internet humor about stalin netinalju stalinist - Eesti Rahvaluule

EDITOR’S PREFACE
is book is the product of a series of difficulties that befell me in the spring
of 2003, when I was searching for a topic in the field of political jokes in order
to write a contribution to a collection of articles organised by the Estonian
Literary Museum / the Centre of Cultural History and Folkloristics in Estonia,
entitled “Võim ja kultuur: Käsitlusi totalitarismist” (Power and Culture:
Investigations of Totalitarianism) (Tartu, 2003). One of the provisional titles
I had chosen was “Humour about Stalin”. By the time I had realised that my
general knowledge of Stalin was too limited to permit me to write an authoritative
investigation of this topic, however, I had already gathered a good
number of Stalin jokes from the Internet. I have compiled this publication in
order to ensure that that work would not go to waste.
Why Internet jokes?
Totalitarian regimes are the most favourable environment for the growth
of political jokes, and the rule of Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, which is
also referred to as the period of stagnation, i.e. the most intensive period of
decay of Soviet socialism, was perhaps the golden age or heyday of political
jokes in the history of mankind up to that time. Victor Raskin (Raskin
1985) and other humour researchers have, however, noted that in conditions
of extreme political terror, when those who tell “bad” jokes can suffer
severe punishments, it is possible for political folklore to dry up and disappear
altogether.
e former Soviet Union, above all Russia, was clearly the birthplace and
native home of the majority of jokes about Stalin. Yet even in Juri Borev’s
book “Сталиниада” (Borev 1990) there are relatively few jokes about Stalin
– perhaps about 50–60 ordinary jokes, whereas Borev’s “Фарисея” (Borev
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