Laughter is not only entertaining, but also a historically and politically ambiguous practice, argues Neringa Klumbytė in her recent book Authoritarian Laughter about the Soviet Lithuanian satirical magazine Broom. Klumbytė focuses on the Soviet cultural and ideological elites—editors, writers, and artists from the Broom—and is interested in their “banal opposition” while promoting ideologically approved representations. This superbly researched and engaging historical ethnography of the complicated politics of laughter is highly relevant to contemporary debates exploring east European complexities. It diversifies the Soviet experience by examining what the author provocatively calls the “Soviet Western periphery” (233), “a site of contested Sovietness” (234) whose cultural elites “participated in production of Soviet laughter without deep commitment to the Soviet state and communism” (10). Importantly, the book successfully develops a number of conceptual contributions, including “multidirectional laughter,” “political intimacy,” and “the banality of Soviet power.”
Authoritarian Laughter is divided into eight chapters that present key empirical and conceptual contributions based on extensive empirical, theoretically informed research, including interviews, visits to personal and state archives, and literature and media analysis. I was impressed by the way Klumbytė is able to move, seemingly effortlessly and in a way that respects situated knowledges, from Jacques Rancière's notion of politics or Achille Mbembe's analysis of hegemonic power relations, to the ideological and material conditions in the Soviet Union and the biographies of the Broom editors. At the same time, the author includes critical reflections on the research process, on the politics of watermelons, and on the description of the rural cheese, ham, and honey she was offered in the course of an interview. The combination of these different levels of abstraction never loses its rhythm, and the book's arguments remain incisive. As a publication about a satirical magazine that developed and published cartoons and—unusually for a magazine in the Soviet Union—comic strips, the book also offers many original visual illustrations. Soviet laughter can thus be felt in the book through multiple visual and textual examples embedded in descriptions of material living conditions in Soviet Lithuania. Such a multi-layered form of the text succeeds in achieving one of its main goals, which is to show how (Soviet) power was experienced and maintained in the everyday life of its cultural elites. Importantly, the author is well aware of the context of both Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuania, which is evident in her subtle observations, reflections, and critiques.
One of the most interesting and potentially provocative concepts Klumbytė develops in her book is that of the multidirectional laughter practiced in the magazine. The author notes that the ideological state magazine published during the Soviet era was not always as pro-Soviet as one might think, and the messages conveyed by its cartoons were sometimes ambiguous and went in opposite directions: “many cartoons and satires contained both ideologically correct and oppositional messages” (11). Klumbytė understands power and resistance as relational, and her ethnographic research on the everyday practices of power, including its banal resistance through multidirectional laughter among the writers and editors of Broom is compelling. Additionally, Klumbytė argues that the magazine played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union: “The Broom, with its criticism of Soviet everyday life, contributed to making the revolution imaginable” (224). I would welcome more extensive and critical research on audience reception and the potentially immanently subversive effects of Broom to make this claim more convincing, since Broom was, after all, a pro-Soviet propaganda magazine.
By analyzing the Soviet media and censorship through the voices of the participants, their support for the Soviet Union's cultural policies and their “banal opposition” to the Soviet Union, Klumbytė presents the complex working life of the cultural elite in Soviet Lithuania, who lived very differently from the dissidents and the majority of Soviet Lithuanian citizens. They remained silent on the systematic criticism of Soviet socialism, but occasionally published messages of Aesopian opposition, undertook their own investigations of readers’ complaints, and developed innovative aesthetic formats. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this impressively researched and written book and recommend it not only to scholars of Soviet history and politics, but also to cultural historians, (media) anthropologists and anyone interested in the complex ethnographically researched history of eastern Europe.
