates but retained many elements of a bureaucratic police state including various forms of social stratification, Gulag prisoners faced a somewhat unique challenge, thrown together with only the cue of the criminal statute they were sentenced under to separate them, forcing them to use strategies including humor to create and maintain their own hierarchies. Then again, it would be strange to suggest that eroding or inverting social distinctions and allowing the newly powerful to form and tend to new hierarchies was somehow alien to the Soviet system. There are certainly patterns in Gulag prisoners’ use of humor to respond to the particularities of camp life, and these often speak to the extremity of the social distortions they experienced, but it is worth remembering that these distortions are not, in principle, entirely unique for the Soviet Union under Stalin. Humor as a Lens on Gulag Society Throughout this analysis of an official humor from “above” draped in earnest but largely in vain over a more organic and likely more impactful humor “below,” I have emphasized humor’s role in forming and maintaining prisoners’ relationships in the context of both Gulag culture (exemplified by common tropes, pastimes, and attitudes) and institutions (as varied as theater, criminal hierarchies, and the segregation of the genders). In privileging the agency and creativity of those who spent years of their lives imprisoned within the Gulag apparatus, we see that humor did not merely reflect the elements of a Gulag society but also helped to build it. In particular, it helped mediate interpersonal relations and transmit norms, values, and information in a dangerous and often deadly environment of scarcity susceptible to anomie and a breakdown of interpersonal relationships. It is worth stressing one final time that it is only possible to investigate Gulag humor where there is evidence for its existence, thus, largely in the recollection or ephemera of former political prisoners. These particular memoirists often recall with a fondness bordering on reverence those fellow prisoners whose light spirit and laughter filled up their barracks, and this should be taken as a sign not of laughter’s predominance but rather its worth. Although I could find only one memoirist who would claim explicitly that laughter was largely absent for years of his imprisonment, it should be taken as a given that humor was at times nearly altogether displaced by horror or that it could be scarce to varying degrees.102 Still, that does not mean it was entirely insignificant or, moreover, that it cannot tell us something about Gulag society when we can discern its traces. Most clearly evident with respect to the increasingly disfavored archipelago model, historians of the Gulag continue to reckon with the frameworks, tropes, and problems introduced by the powerful literary takes of survivors, including Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov. For a time, the contention of the latter, running throughout his Kolyma Tales, to the effect that human connections were ephemeral if not illusory, was unconsciously accepted as a sound basis from which to study Gulag existence. But Shalamov’s wartime and postwar experiences depict as the norm what is actually the complete breakdown of Gulag society in the very real, but far from universal, conditions of mass death and starvation. Instead, when Gulag society functioned—and it did function to at least some extent for the majority of those who experienced the Gulag—it did so on the basis of relationships, which, in turn, were preserved and developed in part through humor. Footnotes The author acknowledges the generous support of the Jacques Rossi Gulag Research Fund, as well as helpful comments by Steve Barnes, Michael David-Fox, Ben Feldman, David Goldfrank, Andrey Gornostaev, Abby Holekamp, Phil Kiffer, Eve Levin, Thom Lloyd, Stas Tarasov, Jonathan Waterlow, and Cory James Young on various drafts of this article. The accompanying images are published with the permission of the International Memorial Foundation and have been prepared with the help of Svetlana Fadeeva. 1 N. I. Gagen-Torn, Memoria, ed. G. Iu. Gagen-Torn (Moscow, 1994), 123. I accessed a digital version of this and all other memoirs cited here (unless otherwise noted) using the indispensable archive maintained by the Sakharov Foundation: http://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/. 