It's Only a Joke, Comrade!: Humour, Trust and Everyday Life Under Stalin (1928-1941)

'A stunningly original study of Stalinist society... Essential reading for anyone interested in how human beings navigate a path through times of extraordinary upheaval, privation and danger' – Daniel Beer

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

Jonathan Waterlow received his PhD (DPhil) from the University of Oxford in 2012. He went on to hold a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at St Antony's College, Oxford, and was a Research Associate at the University of Bristol from 2016-18. He's also been a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, and studied at the Universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews, and the Herzen State Pedagogical University in St Petersburg, Russia. He's a founder at Voices in the Dark (voicesinthedark.world), where he writes and podcasts.