REPLAY : The Cold War & Kamarad Krokodil

     The ink off of the peace treaties that enshrined the official end of World War II hadn’t yet dried properly, but already the great powers, USA and USSR, for lack of more constructive ideas, decided to fight it out in another game of planetary Skanderbeg: THE COLD WAR. A war that would come to last almost half a century and would end with the unraveling of the USSR.

The frozen wind was blowing form every corner, and the most fearsome weapon was called Propaganda (the movies, the TV, the press, and the political speeches)!

In the USSR, the real rifle, for the public’s conscience was the magazine „KROKODIL”. Very talented graphic artists were shooting from all angles with caricatures of great impact. If you behave, I may very well give you the translation of these texts...

   Once unleashed, the war could no longer be stopped. As much in the US, as well as in the USSR, the weapons were sharpened and greased up. Each camp had its own words, concepts, and ideologies that were forbidden, and using them, even in privacy (I hope you haven’t forgotten that the walls have pointy ears...), was dangerous... In the USSR, Stalin was massively thinning out his political adversaries, be it by Nagant, be it by sending them to „vacation” in Siberua; int the US, punishing the deviants was more nuanced, but the results were just as bad. Following and persecuting those who had other political views than the ones agreed upon by the Establishment was so tough that the notion of a left party was practically eradicated from the dictionary. The biggest Scarecrow was senator McCarthy, who was organising real „public” courts, where those who had lost the RIGHT way were being branded. Frightening was the fact that those who were found guilty by the court became pariahs, they lost their job, and they were excluded from society: it wasn’t a good idea to be seen with a deviant, the ideology could become infectious... But this is another story and its time hasn’t come for it to be told...

I return to Krokodil, the soviet magazine with sharp fangs, that pointed out with a red finger the real enemy...

     The Russians understood that Laughter is a fearsome weapon, maybe not as efficient as the Nagant or the Katiusa with which they rarified the enemy’s ranks, but sufficiently corosive to weaken the others’ convictions. The ridiculous doesn’t kill, goes the saying, but it doesn’t leave you untouched either! From the fine humor of Chekhov’s  stories, to the good ol’ fun from „The Golden Calf” and „Twelve Chairs” by Ilf & Petrov, to the coarse, but not unfunny, situations from Zoscenko’s sketches, russian and soviet litterature is full of landmarks for a history of laughter. The governors (actually Stalin, Beria and the gang) didn’t shy away from encouraging the mocking spirit of the humorists, though carefully remembering to publish an unwritten list of the intangible people. Often I wonder how it was never seen by the execution troops represented by the dangerous tandem of Ilf & Petrov?