2 See: Wilson T. Bell “The Gulag and Soviet Society in Western Siberia, 1929–53” (PhD diss., The University of Toronto, 2011); Bell, “Was the Gulag an Archipelago?” The Russian Review 72 (2013): 116–41; Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced labor and its legacy in Vorkuta (New Haven, CT, 2014); Golfo Alexopolous, “Amnesty 1945: The Revolving Door of Stalin’s Gulag,” Slavic Review 64 (2005): 274–306. See also a special issue of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History devoted to this phenomenon: 16 (2015) or The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison, ed. Michael David-Fox (Pittsburgh, 2016). 3 Oleg Khlevniuk, “The Gulag and the Non-Gulag as One Interrelated Whole,” trans. Simon Belokowsky, Kritika 16 (2015): 479. Khlevniuk specifically used “sotsium” rather than “obshchestvo” in the original Russian text. 4 Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society. (Princeton, NJ, 2011), 13. Barnes uses it at 134, 217, and 231, among other instances. In most cases, these can logically refer to culture in the context of institutions; occasionally though, for example 164 and to a lesser extent 197, the term seems a simple substitute for the fraternity of criminals, which seems a rather narrow interpretation. 5 Wilson Bell, “The Gulag and Soviet Society,” 6 (reproduced in “Was the Gulag,” 1); Golfo Alexopolous, Journal of Cold War Studies 14 (2012), 173–75, reviewing Barnes; Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal, Russian Review 73 (2014), reviewing Julie Draskoczy’s monograph on the art of reforging at Beltbaltlag (cited below). 6 Much of what is subsumed by “Gulag society” could also fit under the umbrella of “Gulag culture.” One reason some use the former term is that it is somewhat broader and can more readily include the way institutions shape culture. Barnes, for example, links institutions and culture explicitly in his definition of the Gulag as the sum of “institutions . . . operat[ing] together,” colored by “the circulation throughout the system of prisoners, central directives, and reports on major events in specific camps[, which] created a certain amount of uniformity and shared culture across the Gulag” (Death and Redemption, 13). 7 It should be noted that I exclude the “special settlements” from this analysis. This is not to imply that they should be excluded from “the Gulag” as properly conceived, and indeed they should not be, as they were also a responsibility of the Gulag apparatus. Rather, their absence is due to a lack of suitable evidence. 8 Barnes, Death and Redemption, 13. 9 Jeffrey S. Hardy, The Gulag after Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY, 2016), 133. 10 The most notable exception is Fyodor Mochulsky’s Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir, trans. Deborah Kaple, (Oxford, 2010). 11 A. A. Andreeva, Plavan’e k Nebesnomu Kremliu (Moscow, 1998), 228. 12 G. I. Anfilov, Moskvichi v GULAGe: Pis’ma Gleba Anfilova: Spisok byvshikh politzakliuchënnykh, ed. I. A. Mazus (Moscow, 1996), 12. 13 Steve Lipman, Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor during the Holocaust (Northvale, NJ, 1993). Chaya Ostrower presents a study based on a statistical analysis of utterances collected from fifty-five interviews with survivors, finding, in support of Lipman, that humor primarily served as a “Defense Mechanism”: “Humor as a Defense Mechanism in the Holocaust” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2000). 14 In terms of the humor displayed, the draconian regimes of military prisons seem to parallel less with camp experience than with the months Gulag prisoners spent under interrogation. On the use of humor among Vietnam POW’s: Linda Heiman, “Humor as a Coping Mechanism: Lessons from POWs,” Humor 14 (2001), 83–94. Raymond C. Spaulding and Charles V. Ford discuss a more heterogeneous group (the crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo, held captive by North Korea), finding that those who used humor were less susceptible to depression in captivity and that humor was an unusually effective coping strategy: “The Pueblo Incident: Psychological Reactions to the Stresses of Imprisonment and Repatriation,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 129 (1972), 17–26. 15 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1976), 78, 101, etc.; William Tynes Cowan, “Plantation Comic Modes,” Humor 14 (2001), 1–24. 16 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York, 2003), 388. 17 Julie Draskoczy, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag (Boston, 2014), 14, 48. 