Political intimacy: Power, laughter, and coexistence in late Soviet Lithuania

East European Politics and Societies

Volumn 25, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 658-677

  Klumbyte, Neringa ^a  

^a MIAMI UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Laughter; Lithuania; Political intimacy; Power; Subjectivity

Indexed keywords

EID: 82955180299     PISSN: 08883254     EISSN: 15338371     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0888325410387638     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. The well known are variations on the numbered anecdotes. For example, in a prison all the jokes have been told a thousand times, so the inmates number them so as not to waste time. "67!" Laughter. "52!" Laughter. "41!" One inmate starts laughing like mad. "What's with you?" "I've never heard that one before!" See Seth Graham, "Varieties of Reflexivity in the Russo-Soviet Anekdot, " in Lesley Milne, ed., Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture (London: Anthem, 2004), 167-79, at 169.
2. See also Lesley Milne, "Introduction: Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture, " in Milne, ed., Reflective Laughter, 1-14, on jokes in Russian culture.
3. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), on the Soviet culture of seriousness.
4. Bruce Adams, Tiny Revolutions in Russia: Twentieth-Century Soviet and Russian History in Anecdotes (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005)
5. and Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1993).
6. Anthony Corbeill, Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)
7. and Donna Goldstein, Laughter out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2003).
8. In this article, I draw on the ethnographic research in Lithuania that I have been conducting since 2003. In the summer of 2009, I conducted a follow-up research specifically focusing on The Broom and its history. I carried out archival and media research and interviewed readers and several artists who either contributed to The Broom in Soviet times or were the members of the editorial board in late socialism.
9. At this time Lithuania was an independent presidential republic with Kaunas as its provisional capital.
10. Milne, "Introduction, " 2-3.
11. Milne, "Introduction, " 3.
12. Jonas Bulota, "Šluotos Kelias, " in Jonas Bulota and Arvydas Pakalnis, eds., Šluota (Vilnius: Mintis, 1984), 6.
13. Jonas Bulota, "Šluotos Kelias, " in Jonas Bulota and Arvydas Pakalnis, eds., Šluota (Vilnius: Mintis, 1984), 7.
14. According to the official publication records, in 1971 there were 120,082 copies published. High publication numbers persisted throughout the 1980s
15. in 1986 publication rates are still as high as 112,053. The numbers decreased in the early 1990s.
16. Specifically, I heard people quoting jokes about Kindziulis, a popular joke series in Soviet times.
17. Interview with J. Gimberis by Ferdinandas Kauzonas, "Kaip mudviem su J. Gimberiu nepavyko" [How I and J. Gimberis failed], Respublika 3 Apr. 2008. See http://www.kamane.lt/lt/atgarsiai/literatura/ litatgarsis231 (accessed 20 Mar. 2009). Actually, The Broom with short breaks has been published in post-Soviet times. The journal format has been much smaller, and the quality of publication yields to the quality of the journal in Soviet times. This illustrates, according to some artists, not only the state of the journal, but also the troubled life of post-socialist humor (personal communication with Šarūnas Jakštas, July 2009). The Broom was not published in 2009.
18. J. Gimberis interview. The decline of humor is also noted by some scholars in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern European countries. See Adele Marie Barker, "Introduction, " in Adele Marie Barker, ed., Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), 243-65
19. Alexei Yurchak, "The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism: Power, Pretense, and the Anekdot, " Public Culture 9:2(1997): 161-188, at 182
20. and Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 96.
21. Similar attitudes are expressed by other writers and artists who contributed to The Broom in Soviet times. See Jurga Petronytė's interview with Valdemaras Kalninis, "Linksmajai dailei-podukros dalia" [Humor art is like a stepdaughter], http://www.ve.lt/?rub=1065924826&data=2006-03-31&id=1143728862 (accessed 22 Dec. 2009).
22. Corbeill, Controlling Laughter, 6.
23. Stephen Norris, "'Laughter Is a Very Sharp Weapon': Boris Efimov and Soviet Visual Humor" (Paper delivered at the conference "Totalitarian Laughter: Cultures of the Comic Under Socialism, " Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 15-17 May 2009), 11.
24. Adams, Tiny Revolutions in Russia
25. Barker, "Introduction"
26. Goldstein, Laughter out of Place
