Multiple Masculinities

The Anekdot in Context

Humor is often used as a way to construct groups as other by challenging their status, constructing them as suffering from character flaws, objectifying their bodies, and particularly often, sexualizing or emasculating them through a rhetoric of hypermasculinity (Mulkay 1988; Crawford 2003). This kind of discursive strategy “is not only about masculinity, it is a sustained performance of masculinity” (Cameron 1997, 590) and in the case of Soviet Russia, anekdots reveal a crisis in this “sustained performance.” The humor was used as a strategy to establish and maintain hegemonic control, but in the process exposed collective insecurities and doubt.

Anekdots have a long history in Russia dating back to the mid-eighteenth century ¹ (Graham 2009). The birthplace of the short-form anekdot has been traced to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 Russia and subsequent urbanization and industrialization in the late nineteenth century. The total population of Russia tripled between 1863 and 1913, and the number of urban dwellers with peasant backgrounds quadrupled. The new short-form anekdot lent itself to exchange in passing, in stairwells, in bathrooms, or to be exchanged in rapid succession around the kitchen table late at night. This pastime was shared by compatriots, solidifying a collective identity through reference to a common history, identity, and fluency in official Soviet rhetoric. Yurchak (1997) argues that the “hegemony of representation”—the State’s control over media outlets, propaganda, factories, schools, textbooks, city construction, and other modes of “representation”—made the Soviet citizen feel as though his or her experience was shared by all other citizens. It was with this singular landscape and construction of reality with which all Soviet citizens were familiar and with which the anekdots engaged.

Satire was celebrated by the Bolsheviks as a potential “weapon” to be mobilized in the service of the Revolution during the 1920s but was later abandoned in the 1930s by those revolutionaries who replaced this politicized communication with socialist–realist aesthetics (Graham 2009). It was not until after Stalin’s death in 1953 that there was a resurgence of such satire: both a toned down form in official publications like Krokodil—a satirical magazine that lampooned approved targets, such as capitalist countries and social groups perceived as threatening to Soviet power—and the unbridled form of critique in uncensored anekdots. Although the Communist Party was still in power, Khrushchev’s repudiation of Stalinism in February 1956 and the subsequent reduction in arrests and sentencing enabled the culture of anekdot exchange to flourish. The height of such anekdot exchange spanned from late 1950s to the early 1990s (Brandenberger 2002; Davies 1990; Krylova 1999; Graham 2009).

Anekdots have generally been studied in Russia by folklorists for whom the performance of joke telling and the micro-level interaction dynamics are central (Abdullaeva 2000; Shmeleva and Shmelev 2002). In response to the surge in publications of anekdot anthologies after the dissolution of the USSR, recent research explores how anekdots served as a social safety valve (Yurchak 1997) though their subversive, anti-State quality (Arkhipova and Melnichenko 2010; Krylova 1999; Ledeneva 1998), while others have painted the folklore as a tool of exclusion by groups with more power (Draitser 1999). In fact, anekdots are actually reflections of both power and resistance (Smirnova 2014). Although anekdots may have been used to resist corruption or to cope with uncertainty, the narratives also serve to reify power structures and exclude particular groups through their discursive power. Akin to James Scott’s (1990) concept of everyday resistance, Russian people used anekdots to navigate and cope with the system through a combination of detached quiet cynicism along with public compliance (Yurchak 1997). Krylova (1999) argues that anekdots orient toward a hopeful future in which the disjuncture between the realities presented by party propaganda and the lived reality of Soviet citizens no longer exists. The anekdot is an integral part of this parallel culture of resistance that laughs at the Soviet system (Smirnova 2014).

Anekdots were often subversive in character, but as Hollander and Einwohner (2004) note, “resistance is not always pure. That is, even while resisting power, individuals and groups may simultaneously support the structures of domination that necessitate resistance in the first place” (p. 549). Although anekdots challenged the legitimacy of Soviet power and highlighted inconsistences between propaganda and reality, they utilize and therefore reinforce categories and concepts of the very social system they contest. Women and ethnic minorities have historically been the objects of humor and only rarely the subjects. The boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that create groups necessarily produce inequality through the unequal distribution of status, resources, and social advantages (Lamont 1992, 12). Russian men were less powerful in relation to the State, but more powerful than female or ethnic others. As a result, they were able to appropriate anekdots as tools of resistance in order to portray themselves as victims, or as “silenced,” even when they were privileged in many ways.

