Losing the Soviet nation on "KVN"

The amateur variety and improv contest show KVN— named after the first Soviet TV set, KVN-49, but also an abbreviation for Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh, “the Club of the Jolly and the Resourceful”—first aired live on Soviet Central Television in 1961. For the next decade, the youth program was one of the most watched shows in the USSR, until it was canceled in 1971 by Sergei Lapin (1912-1990), the censorious and openly antisemitic incoming head of Gosteleradio (the Soviet State Committee of Television and Radio Broadcasting). In the decade and a half that followed its cancelation, versions of the contest continued off the air in various Soviet university and technical institute clubs. In 1986, at the beginning of perestroika, KVN returned to Soviet TV screens and once again became an audience favorite.

Like the quiz/ game show What? Where? When?, 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. 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 sovereign, independent post-Soviet republics brought about widespread, sometimes painful discussions about ethnonational belonging, Soviet “friendship-of-the-peoples” ideology, and decolonization in the 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 Odesa Gentlemen” from Odesa State University in Ukraine, starts off its sketch with a mashup of two theme songs: one associated with a Soviet-era TV adaption of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859-1930) Sherlock Holmes series (1979-1986), and the other “belonging” to Stierlitz, the Soviet spy hero of the cult television miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973). In this number, stereotypically “European,” transnational aristocratic cultural refinement—a long-held value of the Soviet intelligentsia—collides with suspicions about a new political order in which culture may no longer easily transcend borders. As the sketch goes on, the “Odesa Gentlemen” get laughs by mentioning typical “Soviet nationalities” tropes, like the Ukrainian national independence movement or their home city’s ethnic Jewish heritage. “Thank God,” the Gentlemen say, that such typical Soviet jokes are still possible in their own Republic of KVN, “a single laugh-creating space.” Left unmentioned is that, by “default,” 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 humor culture appears as the antidote to the bitter realities of post-Soviet impoverishment and strife then unfolding within and among the former Soviet states.