Tiny Revolutions in Russia: Twentieth-Century Soviet and Russian History in Anecdotes by Bruce Adams

Abstract

6i6 Reviews argument. Her extensive engagement with Iurii Druzhnikov, author of themajor earlierwork on Pavlik Morozov, best known inEnglish as InformerOO, is respectful, acknowledging his research contribution, while at the same time situating his con clusions as an inversion of the older, officialmyth: if, in the Soviet version, Pavlik and his brother were murdered as a result of a kulak conspiracy, then inDruzh nikov's account Pavlik was murdered by theOGPU opportunists, generating a kind of counter-conspiracy and counter-mythmaking. The volume includes an indispensable genealogical chart of theMorozov family; historical maps of theUSSR, theUrals, and theTavda region; and a critically an notated dramatis personae without which Kelly's re-examination of suspects would be impenetrable. Thirty-four illustrations-school photographs; posters; witness tes timonies, death certificates, and police reports; gifts fromYoung Pioneers; statues, monuments, and theirmaquettes-add a valuable dimension to the volume. James Nunn's tongue-in-cheek book-cover design, which transforms the volume into a mildewed Soviet school textbook, is a delightful sots-art contribution. If indeed, as Kelly suggests, her interest at times reached the intensity of an obsession (p. 341), it is an obsession fromwhich we greatly benefit. UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH NANCY CONDEE Tiny Revolutions inRussia: Twentieth-Century Soviet and Russian History inAnec dotes. By BRUCE ADAMS. (RoutledgeCurzon Studies on theHistory of Russia and Eastern Europe) New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon. 2005. I73 pp. ?6o. ISBN 978-0-4I5-35173-7. This collection of 794 historically contextualized Russian and Soviet jokes (the title uses a direct translation of theRussian word foran anonymously composed, orally told joke: anekdot) fills something of a lacuna in English translations of Russian political humour. Existing anthologies, some ofwhich Bruce Adams lists in his in troduction (p. 3), typically provide little ifany socio-historical or linguistic context for the non-specialist, which severely limits the range of anekdoty that can be trans lated and included in such works. Adams's careful explanations allow him topresent hundreds of previously untranslated texts. Adams does not merely annotate the jokes in the volume, however; they are in terspersed within (and used to punctuate) an engaging narrative primer on Soviet and post-Soviet history.The book, then, ismore than a sampler of Soviet humour; it traces the changing significance of that humour in the lifeof Soviet society. The author's innovative approach is particularly well suited to the anekdot, a genre that itself was amedium forsatirical, oral 'annotation'-by theSoviet 'folk'-of historical circumstances inflictedon them fromabove over the course of the twentieth century. Tiny Revolutions is thus an extended introduction towhat was arguably the Soviet Union's most important formof 'popular historiography'. In this regard it is appro priate thatsuch a taskwas undertaken by a historian (Adams is a professor ofRussian history at theUniversity of Louisville, Kentucky). His sources are also those of a historian, not a folklorist: inaddition to themost reliable Russian-language antholo gies (such as Dora Shturman and Sergei Tiktin's excellent Sovetskii Soiuz v zerkale politicheskogo anekdota [The Soviet Union in theMirror of the Political Anecdote] (Jerusalem: Express, I987)), Adams has culled and translated anekdoty recorded in the diaries of Soviet citizens. Like many collections of Soviet political jokes, thechronologically organized chap ters of Tiny Revolutions correspond to the changing leadership in the country. One surprise in this regard is the proportionally larger number ofKhrushchev-era jokes MLR, 102.2, 2007 6I7 (297, compared with 24 in the Lenin chapter, I58 forStalin, 211 forBrezhnev, 37 for Andropov and Chernenko, and 67 forGorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin). The ratio represents somewhat of a revision of the conventional wisdom that locates the anek dot's heyday firmly in theBrezhnev period. The author comments explicitly on the unexpected imbalance with a helpful distinction: 'Itwas inBrezhnev's time that the practice of sitting around a kitchen table and "reeling out" [travit] anecdotes by the hour became common, but Khrushchev's era produced more of them' (p. 6o). And what sorts of joke were 'reeled out' during thevarious periods? As a genre on theborder of artistic expression and everyday speech, the anekdoty of each particular historical moment reflected the quotidian and mass-media-determined preoccupa tions of the time: political repression under Stalin ('A...