Method

This article is based upon the translation, coding, and analysis of 1,290 anekdots that were randomly sampled from 12 anekdot compilations, published between 1951 and 2010. The sample analyzed in this study is meant to be thematically exhaustive. Although Russian anekdots existed and wielded their power as an orally transmitted underground folklore, for the purpose of this historical analysis, they are analyzed as written texts. Officially, anekdots were never published in the USSR, but some authors managed to publish them abroad or as samizdat (underground publications; Dementyev 2009), and others were published after the dissolution of the USSR. Twelve compilations of anekdots were used for this study (Table 1). They were drawn from the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, the State Library in Moscow, and contemporary Russian bookstores.

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Table 1.

Compilations of Anekdoty.

	Author	Title	Date Published	Location of Publication	Nationality of Author
1	Andreevich, Evgenii	Kreml’ I Narod: Politicheskie Anekdoty	1951	Munich, Germany	Russian
2	Verner, Artur	Rossia smeetsia nad SSSR. Chitaite anekdoty! Smotrite! Smeites’!	1980	Paris, France	Jewish
3	Zand, Arie	Political Jokes of Leningrad	1982	Texas, USA	Jewish
4	Telesin, Iulius	1001 izbrannyi sovetskii politicheskii anekdot	1986	New Jersey, USA	Jewish
5	Shatzkii, R.	Anekdot: Ul’ibk zhiznii	1990	Moskovskaja Oblast, Russia	Russian
6	Roblesh	Anekdotii	1991	Maikop, Russia	Russian
7	(No author)	Sovetskii Anekdot	1991	Moscow, Russia	Unknown
8	Posvezhinov, Igor	Anekdotii	1991	Voronezh, Russia	Russian
9	Kluckinoe-Vituk	Sovetskii Anekdot	1992	Moscow, Russia	Russian
10	Borev, Iurii Borisovich	Iistoria gosudarstva Rossiskaya Sovetskovo b Predaniya I anekdotach	1995	Moscow, Russia	Russian/Ukrainian
11	Trachtenberg, Roman	Tonna Anekdotov b Sovetskich	2006	St. Petersburg, Russia	Jewish
12	Koshelev, Pavel	Anekdotii o Politikach ot SSSR do Yeltsina	2010	St. Petersburg, Russia	Russian

While this research is framed by anekdots’ long history predating Stalin as well as their continued significance and meaning in contemporary Russia, the sample is drawn from the period of heightened and solidified Soviet cultural policy from the early 1950s until the end of Soviet censorship in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The editors of the compilations had diverse ethnic backgrounds, though all of them were men. Together, these twelve volumes include several thousand anekdots. To create a manageable sample, one-fifth of the anekdots were sampled from each compilation. These narratives were translated from Russian into English and analyzed through Nvivo version 10 software.

Extremely offensive or controversial anekdots were likely underrepresented in these volumes, because publishers may have chosen not to include offensive narratives in volumes that were sold to a popular audience. Recognizing the disparity between published anekdots and those told behind closed doors, it might be inferred that particularly misogynistic, racist, or xenophobic humor is underrepresented in the sample. This is a notable limitation of the study, yet if we take this assumption of underrepresentation to be true, the implications drawn from this research are even more serious.

The coding scheme was informed broadly by Foucault’s (1978) understanding of knowledge, discourse, and power and more systematically by Van Dijk’s (1997), Fairclough’s (1995), and Fairclough and Wodak’s (1997) critical discourse analysis. Hierarchical, tree-like coding maps were developed, with different higher-order codes comprised of various lower-order codes. The coding scheme is presented in the Appendix. Very few anekdots did not fit into any of the coding categories; therefore, saturation was achieved. These maps were used to administer an intercoder reliability test that yielded between 86 percent and 94 percent agreement among three coders (Cohen’s κ). This coding structure undergirded the content analysis of this research—drawing attention to those subjects that were most common in anekdots, so that they might be explored in greater depth through critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk 1997).