18 Andrew Baruch Wachtel and Ilya Vinitsky: Russian Literature (Malden, MA, 2009). For a brief survey of the conversations leading to an affirmative answer, see: Serguei Oushakine, “Red Laughter: On Refined Weapons of Soviet Jesters,” Social Research 79 (2012), 189–216. 19 Ivan Kuznetsov, Istoriia otechestvennoi zhurnalistiki (1917–2000) (Moscow, 2002), 114–15. 20 Bell, “One Day in the Life of Educator Khrushchev: Labour and Kul'turnost' in the Gulag Newspapers,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 46 (2004): 289–313. 21 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULAG (Moscow, 2009), 769, quoted (and endorsed) by Alexopolous, “Destructive-Labor Camps: Rethinking Solzhenitsyn’s Play on Words,” Kritika 16 (2015), 499–526. 22 Calculations based on figures presented in S. Stykelin and I. Kremenskaia, Sovetskaia satiricheskaia pechat’: 1917–1963 (Moscow, 1967). Even if the official print runs over-estimate the copies actually produced, they are useful for the purpose of analyzing authorities’ motivations. 23 For example, Skvozniak (Draft [as from a window]) on the Karelian Front, Frontovoi iumor (Humor of the Front) on the Western Front, along with the Belarusian-language Partyzanskaia dubina (Partisan Club [as to bludgeon with]) and Razdavim fashystskuiu gadzinu (We Will Crush the Fascist Filth). 24 This appears to be part of a larger effort to re-exert central control over the propaganda delivered to prisoners. The authors of official decrees throughout the 1940s claim to address a lack of foundational documents for Gulag political education. These include the introduction of a standardized report for camp KVO directors [September 1942], the elucidation of a schema for camp newspapers [September 1942], a decree standardizing the kul’tbrigady [December, 1942], and a decree missing from the relevant archival files but referenced in a postwar memorandum as “the first and only promulgated document about cultural-educational work and in the form of a tentative decree,” published in April of 1940. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [State Archive of the Russian Federation: GARF] f.R-9414 op.1 d.1434; 1467. 25 GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1434. 26 GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1467; Stepan Ratsevich, Glazami zhurnalista i aktëra: Iz vidennogo i perezhitogo (Narva, Estonia, 2005), 166. 27 Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, Vragi naroda (Moscow, 1996), 222. 28 Konstantin Gurskii, Konstantin Petrovich Gurskii, ed. A. I. Galkin (Ukhta, Russia, 2003), 40. It is worth mentioning that there is no such issue of the all-Soviet Krokodil, though a similar image appeared in a copy of the journal just before the brief German-Soviet rapprochement of the late 1930s. The author could be referring to one of the many camp krokodils or another publication. 29 Pėrkins, “Oda na osvobozhdenie biologa P.E. Zannovskogo” [3.28.1946], Koshkin dom: Literaturnyi satiricheskii al’manakh, ed. Fëdor Langel’d. International Memorial Foundation [Memorial] f.2 op.5 d.80. 30 Pėrkins, “Azbuka Koshkinogo doma,” Koshkin dom. (“Uran dlia bomb atomnykh nuzhen./ Uchis’ imet’ obed i uzhin.”). 31 Kuz’min, Dec. 4, 1941, GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1434. 32 GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1434. 33 For example by officials, Saratov-Kopaev, GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1464; Bulanov, GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1477; Zhukov and Vasil'ev, GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1497; Zhuravlëv and Maksimov, GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1497. 34 GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1467. 35 Draskoczy, Belomor, 63. 36 GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1497. 37 Lesley Milne, “Introduction,” Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture, ed. Lesley Milne (London: 2004), 3. 38 Iz Moskvy v Moskvu cherez Parizh i Vorkutu, ed. T. A. Ugrimova (Moscow, 2004), 645. 39 For example, G. N. et al., “I.N.U.” [1951], greeting card 40 from the Ugrimova Collection, Memorial. 40 A. G. Morozov. Deviat’ let stupenei v nebytie (Saratov, Russia, 1991), 41–42. 41 G. G. Fel’dugin. Zapiski lagernogo muzykanta (Novosibirsk, Russia, 1998), 67–68. 42 Draskoczy, Belomor, 74–75. 