27. and Anna Krylova, "Saying 'Lenin' and Meaning 'Party': Subversion and Laughter in Soviet and Post-Soviet Society, " in Barker, ed., Consuming Russia, 243-65.
28. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1976), 183.
29. Mary Douglas, "Jokes, " in Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1991), 305.
30. Krylova, "Saying 'Lenin' and Meaning 'Party,'" 250.
31. Krylova, "Saying 'Lenin' and Meaning 'Party,'" 247.
32. Unlike many other studies of humor, research on Soviet humor tends to focus on laughter and (state) power. See Adams, Tiny Revolutions in Russia
33. Russian source
34. Norris, "'Laughter Is a Very Sharp Weapon'"
35. Natalia Skradol, "Exceptional Laughter" (Paper delivered at the conference "Totalitarian Laughter: Cultures of the Comic under Socialism, " Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 15-17 May 2009)
36. and Yurchak, "The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism. " Soviet laughter is often approached as a political event (usually subversive of state power) and a weapon of relatively powerless. Indeed, laughter can be seen as a ubiquitous political act if we think of the Soviet state as aiming to accrue total power. In another context, Rio de Janeiro shantytown, Donna Goldstein similarly argued that it is important to recognize that every act that is mitigated through class position is implicitly a class act and, thus, political, since it reflects, reinforces, and enacts class relations. She agrees, though, that an act cannot be termed resistance merely because it took place in the context of domination. Goldstein, Laughter out of Place, 9. See also Marshall Sahlins ("What is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century, " Annual Review of Anthropology 28(1999): i-xxiii) on his critique of the approaches that presume that "all culture is power" or that cultural communication can be translated in terms of domination and resistance.
37. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956)
38. and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, NY: Schocken, 1951).
39. See, for example, the works of Arch Getty, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Moshe Lewin, Robert Thurston, Oleg Kharkhordin, and Stephen Kotkin.
40. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1995).
41. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
42. Brigid O'Keeffe, "Backward Gypsies, Soviet Citizens: The All-Russian Gypsy Union, 1925-28, " Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11:2(2010): 283-312.
43. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 5.
44. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4.
45. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4.
46. and Alexei Yurchak, "Necro-Utopia: The Politics of Indistinction and the Aesthetics of the Non-Soviet, " Current Anthropology 49:2(2008): 199-215.
47. Serguei Oushakine, "The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat, " Public Culture 13:2(2001): 191-214, at 202.
48. Serguei Oushakine, "The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat, " Public Culture 13:2(2001): 203.
49. In the case of dissidents' texts in Lithuania, a similar argument was made by Jūra Avižienis, "Learning to Curse in Russian: Mimicry in Siberian Exile, " in Violeta Kelertas, ed., Baltic Postcolonialism (New York, NY: Rodopi, 2006), 187-202.
50. Gregory Carleton, "Escaping the Past? Re-reading Soviet Satire from the Twenty-First Century: The Case of Zoshchenko, " in Milne, ed., Reflective Laughter, 97-107, at 105.
51. Gregory Carleton, "Escaping the Past? Re-reading Soviet Satire from the Twenty-First Century: The Case of Zoshchenko, " in Milne, ed., Reflective Laughter, 100.
52. Gregory Carleton, "Escaping the Past? Re-reading Soviet Satire from the Twenty-First Century: The Case of Zoshchenko, " in Milne, ed., Reflective Laughter, 104.
53. Gregory Carleton, "Escaping the Past? Re-reading Soviet Satire from the Twenty-First Century: The Case of Zoshchenko, " in Milne, ed., Reflective Laughter, 104-5.
54. Following Herzfeld, by the "state" I mean a shifting complex of people and roles. The "state" in this article primarily refers to authorities, such as people in the government or other public institutions like the censorship office or the publishing house. Since the Soviet state controlled most of public institutions including publishing houses, many people who worked here were Communist Party members and represented state authorities. An artist who worked for the publishing house, even if he or she was not a Party member, represented a state institution as well. In this context the "state" was represented by people and shaped by their values, emotions, relations, and interactions. Thus, the "state" in my context is bound to human agency rather than a symbol of a Soviet system and the regime. On "thingness" of the state, see Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 5.