Critical discourse analysis embraces a feminist situated perspective by (1) analyzing how discourses construct bodies and collectivities in different (and unequal) ways and (2) recognizing how scholarship is sociopolitically situated, despite intentions or efforts to the contrary. A paired content and discourse analysis illustrates how these narratives contribute to multiple Russian masculinities that differ in a number of ways from the dominant, Soviet state-defined identity of Soviet man and Soviet woman. This narrative incorporates a view from the margins but also reflects the hegemonic discourse with which it engages; a dialogue that is central to understanding a situated standpoint (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002, 319). Those who are familiar with a cultural folklore—and the historical context to which it refers—are taught who are the perpetrators responsible for injustices, who are the victims, and how we should feel about these different (groups of) people from the perspectives of those from the hegemonic “center.”

Russian Men as Tragic, Foolish Heroes

Nationalism is a masculine project with its hierarchical authority structure; a male superordinate/female subordinate internal division of labor; and male legal regulation of female rights, work, and sexuality (Collins 1998; Puri 2004). Notions of masculinity and manliness are therefore integral elements to understanding both processes of exclusion and inclusion in the state, in addition to uneven levels of citizenship (Nagel 1998, 243). Soviet masculinity was shaped by “official (state) and unofficial (social life) prescriptions”; therefore, “it would be more prudent to think it terms of several competing or coincidental masculinities rather than a single Soviet manhood” (Friedman and Healy 2002, 232). These competing masculinities were often in dialogue with the New Soviet Man ideal: a man with superhuman strength, brilliance, and devotion to the Communist Party. As an unrealistic goal, these alternative masculinities reflected feelings of inadequacy or rejected the ideal as impractical and undesirable. Aleksandr Zinovyev (1986) argued that the Soviet system produced the opposite of what it intended, dubbing the resulting antihero “Homo Sovieticus,” as a man who lacks ambition or respect for work, is blindly obedient to the party and takes advantage of collective labor, and drinks heavily to cope with his feelings of impotence. It is the Homo Sovieticus that is described in many Soviet anekdots.

Soviet-era anekdots construct Russian masculinity as tragic heroism. In seeking to emulate the Soviet prototypical ideal, the Russian man is constructed as one who seeks greatness through heroic feats, but inevitably falls victim to women, ethnic others, or his own shortcomings. The following anekdot highlights these collective troubles and the incongruity between party propaganda and lived realities. Sixty percent or 772 anekdots in the sample dealt with the party, most notably the mismatch between ideology and practice:

It is a well-known fact that before communism reaches its final and most perfect form; it must first pass through a preparatory period of socialism.

Currently, however, the Soviet Union is in an intermediary stage not described by Marx.

This stage is called ‘alcoholism.’

Soviet rhetoric portrays the Soviet man as a citizen of one of the most powerful nations in the world, yet he is confined to the USSR in his travels and his only conquests are sexual in nature. As such, he is powerful in name but helpless in practice. In her interviews with Russian men, Maria Kiblitskaya (2000) found that many men felt as though they lived “like kings” under Soviet rule, because of the status conferred upon them by the party. They were practically guaranteed employment and wages (no matter now meager) and this provided some sense of assurance and pride. Zdravomyslova and Temkina (2012), on the other hand, argue that such paltry wages made it impossible for men to perform the duties as household breadwinners, causing a crisis in masculinity. They argue that men only felt powerful by associating with national collective imagery and collective accomplishments (see above) but not in their personal lives. The following anekdot expresses the desire to escape:

An American, a Frenchman, and a Russian are sentenced to death. Each is allowed to choose the method of execution. The Frenchman goes first, and chooses a guillotine. But the guillotine is not working, so they set him free. As he passes by the American, he whispers: “The guillotine is broken,” so the American also chooses the guillotine, and is also set free. As the American passes by the Russian, he whispers: “The guillotine is broken.” “Well, since the guillotine is broken,—says the Russian,—then give me the firing squad!”

