Books
It’s Only a Joke, Comrade! Humour, Trust and Everyday Life under Stalin
An Amazon Bestseller in Russian History, It’s Only a Joke, Comrade! uncovers the secret world of political jokes under Stalin’s dictatorship. It reveals how, despite the risk of 10-year sentences in the Gulag, ordinary people used humour to grapple with, make sense of, and share the experience of a life lived along the fault-lines of rhetoric and reality.
War Crimes Trials and Investigations: A Multi-Disciplinary Introduction
The first multi-disciplinary introduction to war crimes trials and investigations, this edited volume includes essays written by experts across a diverse range of fields. My co-editor and I set out to create something that we wished had existed when we started our own research, so the book aims to equip readers with everything they need to know in order to navigate a complex and, until now, deeply fragmented field.
The 48 Laws of Power in Practice
Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power has touched the lives of millions. It's wielded by successful business executives, leading actors and musicians, and even by criminal kingpins. But how can you apply its lessons to your life? This short companion book draws on the in-depth series we created for my podcast, Voices in the Dark, and explains how to use Greene’s book to make real, lasting change in your life. It’s a fun, short read that you can download for free from the podcast’s website.
Academic Articles
‘Humour Roundtable’
The Editors invited me to contribute to a roundtable discussion on humour and history, hosted by the major journal, German History. I provided a different angle on the discussion by comparing and contrasting humour under Hitler’s and Stalin’s authoritarian regimes.
Originally published in German History, 33.4 (2015), and can be accessed here.
‘War Crimes Trials’
This chapter, co-authored with Donald Bloxham, surveys the controversial and contradictory evolution of the war crimes trials held during and after the Second World War. After exploring why and how trials took place at all (they were not common practice before the war), we intentionally highlighted the Soviet contributions to the trials, which have long been written off as insincere or unworthy of scholarly attention because – ‘of course’ – the Soviets only ever held ‘show trials’. But where’s the line between a ‘show trial’ and the Nuremberg Trials, which were likewise carefully controlled, the outcome essentially predetermined, and the defence disallowed from bringing up evidence which the court didn’t want to hear?
More information about the book can be found on the publisher’s website here.
‘Babushka, Helper, Harlot, Joker: Women and Gender in 1930s Political Humour’
I contributed a chapter to this groundbreaking collection: The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Russia and the Soviet Union.
Humour is a way of coping with dramatic change and unstable times, so in this chapter I explore how the changing role of women in the USSR was dealt with in contemporary jokes. How were women represented? What kinds of jokes did women tell? And why did the regime seem to treat women far more leniently than men for telling edgy political jokes?
More information about the book is available on the publisher’s website here.
‘Speaking More than Bolshevik: Humour, Subjectivity, and Crosshatching in Stalin’s 1930s’
I contributed a chapter to a brilliant edited volume which, at the centenary of the Russian Revolution, challenges us to rethink 1917 as a historical divide. The Revolution is often presented as a complete break with the past, but in reality there was plenty of change before, and plenty of continuity after, October 1917.
In my contribution I show how, in humour, many pre-revolutionary values, ideas and frames of reference survived well into the 1930s, and continued to shape how ordinary people made sense of Stalin’s brave new world.
For almost 20 years, historians have been fascinated by the idea that people learnt to ‘speak Bolshevik’ – to use the language and symbols of the Soviet regime to their best advantage. But my research tells a different story: Soviet citizens continuously interwove older values, ideas and ethics with the regime’s as they tried to find their way and even find themselves in these years of great uncertainty. Even as they learnt to ‘speak Bolshevik’, they were also trying to make ‘Bolshevik’ speak sense.
Further details can be found on the publisher’s website here.
‘More than Resistance: Political Humour under Stalin in the 1930s’
I contributed a chapter to an edited collection which explored the role of humour and satire in world history. The volume grew from an international conference held in Freiburg, Germany.
You can preview the book’s contents on the publisher’s website here.
‘Sanctioning Laughter in Stalin’s Soviet Union’
I contributed a piece on humour under Stalin to a special issue of History Workshop Journal that explored the role and limits of political humour under authoritarian regimes.
In this article I go into more depth than I do in my book (It’s Only a Joke, Comrade!) about the leaders’ humour and their changing (and often contradictory) ideas about controlling it in the rest of society.
The article was originally published in History Workshop Journal, 79 (2015), and can be accessed here.
Here’s the original abstract:
Laughter and humour in Stalin’s Soviet Union have long been considered weapons, wielded most effectively by the state against its (perceived) enemies, but also by the populace in acts of resistance aimed against the repressive regime in which they lived. This article argues that both these perspectives are misleading.