55. In this article, I am dealing with comic form of political intimacy in late socialism. Other forms of political intimacy can be identified between political leaders and their followers, among people in work collectives, candidates and voters, members of social movements, or people on strike. All these different forms are examples of intersubjective forms of intimacy. "Nation" can be an example of imagined political intimacy which presupposes a relationship of closeness and common belonging among nationals.
56. Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy.
57. I thank Jessica Greenberg and Serguei Oushakine for this point.
58. Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy, 13.
59. Yurchak, "The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism. "
60. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987).
61. cited in S. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1991), 29.
62. Yurchak, "The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism, " 178
63. see also Philip Boobbyer, "Truth-Telling, Conscience and Dissent in Late Soviet Russia: Evidence from Oral Histories, " European History Quarterly 30:4(2000): 553-85.
64. Yurchak, "The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism, " 178.
65. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More, 114-17.
66. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More, 121-22.
67. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More, 125.
68. In socialism, productive labor was an important aspect of state ideology, and the workplace was to be central to social life. On labor in socialism and post-socialism, see Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Re-unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1999)
69. Elizabeth Dunn, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2004)
70. Sarah Ashwin, Russian Workers: The Anatomy of Patience (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999)
71. and David Kideckel, Getting By in Postsocialist Romania: Labor, the Body, and Working-Class Culture (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2008). Productive labor was also a key aspect of communist morality. "The Moral Code of the Builder of Communism, " the single most authoritative and enduring statement on the nature and content of Soviet morality issued at the Twenty-second Communist Party Congress in 1961, emphasized hard work and collectivism among many other moral dispositions (XXII S''ezd KPSS, no. 3: 317-18).
72. On communist morality and family values, see Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev's Russia (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2007).
73. A. F. Shishkin, "Stroitel'stvo kommunizma i nekotorye problemy Marksistkoi etiki, " in Voprosy Marksistko-Leninskoi etiki (Moscow: Politizdat, 1960), 55-56
74. see also S. Kosolapov and O. Krutova, Nravstvennye printsipy stroitelia kommunizma (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1962), 63.
75. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev's Russia, 13, 16.
76. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev's Russia, 16.
77. Šluota 3 (1970): 7. Many short anecdotes in The Broom are cited without an author.
78. Šluota 4 (1980): 9.
79. Bronius Kuzmickas, "Dorovinė asmenybės regresija, " in Antanas Gaidys, Edmundas Krakauskas, Bronius Kuzmickas, et al., eds., Dorovinės asmenybės brendimas (Vilnius: Mintis, 1980), 37-53, at 39.
80. Šluotos kalendorius (Vilnius: Mintis, 1971), 96, emphasis in original.
81. Šluota 5 (1975): 7.
82. Šluota 3 (1980): 7.
83. See Bulota, "Šluotos Kelias. "
84. During my research in Lithuania in the mid-2000s, villagers in several occasions remarked that now there is nowhere to turn to with their problems. Even if they did not write complaint letters themselves earlier, many of them knew other people who did. In W. Becker's film Goodbye, Lenin! Alex's mother writes similar letters of complaint, which is the only publicly meaningful activity that she can undertake while being sick.
85. Jūratė Kuzmickaitė's interview with Algirdas Radvilavičius, Kauno Diena, 5 Mar. 2005, http:// kauno.diena.lt/dienrastis/kita/apkunus-elgetos-su-nosimis-agurkeliais-26309 (accessed 9 Oct. 2009).
86. Personal communication with Ke{ogonek}stutis Šiaulytis, July 2009.
87. Personal communication with Ke{ogonek}stutis Šiaulytis, July 2009.
88. Šluotos kalendorius (Vilnius: Mintis, 1976), 19.
89. Šluota 6 (1985): 6.
90. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 103.
91. See Neringa Klumbytė, "Ethnographic Note on Nation: Narratives and Symbols of the Early Post-Socialist Nationalism in Lithuania, " Dialectical Anthropology 27:3-4(2003): 279-295.
92. According to Algirdas Radvilavičius, a former Broom artist, every issue of the journal had to have a "political cartoon. " Political cartoons had to target the West, capitalism, and capitalist life style. See Radvilavičius interview.