The fool is a character whom Russians respect because he is able to avoid manipulation and greed through pure values and motivations. The fool was played by multiple characters in Soviet-era anekdots; two such characters include Vasili Ivanovich Chapaev and Max Otto von Stierlitz. Chapaev was a commander in the Red Army who died in battle while swimming across the Ural River in 1919. Soon after his death, Chapaev was canonized in Soviet mythology through a 1923 novel written by Dmitri Furmanov and more notably after the release of the Vasil’ev Brothers’ film Chapaev in 1934. These official texts used Chapaev to illustrate Russia’s valiance and victory in the Great Patriotic War. As an elite soldier, he was a positive hero who represented the values and glory of the Soviet Union much like the Soviet New Man. Chapaev was further memorialized in Soviet jokelore, albeit in a different vein.

Instead of lauding his heroism, or devotion to the party, Chapaev is depicted in anekdots as a dimwitted drunk, not unlike how Lenin was portrayed in the earlier anekdot. Critiques of Soviet power were articulated in a variety of ways: by subverting the pristine, idealized image of Chapaev as an upstanding, moral, and honorable man as well as by drawing attention to contradictions in party propaganda. Below is an anekdot that presents both critiques.

Petka is trying to write an essay for a literature class. He sits there racking his brains.

“What is making you so miserable?” asks Vasili Ivanovich.

“I have to write this essay on ‘What I did yesterday.’”

“Well, what did you do?”

“The same thing I do every day! I drank!”

“What an idiot you are Petka,” says Vasili Ivanovich. “You can’t write that. Go through the essay and every time you wrote, “drank,” put “read” instead. Replace “bottle” with “book” and then it will sound a lot more cultured.”

Petka is thrilled and begins to scratch away: “I got up yesterday morning and read half a book. I thought for half a moment and then read the other half. It didn’t seem like enough, so I set off to the shop for another book. On the way I saw Vasili Ivanovich coming towards me … and his eyes were so well read …”

SS Standartenführer Max Otto von Stierlitz was a fictional World War II Soviet Army intelligence officer living undercover in Nazi Germany who became infamous in the 1973 iconic Soviet miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring. The movie miniseries was and still is a very influential cultural item, so much that it has been deemed a “cult” classic (Kharkhordin 1999) and “a television blockbuster” (Stites 1992) aired particularly often around Victory Day (May 9), the day that Nazi Germany fell to the Soviets. According to Brezhnev’s personal assistant, Brezhnev loved the show and watched it over twenty times, arranging the CPSU meetings so as not to miss an episode (Olcott 2001). The show was used as a means of solidifying a patriotic collective identity and elevating Stierlitz as an ideal citizen. In response to the show, anekdots about Stierlitz became quite popular. Anekdots challenged the nationalistic image of the Soviet Union by redefining Stierlitz, the “intelligence officer,” as a humorously obtuse detective who regularly misses the obvious:

Stierlitz came into Muller’s office and saw a dead man on the floor. “The poor fellow was poisoned,” thought Stierlitz, stroking the handle of an ax protruding from the man’s back.

Women as Supporters: Servants, Sluts, and Scapegoats

Ideologically, gender equality was requisite to the accomplishment of the communist mission. In fact, there were activists who argued that women were “the most oppressed of all proletarians,” and therefore should be “mobilized as a lever to liberate the rest of society” (Koenker 1995, 1439). Despite this perspective, Soviet rhetoric promoted a traditional family structure, which in turn solidified a patriarchal public–private division of labor. The heteronormative family model facilitates the subordination of women to man and child to adult to appear as a “natural” fact. Hierarchies within the nation are accordingly justified as a natural product of social relations and social difference; other forms of social subordination justified by race and sexuality are also written into the national familial narrative (McClintock 1995, 358; Collins 1998). This naturalization of gender relations was also produced by the complimentary figure of the “New Soviet Woman” who was supposed to support the New Soviet Man as a full-time worker as well as a wife and mother.

