The Real Story of the CIA’s Secret Treasure-Trove of Soviet Jokes
Recently declassified CIA documents have been discovered to contain a cache of Soviet jokes collected by the agency in the 1980s; since historian Gene Zubovich tweeted about it, media outlets around the world have been gleefully reprinting them. It’s not hard to understand why – some of the jokes are simply irresistible:
A worker standing in a liquor [store] line says, ‘I’ve had enough, save my place, I’m going to shoot Gorbachev’. Two hours later he returns to claim his place in line. His friends ask, ‘Did you get him?’. ‘No, the line there was even longer than the line here’.
The jokes are fun for a quick chuckle... but despite all the press coverage, nobody seems to know quite what to make of them.
The jokes came as a surprise to Western audiences, long used to thinking of the Soviet Union as a brutally repressive state that would throw you in a gulag for daring to tell a joke about Brezhnev’s frequently incoherent, alcohol-infused speeches, let alone the activities of the KGB. But, in reality, by the mid-1970s, ‘Heard the new political joke?’ had practically become a greeting between friends, who’d proceed to reel out dozens of the latest satirical punchlines, even in public places. There was always some risk in sharing these joke (especially with strangers), but this was…
