Dark humor is like food not everyone gets it Shirt
In these strange times, people naturally turn to the past for orientation: Londoners recall the spirit of the Blitz, while citizens of St Petersburg look back to the Nazis’ Siege of Leningrad to remind themselves what they can overcome. But tales of suffering and heroism take us only so far. Humor is just as important. It punctures the sense of pervasive anxiety and shines a light into unfamiliar and dark places.Here, too, the past can serve as a guide. History reminds us that laughing in the face of fear is a powerful impulse, regardless of the risk involved. Soviet citizens lived in a world where a single wrong word could mean denunciation and their lives being torn apart by Stalin’s ruthless secret police. A harmless joke could lead to the dreaded 5 a.m. knock, ransacked apartments, and a terrifying ride in a ‘Black Raven’ prison car to an NKVD cell. There, these unfortunate souls were frequently subjected to days-long interrogations by officials determined to extract confessions that transformed a careless joke into evidence of a conspiracy against the Soviet project. A directive issued in March 1935 declared that sharing political jokes was essentially the same as leaking state secrets, so the intentions of joke-tellers were to be systematically disregarded.
Dark humor is like food not everyone gets it Shirt
Even those totally committed to the Soviet project were not safe. Card–carrying party members often shared ‘anekdoty’ (political jokes) with each other to air their frustrations with a regime that constantly fell short of its grandiose promises. In early 1934, Paraskovaya Pomelova, a party member in her late twenties, shared a joke with one of her colleagues:Stalin went for a swim in the River Neva and began to drown. A collective farmer was passing by and jumps in to save him. Back on shore, Stalin begins to ask the farmer what he’d like as a reward, but, realizing who he’s saved, the farmer interrupts: ‘Nothing! Just don’t tell anybody that I saved you!’Pomelova was arrested in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s purges, for the joke she had told three years earlier.