The New Soviet Woman differed greatly from the conceptions of revolutionaries preceding the 1930s. Instead of being freed from domestic concerns, she was bound to them. Although she was able to work alongside in the workplace, her primary role was that of mother. The New Soviet Woman was deemed critical for the proper socialization of children and transformation of local communities (Bloch 2005, 543). In the wake of a major population decline beginning in the 1920s caused by war, revolution, and increased contraceptive use, Soviet propaganda emphasized women’s role in producing the next class of healthy workers. Many policies forced women to curtail professional aspirations in order to fulfill their dual role as worker and housewife. Under the “private familial strategy,” women were supposed to save men and protect them from their bad habits, “such as alcoholism, overeating, and physical immobility by being ‘loving women’ and ‘good housewives” (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2012, 19; Kiblitskaya 2000). The “Little Deal” excused men “from responsibility not only for the birth of a child but for the entire spectrum of problems associated with the organization of everyday life,” including shopping for food and clothes, providing healthy food, and cultivating the proper “taste” for husbands and children, by selecting books to read and movies and shows to see (Stiazhkina 2009). As a result, the arrangement came to be known as the “double burden” (Buckley 1981). Women were not expected to climb the occupational ladder, and if they did, they were often accused on neglecting their families and the party’s best interests (Ashwin 2000).

This “weak family breadwinner” model credited men as the official providers of the household, even though 92 percent of women were employed in the 1970s and 1980s and were significantly more educated than men (Buckley 1981). The man-as-breadwinner cultural myth justified inequalities in the home such as the fact that women typically did between 60 percent and 70 percent of the housework as well as the 30 percent deficit in pay at work (Aivazova 1998, 82–83; Kiblitskaya 2000). These competing requirements domestic and occupational duties limited occupational mobility and produced considerable role strain for women.

The Russian male perspective of anekdots defines women primarily according to one of the three roles: housewife, slut, and/or scapegoat (a woman who deserves violence committed against her). These roles are interconnected, discursively constructing women as (1) unwelcome in the workforce, instead encouraged to serve the needs of their male counterparts in domestic roles; (2) manipulative and promiscuous, exclusively seeking money or control; and (3) deserving of violence committed against them and/or responsible for men’s failings. These narratives reify women’s subordinate roles in the national imagery, despite claims of equality, focusing upon the incongruity between party propaganda and lived experiences.

Most narratives involving women occurred in the domestic sphere—in the kitchen or bedroom—and when in public spaces, often shopping (see also Laineste 2012), which naturalizes a particular gender role. Twenty-two percent of the sample (290 anekdots) specifically dealt with the family, oftentimes focusing upon the woman’s role in maintaining its stability. The role of the woman as the homemaker, who must attend to household chores and the needs of her husband, is articulated in the following anekdot:

Your husband was telling me the other day that he lives like a dog.

It’s true, he comes home with dirty feet, sits in front of the fireplace and waits to be fed.

Women played a central symbolic and auxiliary role in the communist vision, but only insofar as they fulfilled their subordinate, supportive status in the family as well as the state. Women were supposed to support, rather than interfere or compete with their husbands’ professional duties outside of the home. National rhetoric was able to downplay or ignore women’s contributions to the party by only paying attention to how they serve men:

Women were excluded from the armed forces following the Civil War, which elevated men’s status to sole defenders of the society. Sjoberg and Gentry (2008) argue that even when women are allowed to serve, female soldiers are constructed as only serving the needs of their men (husbands and sons), rather than acting as independent citizens. Female power is singularly understood as sexual. Unlike those narratives that portray women as simpleminded and helpless, anekdots about sex portray women powerful but only through sexuality:

A drunk man is on a bus filled with women. He starts to yell out: “Those in front of me are fools and those behind me are sluts.” Silence. At the next bus stop, he repeats,

“Those in front of me are fools and those behind me are sluts.”

Silence. Again, at the next bus stop he says,

“Those in front of me are fools and those behind me are sluts.”

Finally a woman replies to him, “How can you say that? I have been married for 20 years to the same man and never cheated on him!”

“Well then, you’re a fool. Move to the front of the bus.”