43 Their performance by kul’tbrigad members is attested to by Pavel Shurdelin and Sergey Shtein, neither of whom dwell on the performances or offer any assessment of their quality: PD. Shurdelin, “Gody i dni moei zhizni: Izbrannye stranitsy vospominanii,” in Kniga pamiati: posviashchaetsia tagil’chanam—zhertvam repressii 1917–1980-kh godov, ed. V.M. Kirillova (Yekaterinburg, Russia, 1994), 161; S. A. Snegov, Iazyk, kotoryi nenavidit (Moscow, 1991), 53. 44 GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1436: “No otlichno chtob rabotat’/Delo trudnoye poznat’/Ėto brat ne to, chto sidia/V nosu pal’tsem kovyriat’.” 45 The chastushka form was not novel among official Soviet satire: see, for example, Waterlow, “Sanctioning Laughter in Stalin’s Soviet Union,” History Workshop Journal 79 (2015), 204. 46 Kuz’min, Sep. 21, 1941, GARF f.9414 op.1 d.1434: [estestestvenno for estestvenno]. 47 Antonov-Ovseenko, Vragi naroda, 59. 48 Blat is a Russian term similar to the Chinese Guanxi, denoting the value of what can be obtained with the help of friendly, well-placed people in one’s extended social network. Though it can be rendered in English as “connections” or “pull,” neither is perfect, and the term’s genealogy is complicated: Alena Ledeneva, “‘Blat’ and ‘Guanxi’: Informal Practices in Russia and China,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (2008): 118–44. 49 Vatslav Dvorzhetskii, Puti bol’shikh ėtapov: Zapiski aktëra (Moscow, 1994), 112–13. 50 Dvorzhetskii, Puti bol’shikh ėtapov, 112–13. While it is entirely plausible that Dvorzhetskii exaggerates the popularity of this character, it seems reasonable to trust him to assess which character was “by far the most popular.” 51 For example, Genri-Ralf Levenshtein, Mariiskii lesopoval: Vrachom za koliuchei provolkoy (Yoshkar-Ola, Russia, 1991), 224; Nikolai Sobolëv, Derzhis’, Kolia (Kazan, Russia, 2003), 153; Dvorzhetskii, 115. 52 For example, T. E. Lytkina, Vospominanie Memorial f.2 op.1 d.85, 56; Bulanov, GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1477; Memorial KP 1979–81. 53 For example, Belomorov, GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1464; Antonov-Ovseenko, 81; Dmitri Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin (New York, 1973), 180, quoted by Applebaum, 388. 54 I. S. Varpakhovskaia, “Iz vospominanii kolymskoi Traviaty” in Teatr GULAGa: Vospominaniia, ocherki, ed. M. M. Korallova (Moscow, 1995), 74. 55 Natalia Sokolova, “V zerkale smekha,” Voprosy literatury 3 (1996), 374. (Referenced by Waterlow, “Popular Humor in Stalin’s 1930s: A Study of Popular Opinion and Adaptation,” PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2012, 188.) 56 Antonov-Ovseenko, Vragi naroda, 87. 57 GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1467; “Instruktsiia po izdaniiu stennykh gazet.” (September 18, 1942) GARF f.R-9414 op.1 d.1434. 58 N. M. Korzhavin, V soblaznakh krovavoi ėpokhi: Vospominaniia 2 (Moscow, 2005), 240. 59 Waterlow, especially “Popular Humor” and “Sanctioning Laughter”; Draskoczy, Belomor, 95–96. 60 Jonathan Waterlow argues convincingly that “resistance” is a highly inadequate framework for fully interpreting the humor of those living under Stalinism (and, by extension, other forms of oppression), and the lens of “survival” is also limiting for similar reasons: “Intimating Trust: Popular Humour in Stalin’s 1930s,” Cultural and Social History 10 (2013): 211–29. He is prompted by considerations similar to those inspiring Michael David-Fox’s critique of a “resistance paradigm” in 1990s historical literature on Soviet society, particularly under Stalin: “Whither Resistance?” Kritika 1 (2000): 161–65. Christie Davies also observes that the frame of resistance (what he calls the “protest thesis”) is highly problematic, though he does not probe proposed alternatives as thoroughly as Waterlow: Christie Davies, “Humour and Protest: Jokes under Communism,” Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 52 (2007): 291–305. 61 Waterlow, “Intimating Trust.” Emphasis in the original. 62 Historians of emotion have increasingly rejected so-called “hydraulic” explanations for emotional phenomena (that is, as a release for internal turmoil or over-stimulation of the positive or negative kinds) in favor of conceiving emotion as a means of discourse or even self-assessment; see work by William Reddy including The Navigation of Feeling:AFramework for theHistory ofEmotions (New York, 2001) and “Humanists and the Experimental Study of Emotion” in Science & Emotions After 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective, eds. Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross (Chicago, 2014). 63 T. A. Aksakova, Semeinaia khronika 2, ed. T. A. Aksakova-Sivers (Paris: 1988), 185. 