Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania by Neringa Klumbytė (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania by Neringa Klumbytė Senem Yildirim (bio) Neringa Klumbytė, Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022). 287 pp., ill. Index. ISBN: 978-1-5017-6668-8. Shortest joke: "COMMUNISM." Broom, 1991 Studies of authoritarianism typically focus on state power, violence, and the infringement of human rights. Neringa Klumbytė, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, takes a different approach to the study of authoritarianism by examining "the commonplace experiences of power" through the production and consumption of the officially approved humor magazine in Soviet Lithuania – creating cartoons and satires, navigating censorship, and embracing the official culture through laughter (P. 4). Klumbytė contends that when democratic forms of political participation are lacking, the state mobilizes citizens and provides them with avenues of engagement through humor and satire. The author aims to reconstruct the process of the authoritarian regime's infiltrating of citizens' daily lives, engaging them politically, and making ideology a household item [End Page 232] on moral and emotional levels – or, alternatively, failing on these fronts. Specifically, the book studies the case of the Lithuanian satire and humor magazine Broom (Šluota) from 1956, when it was founded, to 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The author discusses how Broom, the only humor magazine in the Lithuanian language at the time, became the main outlet for state-sponsored laughter in Soviet Lithuania. The authorities considered such outlets to be disciplinary and propaganda tools at their disposal, but this was only partially so. Klumbytė masterfully shows how, along with its official role, Broom functioned as a site for contesting Sovietness and reaffirming the distinctiveness of Lithuania. This book provides a valuable contribution to studies of Soviet authoritarianism by exploring the dynamics between the authoritarian government and its citizens, the resistance to state power, and the role of state propaganda and popular participation. These topics have long been of interest to scholars studying the region. The early "totalitarian school" depicted the Soviet state as an institution with almost complete control over society, where citizens were portrayed as atomized individuals who were either completely brainwashed or repressed by the powerful state apparatus.1 However, in the 1970s and 1980s, revisionist scholars such as Sheila Fitzpatrick, Moshe Lewin, and Robert Thurston challenged this theory and introduced a social history approach that shed light on how the Soviet state was able to secure mass support.2 Post-revisionist scholars doubled down on this approach by asserting the existence of a distinctive Soviet subjectivity and arguing that normative Soviet values were voluntarily internalized by citizens who systematically performed Sovietness in their daily lives.3 Most of these studies dealt with the Stalinist period and tended to focus on Moscow or Leningrad. By contrast, Klumbytė's book focuses on Lithuania during the late Soviet period. While acknowledging the role of the repressive state apparatus, she also draws attention [End Page 233] to limited social, economic, and political pluralism and the relative freedoms of Soviet citizens. By choosing writers, artists, and editors of Broom who communicated state ideology to the masses as the main protagonists of her study rather than dissident intellectuals who openly opposed the Soviet state, Klumbytė has made a daring conceptual choice. She argues that "authoritarian laughter" was multidirectional: it was a communicative exchange among artists and audiences that was both ideologically correct and subversive. In authoritarian society, complicity did not necessitate shared beliefs, so by avoiding binaries like dissident versus accomplice, Klumbytė offers an important insight about the position of Soviet intellectuals in-between the polar stances of resistance and conformity. Previous studies of authoritarian humor have juxtaposed official and unofficial humor, focusing on laughter either as a form of resistance or a tool of propaganda.4 By contrast, Klumbytė's approach to laughter is complex and does not differentiate between its two functions. In this regard, she is closer to John Etty, who has aptly challenged the divide between official and unofficial humor in his book on Krokodil's graphic satire and has suggested that, irreducible to propaganda, it sometimes...