Such narratives redefine rape from an act of aggression against women to something that women desire and control. In doing so, they diminish violence against women by redefining women as willing participants. The trivialization of interpersonal violence and rape, normalization of male aggression, and definition of gendered violence as humorous constructs these acts as less troubling to societal notions of civil society, democracy, and women’s rights.

Women were not encouraged to speak out on behalf of their interests since the collective mission was committed to the equal treatment of all, even if that involved the reification of existing inequalities. Zinovyev (1986) argues that the Soviet people were cultivated to ignore their own intellectual choices or emotional needs in order to adapt to, and merge with, the collective majority. This argument is particularly true in regard to women’s rights. The Soviet Party demonized feminism, painting it as a “bourgeois” movement that split the interests of the working class by focusing upon women’s needs. Feminist organizations and publications were disbanded and silenced. As a consequence, women lost any means of political participation through nongovernmental means (Riordan 1996; Sperling 2015).

The following anekdot ridicules men of other nationalities, but the butt of the joke is women of all nationalities. The narrative constructs multiple groups as other, while also self-reflexively commenting upon Russian male violence.

A husband comes back unexpectedly

French wife: Jacques, move over, my husband is back.

German wife: Hans! You are two minutes early!

Jewish wife: Haim! Is that you? Then who is with me?

Russian wife: (falling to her knees) Ivan, hit me, but not in the face, please.

Women were not simply late in receiving citizenship rights, but rather their exclusion should be recognized as an integral part of the nation’s structure where men were expected to serve as representatives for the (noncitizen) members of their families (Yuval-Davis 1993, 625). Ethnic others were similarly subjugated through the Soviet nationalities policy that required all groups to identify their nationality on their passports, defining certain individuals as other and at times enacting discriminatory hiring policies against them (Gorenburg 2006).

Both women and non-Russian nationalities are blamed for the shortcomings of Russian men and the Soviet state.

Excluded, Emasculated, and Effeminate Others: Ethnic and National Out-groups

National identity is based upon a cultural mythology of heroes, victims, and fools. Russian men are often constructed as both heroes and victims in narratives whereas women and ethnic others play the roles of villains. Mythology often involves multiple disparate ethnic and racial out-groups which need to be conceptually reorganized through “the control of sexuality in order to facilitate a common sense of belonging and self-collective identification” (Chong 2008, 530). Constructing ethnic others or political enemies as sexually inept or overly promiscuous dehumanizes and justifies discrimination against them, while simultaneously producing an in-group through contrast.

The Bolsheviks sought to create a federation among the Soviets that was “national in form, but socialist in content” (Gorenburg 2006, 273; Suny 1993), but they also wanted to retain Russian power and dominance. As a result, the Soviet nationalities policy oscillated between Russofication and ethnophilia, enacting assimilationist policies while simultaneously institutionalizing ethnic identity through ethnic republics, passport identifications, the promotion of native language schools, and by allowing media to be disseminated in native languages (Gorenburg 2006). The instituted passport policy forced individuals to identify with a minority ethnic group within their titular republic, and the ethnicity inscribed in their internal passports was recorded in almost all transactions. This policy was instated, based on Lenin’s hope that:

a total democratization of all spheres, including the establishment of state borders according to the ‘sympathies’ of the population [would] in turn lead in practice to a total abolition of all national tensions and all national distrust, to an accelerated drawing together (sblizhenie) and merger (sliianie) of nations which will result in the withering away of the state. (Lenin 1977, cited in Gorenburg 2006)

The Soviets believed that they were immune to racism, as it only occurred in capitalist and imperialist countries with histories involving racialized slavery (Zakharov 2015); therefore, the nationalities policy was unproblematic to the communist vision of equality. Race was conceptualized by Soviet historians and philosophers as distinct from nationality or ethnicity (which were malleable) and therefore not an issue in the USSR. Despite this belief, in both legislation and practice, the Soviet state did not distinguish between race, ethnicity, and nationality. For example, Lenin described anti-Semitism as a “vile inflation of a racial feature of the nationalities question” (Lenin 6, 426, cited in Zakharov 2015) and spoke of “national racial hatred” (Lenin 8, p. 178, cited in Zakharov 2015). Despite the party’s belief that both national and class distinctions would disappear with the realization of communism, the primordiality of nationality did not fade away during the development of a socialist society. For example, the korenizatsiya movement in the 1920s and 1930s supported national forms in culture, language, and political representation indoctrinated Soviet people with the understanding that nations were primordial (Slezkine 1994). “The creation of ‘Soviet man’ was itself an ethnicitzed and ethnicizing project” in that it promoted equality through difference (Bonney 2002, 458, cited in Zakharov 2015).

