Privatization: Jokes, Scandal, and Absurdity in a Time of Rapid Change

Abstract

Swan Lake had a peculiar resonance in the later years of the Soviet Union. Habitually, in moments of political crisis, advertised programs would be replaced with Tchaikovsky’s ballet, thus effectively blanking out the channels. As fast as one station was switched to the next, only pirouettes and white tutus would fill the screen; the state radio built into each apartment would only be playing what was, to all intents and purposes, the anthem of fear. Too rapidly, people learned that the soaring melodies and muscular leaps of the Bolshoi Ballet’s finest promised a period of emotional disquiet. Quite simply, it signified a threat to the established order that was being battled out behind the Kremlin walls while a nervous population waited in dread of they knew not what, perhaps the death of a leader, perhaps an insurrection in some peripheral part of the empire. The last time the divas twirled while the hopes of communism burned was the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991; footage of Boris Yeltsin riding triumphant with the tanks through the streets of Moscow did not appear until the struggle was over, Yeltsin was installed, and a new order could be safely announced. It is not only the weak who employ hidden transcripts, nor, as I describe later, subvert recognized social orders.