Lenin Was a Mushroom

In May 1991, months before the end of the Soviet Union, the artist, performer, and experimental musician Sergey Kuryokhin (1954-1996) appeared on the television show The Fifth Wheel (Piatoe Koleso, 1988-1998), hosted by journalist Sergey Sholokhov (1958-). Over the course of the hour-long episode, Kuryokhin argued that, by ingesting enormous quantities of psychedelic mushrooms, Vladimir Lenin had turned into a mushroom himself—and, as a consequence, into a radio wave. This moment is a famous example of the ironic style called stiob, which anthropologist Alexei Yurchak describes as a parody based on over-identification with the object of parody the itself—that is, a parody or performance based on continuous “shimmering” or oscillation between sincere belief and ironic distance. Kuryokhin was so convincing that many of the show’s viewers believed him. He achieved this persuasive effect by imitating various forms and symbols of Soviet authoritative discourse. He referred to serious-seeming research and putatively scientific findings. He sat in front of large, overflowing bookshelves with a portrait of Nobel Prize-winning poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), a towering figure within the Russian intelligentsia, visible in the center of the frame. Kuryokhin’s exposition was interspersed with interviews with biologists explaining the properties of mushrooms and deceptively presented historical images, all giving the impression of logically connected pieces of evidence. The prank was particularly effective as an ironic culmination of perestroika, which was saturated with sensational revelations of hidden truths about Soviet history. Over the course of just a few years, Soviet people’s fundamental beliefs had been so deeply challenged that even the most outlandish claims could now pass as credible. Kuryokhin hoax was so successful in winning over his audience precisely because he was operating on the very edge of the believable. “Lenin Was a Mushroom” points to the blurring of boundaries between underground culture and mainstream media, both in the sense that leaders of the late-Soviet underground scene became involved in mainstream media or politics, and in the sense that strategies of underground art were assimilated into the mainstream. Examples of this tendency include the New Artists’ Pirate Television, which artist Timur Novikov (1958-2002) saw as an early attempt to infiltrate mainstream television, as well as Igor Dudinsky’s involvement in the creation of one of the most popular post-Soviet tabloids, Megapolis-ekspress. Stiob is generally associated with underground art and resistance to the emptiness and hypocrisy of late-Soviet official culture. Starting in the mid-late 1990s, however, it gradually became a dominant style within politics and media culture—and, in this incarnation, has served reaction, repression, and conservation of the status quo, especially after 2000. Before dying prematurely, Kuryokhin proclaimed his allegiance to fascism and violence as part of an artistic approach to politics. Since the 1990s, stiob and political irony have shaped the strategies of public figures flirting with nationalism, militarism, aggressive masculinity, and xenophobia—like NBP founder Eduard Limonov (1943-2020), far-right philosopher Alexander Dugin (1962-), and right-wing populist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky (1946-2022). More recently, stiob and trolling have become tools of establishment media and power structures in the service of authoritarianism and mass disinformation—from TV hosts and journalists like Margarita Simonyan and Dmitry Kiselyov, to Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, all the way to Putin himself. The susceptibility of stiob to co-optation as an instrument of repression, coercion, and manipulation has raised the question of whether the technique retains any effectiveness as a strategy of subversion and artistic expression.