64 Aleksei Merekov, “Konvoir,” Memorial, KP456. 65 Waterlow, “Intimating Trust.” As David Brandenberger points out, the phenomenon of humor being shared among close-knit groups is generally accepted: Political Humor under Stalin: An Anthology of Unofficial Jokes and Anecdotes (Bloomington, IN: 2009). 66 D. E. Alin, Malo slov, a goria rechen’ka . . . : Nevydumannye rasskazy (Tomsk, Russia, 1997), 74. 67 I. P. Aituganov, Krugi ada (Kazan, Russia, 1998), 45. 68 This recalls the commodification of emotion described by Daniel Lord Smail within his concept of the “psychotropic economy”: On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, CA, 2008). 69 “Kolyma, Kolyma a planet full of wonder / [Just] ten months of winter, [then] all the rest is summer.” 70 Such as those cited by E. V. Markova: Vorkutinskie zametki katorzhanki “E-105” (Syktyvkar, Russia, 2005), 167–70. 71 I could only find one somewhat comparable example in Mikhail Mel’nichenko’s encyclopedic compendium of Soviet jokes: Sovetskii anekdot (Ukazatel’ siuzhetov) (Moscow, 2015), 299–300. In that case, animals were interrogated by the NKVD. 72 B. L. Brainin, Vospominaniia vridola: Memorial f.2 op.1 d.27. 73 V. L. Sosnovskii, Let GULAGa: Memorial. f.2 op.1 d.113. 74 A. V. Aktsynov and L. M. Aktsynova, Po sterne bosikom (Cheboksary, Russia, 1992), 85. 75 Brainin’s manuscript includes a claim to have invented the term on the spot, along with a correction in his own hand to the effect that the term originated in the Solovki camps of the 1920s. 76 Memorial KP1935 39; 1956 20; 2018 77 Memorial KP1969; Elena Tager, “Ia dumala starost . . .” in Poėziia uznikov GULAGa (Moscow, 2005), 29. 78 Quoted by Draskoczy, Belomor, 94. 79 Jeffrey S. Hardy, “Of Pelicans and Prisoners: Avian-Human Interactions in the Soviet Gulag,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, forthcoming. 80 O. L. Adamova-Sliozberg, Put’ (Moscow, 1993), 75; V. A. Samsonov, Zhizn’ prodolzhitsia: Zapiski lagernogo lekpoma (Petrozavodsk, Russia, 1990), 248. 81 Samsonov, Zhizn’ prodolzhitsia, 40. 82 G. E. Stepanova-Kliuchnikova, Kazakhstanskii Alzhir/Assotsiatsiia zhertv nezakonnykh repressii (Moscow, 2003), 55. 83 Gustav Gerling-Grudzinskii, Inoi mir: Sovetskie zapiski, trans. N. E. Gorbanevskaia (London: 1989), 125. 84 Iulo Sooster, “Liubovnyi golod” [1950] Memorial KP49. 85 Koshkin dom, 59–62. 86 N. A. Afanasova, Zhinznenyi Put’ (St. Petersburg, 2005), 129. 87 Brainin, Vospominaniia vridola, 24. 88 Applebaum gives this topic some attention, and Barnes is currently working in this direction. 89 “Zhena vreditelia ne byla bditel’na/Na muzha vo-vremia ne donesla/I ne doproshena v Butyrki broshena/i karu rovnu s nim ponesla:” Zinaida Usova, CHSIR—Vospominaniia Memorial f.2 op.1 d.118. 90 Afanasova, Zhinznenyi Put’, 101 and A.F. Barina Shilova, Memorial f.2 op.2 d.5 l.130. 91 Elena Zhukova, “My rodom iz tridtsat’sedmogo,” Memorial f.2 op.1 d.113 [p. 39] The original: “Komu vosem’, komu piat’/Nichego tut ne poniat’/Vy sidite za kogo/Za sebia, il’ za nego?/Ia za pervogo sizhu,/Ot vtorogo syna zhdu.” 92 “Performative” in the sense J. L. Austen uses it, that is, as activating a certain agreement or relationship: How toDo Things with Words (Cambridge, MA, 1962). 93 Afanasova, Zhinznenyi Put’, 134. 94 Alin, Malo slov, 124. 95 Brainin, Vospominaniia vridola, 4. 96 K.V.Ch. [08.05.51], greeting card 27 from the Ugrimova Collection, Memorial. 97 Valerii Frid, 58 1/2: Zapiski lagernogo pridurka (Moscow, 1996), 173. 98 A career criminal. 99 Sergey Romanovich, “Ballada o strannom tekhniki,” in “Poėticheskie illiustratsii,” Memorial f.2 op.3 d.52/54. 100 Waterlow, “Popular Humor” and “Sanctioning Laughter.” See also the Brandenberger anthology for a sampling of relatively overt Stalin-era political humor. 101 Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, Broad isMy Native Land: Repertoires andRegimes ofMigration in Russia’sTwentiethCentury (Ithaca, NY, 2014). 102 M. I. Evzerov, “Neraskaiavshiisia vrag vnov’ v stroiu . . .” in O vremeni, o Noril’ske, o sebe . . . Vospominaniia 1, ed. G. I. Kasabova (Moscow, 2001), 116–17. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. 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TI - Laughing on the Inside: Humor as a Lens on Gulag Society
JF - Journal of Social History
DO - 10.1093/jsh/shy032
DA - 2019-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/laughing-on-the-inside-humor-as-a-lens-on-gulag-society-2gYcyz9HUh
SP - 1281
VL - 52
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -