Russian political jokes

In the Soviet period political jokes were a form of social protest, mocking and criticising leaders, the system and its ideology, myths and rites.

[3] In the Soviet Union, telling political jokes could be regarded as a type of extreme sport: according to Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code), "anti-Soviet propaganda" was a potentially capital offense.

Ben Lewis claims that the political conditions in the Soviet Union were responsible for the unique humour produced there;[5][4] according to him, "Communism was a humour-producing machine.

This is another joke about how disastrous the consequences of collectivisation were on Russia's food supply, how Trotsky wanted to treat peasants harshly to uplift workers, Bukharin vice versa, and how capitalist countries were still faring well in spite of this.

They supply snappy or ambiguous answers to questions on politics, commodities, the economy or other subjects that were taboo during the Communist era.

From the 1960s until the early 1980s, the Soviet Union had only three newspapers: the Pravda ("Truth"), the Izvestia ("News"), and the Krasnaya Zvezda ("Red Star").

Other jokes target the crop failures resulting from his mismanagement of agriculture, his innovations in urban architecture, his confrontation with the US while importing US consumer goods, his promises to build communism in 20 years, or simply his baldness and crude manners.

Leonid Brezhnev was depicted as dim-witted, senile, always reading his speeches from paper, and prone to delusions of grandeur.

As Andropov's bad health became common knowledge (he was eventually attached to a dialysis machine), several jokes made the rounds: Mikhail Gorbachev was occasionally mocked for his poor grammar, but perestroika-era jokes usually made fun of his slogans and ineffective actions, his birth mark ("Satan's mark"), Raisa Gorbacheva's poking her nose everywhere, and Soviet–American relations.

"[22] The joke has persisted in the form of "Russia is the homeland of elephants" (Russian: Россия – родина слонов.

A subgenre of the above-mentioned type of joke targets long sign-up queues for certain commodities, with wait times that could be counted in years rather than weeks or months.