Evgeny Dobrenko's and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol's book State Laughter: Stalinism, Populism, and Origins of Soviet Culture focuses on state-sanctioned humor during the Stalinist era in Soviet Russia. The authors suggest they are creating a new approach to laughter in totalitarian regimes by claiming that state laughter was popular and derived from the masses, a form of symbiosis between the state and people. At the same time, laughter is seen as an instrument of control in a totalitarian regime.
The authors rightfully argue that in Soviet studies humor has been conventionally associated with the subversive while Iosif Stalin's reign of terror was not considered funny. However, there have been important studies of Soviet state-sanctioned laughter in the last two decades (Serguei Oushakine 2011, 2012; Oushakine and Dennis Ioffe, 2013; Stephen Norris 2009, 2013; John Etty, 2019; Annie Gérin, 2018; Kateryna Yeremieieva, 2018; Serhy Yekelchyk, 2006). Moreover, scholars have spent significant attention studying humor in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes by also focusing on state laughter (Lisa Wedeen, 2019; works on WWI and WWII humor). In the context of these studies, Dobrenko's and Jonsson-Skradol's book offers several important contributions. First, the book differs from previous studies in its scope. While scholars have focused on specific topics earlier, such as cartoons or comedies, State Laughter addresses multiplicity of genres. Chap. 2 explores laughter during the show trials of the late 1930s; Chap. 3, several comic works created during WWII; Chap. 4, political caricature; Chap. 5, satire in the Soviet theater; Chap. 6, the transformation of the comical, allegorical vocabulary from the late 1920s to the mid-1950s; Chap. 7, the kolkhoz comedy; Chap. 8, the “lyrical comedy” focused on urban lifestyle; and Chap. 9, musical comedies. Second, State Laughter introduces us to various debates and considerations about humor among Russian ideologues, intellectuals, writers, and even Stalin himself. It also discusses interconnections of Stalinist humor with eighteenth and nineteenth century Russian and nineteenth and early twentieth century west European humor.
Unlike many other studies on unofficial humor, the book explicitly departs from the often valorized Bakhtinian approach to laughter. The authors call the Bakhtinian carnival utopian, since Bakhtin wrote about a laughter devoid of ridicule as an affirmative and positive force, a form of liberation from oppression and fear. According to Dobrenko and Skradol, unlike in Bakhtin's carnival, which undermined social hierarchy, in Stalinism laughter “consolidated behavioral norms and trained individuals in state-sanctioned behavioral and social roles” (7). For them state laughter is “a most efficient instrument of intimidation, a way to anchor the hierarchy, a powerful tool of totalitarian normalization and control” (3). Moreover, laughter is a foundation of popular culture and a key instrument in the production of “the people” (4). While in Soviet studies analytics of state-people and official-unofficial have been prominent, in Dobrenko's and Skradol's perspective, Stalinism's laughter is considered popular and coming from the masses (28). One of their concepts—a radically popular regime—emerges from this idea where a regime “does not set itself off from ‘popular culture’ but rather incorporates it and adapts itself to it to become radically popular” (22). In their opinion, Socialist Realist art was an example of radical populism.
The book is also an important contribution to studies of Soviet satire. The authors argue that Stalinist satire was the satire of the impossible (216). It was impossible since satirical writing had been commonly created against the regime. During the Stalinist era the idea of “positive satire,” satire that promoted positive content, became consolidated while various objects of criticism were relegated to still occurring shortcomings or bourgeois survivals.
The analysis in the book is primarily textual and arguments emerge in the context of interpretation of various texts. Although authors infer claims about humor reception among people, the book presents little data to understand what people actually laughed at beyond a text. Moreover, the popularity of discussed Stalinist comedies or literature does not necessarily mean that Soviet citizens accepted various state ideological agendas.
While it is beyond the scope of this book, I think it is important to keep in mind that state laughter coexisted in the context of censorship, which is rarely mentioned in the book. Moreover, while this state laughter was a means of Soviet imperial governance, it must have had different circulation and reception in Soviet peripheries. Thus, officially sanctioned laughter in the Stalinist era does not necessarily mean that people and the state in real life laughed at the same things or that all Soviet people were united by state laughter.
