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It's Only A Joke, Comrade!: Humour, Trust and Everyday Life under Stalin (1928-1941)
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781985635821
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: Jun 13 2018
Pages: 308
Weight: 0.91
Height: 0.65 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In the shadow of the Gulag, Soviet citizens were still cracking jokes. They had to.
Drawing on diaries, interviews, memoirs and hundreds of previously secret documents, It's Only a Joke, Comrade! uncovers how they joked, coped, and struggled to adapt in Stalin's brave new world. It asks what it really means to live under a dictatorship: How do people make sense of their lives? How do they talk about it? And whom can they trust to do so?
Moving beyond ideas of 'resistance', 'doublethink', 'speaking Bolshevik', or Stalin's Cult of Personality to explain Soviet life, it reveals how ordinary people found their way and even found themselves in a life lived along the fault-lines between rhetoric and reality.
'[A] landmark study ... an outstanding addition to the body of literature that has flourished since the 1991 archival revolution.' - Kritika
'Beautifully written' - The Soviet & Post-Soviet Review 'An extraordinary achievement' - Ronald Grigor Suny'Re-vitalizes our understanding of Soviet society' - Lynne Viola
'Fascinating ... lively, engaging, and at times very funny' - Catriona Kelly
'The best book on Stalinism I've read in a long time' - S.A. Smith
'To breathtaking effect, Armando Iannucci's The Death of Stalin tapped into the relentlessly dark humour to be found in the USSR at its paranoid peak. Now, Jonathan Waterlow has picked up the baton, exploring the kind of jokes that flourished in Soviet society to help people cope with the uncertainty and despair of living under an authoritarian regime where reality could change overnight' - The Herald'One of those rare books that not only has to be read by scholars in the field, but is also accessible to a wide readership. Indeed it is an essential read for anybody who wants to get beyond standard views of the communist joke and understand what humour really tells us about life under this extraordinary regime' - David Priestland
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It's Only a Joke, Comrade!: Humour, Trust and Everyday Life under Stalin
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