Loss of the Soviet Nation at KVN

The university-age amateur variety and improv contest show KVN - so named after the first Soviet TV set, the KVN-49, but also standing for “the Club of the Happy and the Resourceful”– first aired on live Central Television in 1961 and for a decade was one of the most widely-watched shows in the USSR, until it was cancelled in 1971 by the censorious and openly anti-semitic incoming head of Gosteleradio, Sergei Lapin. For the next decade and a half, versions of the contest continued off air, at the level of various Soviet university and technical institute clubs. In 1986, at the beginning of Perestroika, KVN returned to Soviet TV screens and once again became a mainstay on it.

Like What? Where? When? (see Artifact #00030), KVN was structured around regional clubs spread across the USSR, with victories in local competitions bringing the clubs to Moscow. However, whereas What? Where? When? was a game of intellectual erudition with universalist pretensions, in which the teams’ home origin was not a major point of discussion, KVN was a competition for audience laughs, and some types of jokes elicited more laughs than others– such as Soviet ethnic humor, often at one’s own expense, which came particularly easily to teams from the non-Russian Soviet republics.

In 1991, the dissolution of the USSR and the rise of sovereing, independent post-Soviet republics brought about widespread, sometimes painful discussions about ethnonational belonging, Soviet ‘friendship-of-the-nations’ ideology, and decolonization in former-Soviet space. The present fragment, taken from the opening of KVN’s first decidedly post-Soviet season in January 1992, raises these questions particularly sharply. The team, “the Odessa Gentlemen” from Odessa State University, starts off their sketch with the mashup two themesongs– that of Sherlock Holmes the British sleuth and that of Stierlitz, the Soviet spy. Thus ‘European,’ transnational aristocratic cultural refinement (a longheld Soviet intelligentsia value) collides with suspicions about a new political order in which culture might not so easily transcend borders anymore. As the sketch goes on, the “Odessa Gentelmen” get laughs by mentioning typical ‘Soviet nationalities’ tropes, like the Ukrainian national independence movement or their city’s ethnic Jewish heritage, and “thank God” that such typical Soviet jokes are still possible in their own Republic of KVN, “a single laugh-creating space.” It goes without saying that this space is Russophone, that its epicenter continues to be Russia, and that its satellites continue to be Russian-speakers from the former-Soviet ‘near abroad.’ This idea of an enduring ‘Russian world’ of laugh culture appears as salvific relative to the bitter realities of post-Soviet impoverishment and strife presently unfolding within and among the former Soviet states.