The Soviet state in fact had a frequently ambiguous, evolving attitude to humour and its uses. At times, the humour of state and people even overlapped – particularly when attacking the caprice and foolishness of local bureaucrats – but the article emphasizes that the function and hence meaning of this humour differed radically depending upon who told a given joke and their position of power relative to its target. Ordinary people’s humour in the USSR was frequently reflexive: it was not aimed at the Soviet system, but represented Schadenfreude at one’s own misfortunes.
In contrast to Patrick Merziger’s ‘German humour’, which ‘blocked everything disturbing out’, Soviet citizens used humour to bring the disturbing in, and to diminish its power through laughter. Nevertheless, the state considered political humour to be ‘antisoviet agitation’, and punished many joke-tellers accordingly. Despite this, the article demonstrates that such punishment was inconsistently enforced; in the USSR, laughter was not simply sanctioned, but was frequently recontextualized and reinterpreted.
‘Intimating Trust: Popular Humour in Stalin's 1930s’
This article was the first fruit of the 10-year odyssey which would lead to my book, It’s Only a Joke, Comrade!
The article was originally published in Cultural and Social History, 10.2 (2013), and can be accessed here.
Here’s the original abstract:
It has often been proposed that popular humour under Stalin functioned as a ‘weapon of the weak’: the only defence mechanism of a disenfranchised, repressed population. This view is a consequence of both problematic source materials and of a Cold War influence which has led to analyses which repeatedly cast the Soviet population as victims of either total state coercion or total state conversion.
This article examines how citizens' humour in fact demonstrates complex processes of engagement, assessment and eventual adaptation by Soviet citizens to the circumstances of the 1930s, rather than providing evidence of some kind of ‘resistance’. By sharing humour (a dangerous pursuit at this time) unofficial social bonds and common viewpoints were formed among the Soviet population – bonds which were based upon trust. These exchanges of trust tokens and savoir-faire led not to a population opposed to the regime, but to a population which retained a space in which to exercise its critical and interpretational faculties, an exercise which was then to enable acceptance of and adaptation to the regime. From these analyses a more accurate model of state–citizen relations is proposed: not that of a weapon, but of a shield composed of paradigms both new and old.
Academic Journal Reviews
State Laughter: Stalinism, Populism, and Origins of Soviet Culture – Evgeny Dobrenko & Natalia Jonsson-Skradol
State Laughter joins the ranks of several recent studies that together dispense with the inaccurate assumption that humour and laughter did not (or could not) exist under Stalinism. This new, collaborative volume is the first to comprehensively explore how the regime itself understood, attempted to control, and ultimately wielded humour as a (usually blunt-force) tool of statecraft.
Published in Modern Language Review, Volume 118, Issue 3 (2023).
A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia – Sheila Fitzpatrick
Having experimented with some autobiographical sketches in The London Review of Books, Sheila Fitzpatrick, for decades a leading voice of early Soviet social and cultural history, has now produced a full-length memoir covering the experiences of her first trips to the USSR in the late 1960s while she researched her doctorate. By turns fascinating, disturbing and hilariously funny, it offers a unique insight into the life of a brilliant historian at a moment when Soviet history (rather than ‘politicla science’) was born.
Published in Slavonica, Volume 20, Issue 2 (2014).
Sovetskii Anekdot: Ukazatel' Siuzhetov – M. Mel’nichenko
Despite the Soviet Union’s reputation for monolithic censorship and repression, citizens always shared jokes about the regime and their lives within it. Even under Stalin, when telling jokes could land you in a Gulag for 10 years or more, the people continued to joke. Mikhail Mel’nichenko’s amazing, comprehensive book collects these jokes together in the first truly scholarly critical edition and traces their evolution as a vital element of Russo-Soviet culture.
Published in Slavonic & East European Review, Volume 94, Issue 2 (2016).
The Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin – James Harris
Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, first published in 1968 and revised in 1990, looms over our understanding of Stalinism. That fiery work continues to inform general perceptions of the Stalinist purges, but has long since been shown to be deeply flawed, from the exaggerated numbers to the analytically void moralising. This bold new collection challenges us to think differently, addressing all the the principal and perennial questions surrounding the ‘Terror.
Published in History, Volume 100, Issue 341 (2015).
War, Evacuation, and the Exercise of Power. The Center, Periphery, and Kirov's Pedagogical Institute, 1941–1952 – Larry E. Holmes
Continuing Larry Holmes’s fascination with the town of Kirov (now Viatka), this book uses the history of the Kirov Pedagogical Institute to explore the disruptive experience of the Second World War as experienced on the ground. Filled with numerous revealing vignettes, the book reassess the triumphalist war narrative which remains largely unexamined from a balanced and dispassionate perspective. In a time of disaster, Holmes seeks to offer ‘Not a tale of triumphalism . . . but rather an appraisal of the difficulties, the choices weighed, and decisions taken’ in this period.
Published in Europe-Asia Studies, Volume 66, Issue 4 (2014).