Soviet anekdots reveal this tension between communist and Soviet ideals in addition to the racist sentiments pervasive among the Russian people. Although the Soviet Union hosted over a hundred ethnic groups, it is surprising that only a few of these distinctive groups were represented in Soviet anekdots. The existence of jokes about a particular ethnic group is an indication of the group’s visibility in the culture (Davies 1990). Oftentimes, a group is visible because they are perceived as a threat—in terms of greater success, wealth, power, or intelligence. In order to bolster one’s own collective image, outsiders are emasculated as a way to diminish or discredit their successes. Three ethnic groups (Jews, Georgians, and the Chukchi) are presented in order to illustrate how the construction of the New Soviet Man required the construction of ethnic others as cowards, villains, or fools.

Of the nineteen national or ethnic groups mentioned in the sample, Jews occupied more than a quarter of those anekdots that mentioned another national or ethnic group. Considering their relatively small proportion of the population (in 1970, approximately 3 million of 242 million, or 1 percent of the population was Jewish), Jews were very visible in Soviet culture due to their educational and occupational achievement as well as their ability to emigrate (Yuval-Davis 1993). Jews were considered a national group in the Soviet Union (even before the establishment of Israel in 1948); as such, their nationality was listed as Jewish on their passports. Their achievements and abilities to escape were constructed as manipulative and cowardly as illustrated in the following anekdots.

Really those Jews—for themselves they invented Zionism and for the others—Marxism.

On the front lines, a commander yells out: “For the Soviet Motherland!” “For Our Beloved Stalin!” and his soldiers charge into battle. All except for one soldier, a Jew, who hides in the bushes.

After the attack, the commander tracks him down and scolds him: “You bastard, pussy, coward!”

The Jew mutters to himself:

“Better to be a coward for five minutes than a corpse the rest of your life.”

There were few jokes about Georgians before the death of Stalin in 1953. This may be attributed to the fact that Georgia was a highly nationalist nation-state to the South with whom Russians rarely came into contact (Draitser 1982). They were a distinct group but did not threaten Russian supremacy and therefore were absent from the nationalist discourse. After Stalin’s death, the Soviet government lifted its ban against private enterprise, allowing small businesses to reopen while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade, and large industries. This was when Russians first had exposure to the Georgians and other Southern nationalities who often sold fruit and flowers for profit in local markets (Draitser 1999). Although less than a percentage of the Georgian population was involved in this business, the contrast between these presumed-to-be prosperous southern foreigners and Russian men fostered an image of Georgians pilfering from the Russians and flaunting their riches:

In a church, a Georgian prays for money to buy a car. Next to him, a Russian prays for half a liter of vodka. Finally, the Georgian gets annoyed and gives the Russian ten rubles: “Listen, get yourself a bottle and don’t bother God with your trifles.”

Anekdots about the Chukchi might be grouped under ethnic humor since they represent a real population from the Soviet Union, yet they differ from the representation of other ethnic groups in that they are not perceived as threatening to Russians. Instead, this strain of humor is very similar to the one dealing with “the fool.” The Chukchi mock Soviet power in very astute, unassuming ways in anekdots, oftentimes by revealing the inherent contradictions between official discourse and reality through their literal interpretation of party slogans. The Chukotka Peninsula is the northeastern tip of Siberia just fifty miles west of the Seward Peninsula in Alaska, far northeast of where most Russians have ever traveled. Chukchi are perceived to be geographically isolated and therefore illiterate and cut off from the general social world. Anekdots about the Chukchi often focus upon frigid conditions and the perceived simple mindedness of this people:

A Chukcha wants to buy a refrigerator.

