internet humor about stalin netinalju stalinist - Eesti Rahvaluule

Arvo Krikmann
1992), which contains so-called ‘intelligentsia folklore’ dating from the post-
Stalin era, consists mainly of political jokes.
In the West, many collections of jokes poking fun at socialism and the
Soviet regime have appeared since the 1950s (for instance Banc & Dundes
1990: 172–177, cf. also the list of printed sources in this book), although even
these predominantly reflect the circumstances of the post-Stalin periods.
In Estonia, linguist Jüri Viikberg has been one of the people who has
gathered forbidden jokes in a drawer, waiting for better times. At the first
opportunity he donated his collection to the Estonian Folklore Archive, and
later also published a collection of jokes entitled “Anekdoodiraamat” (Book
of Jokes) (Viikberg 1997). ere were undoubtedly also similar collectors in
Russia and in other parts of the socialist bloc, but it is difficult to obtain more
precise information about the material they have collected.
In 1992 an extensive competition took place in Estonia for the collection
of tradition in schools, and this also gathered a great number of transcriptions
of Soviet-era political jokes, although the number of jokes relating to
Stalin in that material was quite small – his name occurred in only forty
jokes (see Sarv 1995: 111). e possibilities of gathering a significant volume
of Stalin humour from the manuscript archival material to be found in the
former republics of the Soviet Union appeared almost non-existent, even for
linguistic reasons alone.
us I chose the Internet, especially the Russian Internet, as the main
source in my quest. e Russian Internet contains some extensive and some
extremely extensive databanks and collections of jokes and anecdotes: many
copies of Yulius Telesin’s book (Telesin 1986), those of Jegor Posvezhinnyi,
Viktor Bolotnikov, Andrei Chorich, the anonymous “Сайтик Алекса”, the
humour site edited by Dima Verner entitled “Анекдоты из России” (Jokes
from Russia) with its archive, etc. On the basis of these I created a ‘start platform’
– all texts containing the word “Сталин”. After that I performed an additional
search in the Russian search engine ‘Rambler’ to find additional files
containing both “Сталин” and “анекдот”, registered the texts added in this
manner, appended them to the previous material and eliminated duplicates.
After that I attempted to find a sequence (on average 4–7 words in length)
with which to identify each text that had entered my list, and determined,
using the possibilities offered by Rambler, how many copies of this or that
text version could be found on the Russian Internet. I also took into consid-
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