Trust and Distrust in the USSR – Geoffrey Hosking et al
The study of ‘trust’ in the Soviet Union has grown significantly in recent years. This collection flies the flag for ‘trust as an independent topic of research’ – as a new method of explaining and understanding the Soviet sociopolitical system. The authors of this collection examine ideas of ‘forced trust’, ‘ambient distrust’ and more – but does their claim hold up that they’re establishing a bold new paradigm in Soviet studies?
Published in Ab Imperio, Issue 1 (2014).
Moscow 1937 – Karl Schlögel
In the Soviet Union, and today in its former member states, ‘1937’ is a ‘code word for one of the greatest historical catastrophes of the twentieth century’. Indeed, in the years that followed, contemporaries didn’t speak of a ‘Great Terror’ – the term we use now – but often just of ‘1937’. Although Moscow was in many ways at the centre of the wave of 1.5 million arrests and 700,000 executions, this was not everything that happened at this time. Moscow 1937 was not only a place of death; it was also a ‘gigantic construction site’, as Schlögel makes plain, and this is the fascinating central contrast that chases the reader across the pages of this remarkable book.
Published in Reviews in History, Institute of Historical Research at the School of Advanced Study (2014).
Spartak Moscow: A History of the People’s Team in the Workers’ State – Robert Edelman
The myth of Spartak has long been an evolving historical object. Even the specific inspiration for the team’s name –officially named after the gladiator and rebel slave Spartacus – is itself lost in claims and counter-claims. The ‘people’s team’ (so runs one version of the team’s legend) had players sent to the Gulag by Stalin himself, and the great rivalry between Dinamo and Spartak was underlaid by the belief that the former was funded by the secret police. Football in the USSR was, in a word, political. But, on the field of play, politics was for once contested in the open, with the outcome not predetermined behind closed doors.
Published in English Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 530 (2013).
The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses – Frances Lee Bernstein
The Soviet 1920s were marked not only by a sense of possibility and creativity, but also by a sense of crisis. World war and then civil war had created—so many thinkers and doctors believed—a moral and physical degeneracy in the population which demanded rapid correction. It was believed that there was a suicide ‘epidemic’ in these years and, as Bernstein’s book examines, also a pressing sexual and moral crisis. Official attempts to address these fears became part of the broader project of establishing a whole new way of life, which touched upon all aspects of existence, the self and social relations.
Published in Europe-Asia Studies, Volume 65, Issue 8 (2013).
Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941 – David Brandenberger
In Propaganda State in Crisis, Brandenberger seeks to return ideology to the fore in the analysis of pre-war Stalinism – a welcome return after more than a decade (perhaps more than two) of Alltagsgeschichte reigning supreme in the field. How did the Soviet state attempt to indoctrinate its population and to mobilise them in support of the new regime? Brandenberger sets out to answer this question by focusing on three inter- connected areas: ideological ‘production, projection’ and ‘popular reception’.
Published in Revolutionary Russia, Volume 25, Issue 2 (2012).
Inventing the Enemy: Terror and Denunciation in Stalin’s Russia – Wendy Z. Goldman
Stalin’s Terror, which reached its bloody zenith in 1937, remains infamous in both the historiography of the Soviet Union and in popular understandings of that regime. However, even with access to the Russian archives made possible in the 1990s, we have had little sense of the individual stories which made up that ‘terror’, being limited instead to faceless columns of names and numbers recorded in official documents. Wendy Goldman’s new book brilliantly overcomes this deficit and takes us into the heart of the ‘terror’ as experienced on the ground.
Published in Journal of European Studies, Volume 43, Issue 1 (2012).
Stalinist Society, 1928–1953 – Mark Edele; Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life under Stalin, 1939–1953 – Timothy Johnston
These books both set out to develop our understanding of ordinary citizens’ relationships with the Stalinist regime, relationships which have in recent years been increasingly understood as a middle-ground between support and resistance, conversion or coercion. They ask, in short: what actually held Soviet society together during these tumultuous years?
Published in History, Volume 97, Issue 327 (2012).
Political Humor under Stalin: An Anthology of Unofficial Jokes and Anecdotes – David Brandenberger
‘At first glance, the idea that political humor existed under Stalin seems rather unlikely’ (p. 1). From this opening sentence, David Brandenberger quickly sets out to demolish this misconception and provides us with a fascinating look into the multifaceted worlds of popular opinion and humour that existed despite the repressiveness of the regime.
Published in Europe-Asia Studies, Volume 64, Issue 2 (2012).
Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921–1929 – Kenneth M. Pinnow
The failed Russian Revolution of 1905 provoked a ‘suicide epidemic’ that was interpreted by the Bolsheviks as yet another demonstration of the pernicious effects capitalism had upon a society crying out for change. But after the successful Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, suicide did not suddenly disappear…
Published in Social History of Medicine, Volume 24, Issue 3 (2011), Oxford University Press.