“What do you need that for?” the salesperson asks, “You live in Siberia.”

“To warm up during the winter—imagine how nice it would be when it’s −40 degrees outside and only 0 in the fridge!”

Conclusions

CPSU advocates believed that the Soviet Union would produce a New Soviet Man and Woman who would embody the values and aspirations of the party. As time passed, this idea proved to be a lofty and unrealistic goal. Instead, Zinovyev’s concept of Homo Sovieticus, the embodiment of the adverse results of Soviet policies, seemed more accurate. One anekdot succinctly communicates this popular perception: “The government pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work.” Homo Sovieticus, the opposite of the New Soviet man, was indifferent to life. He cared little about his own work or the work of the collective in realizing as communist ideals. He is blindly obedient to the party, but drinks heavily to cope with his powerlessness.

Anekdot narratives in this sample reflect this tension between the New Soviet Man and Homo Sovieticus, grappling with the insecurities and fallacies experienced by Russian men. A hegemonic Russian male identity was salvaged, but only by subjugating and excluding particular populations and subpopulations of citizens (women and ethnic others) through the dual processes of stereotyping and scapegoating. Specifically, subgroups were defined in supporting roles, unfit for positions of status or power and out-groups are defined as cowardly and impotent or hypersexual and crude, less civilized than their in-group counterparts. These images stand in contrast to the party image of the idealized New Soviet Man who is powerful, brave, and sexually potent. Yet, just as out-groups are defined in contrast to this idealized image, so are actual Russian men, who challenge the legitimacy of this image by highlighting the incongruity between propaganda and reality.

Anekdots functioned as a type of democratic dissent akin to “montages” (Benjamin 1999) or “assemblages” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). Oral folklore is ambiguous and antiessentialist in that it has no fixed or definitive version—the repetition of a joke or song or folktale is a choice on part of the individual teller and each enactment is unique. As James Scott (1990) explains, “there is no orthodoxy or center to folk culture since there is no primary text to serve as a measure of heresy” (160–61). The very act of telling these narratives serves to reconstitute what is the “primary text” of experience or the lived reality of those who participate. Anekdots shared social space with other cultural texts; like any other messages, they were contextual and dialogical, so their meaning and social impact could vary depending on those particular situations in which they became enunciated. Every text is a communicative act that positions itself in relation to the status quo it seeks to change (Skinner 2003, 115). Anekdots comprise an organic discourse embedded in broader narratives much like a gender performance amid more pervasive discursive structures of performativity (Butler 1990). Daily events and struggles are often compared to anekdots, as a speaker might say, “you know, it’s just like in that joke …,” and then compare his or her actions with an anecdotal situation. In doing so, the narrative reflects the speaker’s identity and marks his or her belonging to a particular discursive community (Kashkin and Shilkhina 2009, 257–58).

Nationalism must be both a centralized and a decentralized power, which is established and maintained through production, rather than merely coercion and restrictions. Nationalism attains its power by appearing to be natural and timeless (Anderson 2006; Puri 2004) by incorporating itself into everyday life and practices (Billig 1995) not unlike gender (Butler 1990). Gender is not something we are born with, but something we do (West and Zimmerman 1987), accomplish (Connell 1987), and perform (Butler 1990). As Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, “one is not born a woman, but becomes one,” and we must not forget that the same is true for men. In analyzing the gender performances in Soviet anekdots, we better understand the multiple masculinities that both maintain and dismantle structures of power.

Although this study focuses primarily on the world of text and rhetoric, research indicates that aggression in humor translates to aggression and violence in the real world (Bemiller and Schneider 2010). Therefore, the implications of symbolic violence ought to receive closer attention, in that it may serve as a reflection of harbored prejudices and hostilities. This research also provides analytic tools to better understand (and ameliorate) persistent gender inequality in other countries where official law and popular practice diverge. In relation to the emergent Russo-Soviet nationalism that is expressed in these narratives, the subjugation of women establishes gendered roles within the national identity and naturalizes a gender hierarchy within it. Further research might explore sites of female folklore that paint gender relations differently or challenge anekdots’ depictions of power relations.