Communism was no joke - or at least, it didn't have many. But author Ben Lewis, who has written Hammer & Tickle, believes that telling the history of Communism through its jokes helps us to understand it - and how it was eventually laughed out of existence.

In the beginning there was no Communism and no Communist jokes. Then along came the Russian Revolution.

In the first phase of Communist humour, hundreds of satirical writers were inspired by the mushrooming Soviet bureaucracy and instant shortages of Communist economics. The writer Zoshchenko mocked the arrival of electricity – thanks to lightbulbs, Soviet citizens could now see in what poverty they lived.

An early joke went: An old woman goes to Moscow zoo and sees a camel for the first time . "My God, look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse," she said. 


Stalin banned almost all the satirical magazines which had appeared under Lenin. From 1934, anti-Soviet joking – both the telling and the listening - became a crime.

"Did you hear," said the jokers, "that Stalin has announced a prize for the best political joke – 25 years."

In fact the sentence was usually five to eight years. When Khrushchev began to release people from the Gulags in 1953, there were, according to the historian Roy Medvedev, 200,000 jokers incarcerated, out of a total prison population of 2.5m.

'Official' humour

To counter the underground Communist jokes, Stalin established an official sense of humour – in movies like Volga Volga and the magazine Krokodil. Soviet laugh-producers mocked evil war-mongering capitalists and incompetent bureaucrats – but never the leadership or ideology. Battle-lines were now drawn for the next 50 years in which two kinds of humour slugged it out.

After World War II, the army of underground jokers got a huge influx of new recruits from the central and eastern European countries occupied by Stalin. A new genre of joke emerged – against the Russians. Are the Russians are brothers or our friends? Our brothers – you can choose your friends.

Jokers were also imprisoned in Soviet Bloc countries in the 1950s but in the 1960s the Communist regimes did a U-turn on the jokes – they decided to tolerate them. They now thought they were harmless way for their population to let off steam. In this new era of freedom, the number and variety of jokes grew exponentially.


Can you wrap an elephant in newspaper? Yes if it contains a speech by Khrushchev.
One house-wife to another: “I hear there’ll be snow tomorrow.” “Well, I'm not queuing for that."

Shortages and queues

Inside the ranks of the official humourists there were now fifth columnists who tried to push the boundaries of what humour the state would permit. As the 1970s progressed, cartoons about shortages and queues appeared in some satirical magazines. Still, the 1970s was the era of stagnation – the tide of jokes did not turn into a revolution.

The link between the velvet revolutions of 1989 and Communist jokes can be found not in how many jokes there were – but who was telling them. Now it was the leaders.

Reagan tried to niggle Gorbachev at summits by telling him the jokes he’d heard. When Jaruselski went to visit Gorbachev in Moscow he used a joke to explain the problem of the Polish economy. Why are there two people pushing every wheelbarrow in Poland? Because the third person’s off sick.

And Gorbachev told Communist jokes to conservative party leaders in an effort to persuade them of the need to reform. “Jokes were our salvation,” said Gorbachev in a speech in 1989.

Hammer & Tickle: A History of Communism told through Communist Jokes by Ben Lewis published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson