Soviet identity and Jewish Emigration on "KVN"

This excerpt, from an episode from the 1992 season of KVN (Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh, the “Club of the Jolly and Resourceful”), shows a fragment of the performance of the Israeli National Team, which came to compete at the Russia-based KVN under the rubric of a “special project.” The team jokes about the former Soviet internationale settling in Israel, forming a collective that cares little for its new host country and, oddly enough, feels a greater sense of all-Soviet kinship than back in the original USSR, which, in any case, no longer exists.

One association with this paradoxical sense of kinship are the team members’ old Soviet passports, which they still own. The Soviet passport, which required Jewish holders to list their “nationality” as Jewish, often invited the antisemitic violence that prompted so many Jews to emigrate. At the same time, these new ex-Soviet Israelis clearly feel out of place both in Israel and post-Soviet Russia. On the plus side, they live in an era of open borders with non-Soviet states, which has allowed them not only to emigrate —during the decade starting with 1989, when about a million former Soviet citizens with Jewish backgrounds moved to Israel— but also to return to Russia from Israel, a state with which the USSR had no diplomatic relations.

What would that capacity to return, as well as that preserved sense of all-Soviet identity, mean for Russian viewers of the Israeli National Team? Just after this opening act, one member of the jury, Anatoly Lysenko—himself a major late/post-Soviet television executive—states that he is happy to see the familiar faces of former KVN regulars who are now émigrés, awards the Israeli team first place, and laments that, “apparently, the best KVN writers have already moved” to Israel. For other formerly Soviet Russian viewers in 1992, the appearance of celebrated Soviet passports on stage was undoubtedly an ironic joke and little more. But many others could interpret such moments as retroactive validation of the lost Soviet imperium by its “subaltern” nationalities— validation that implied a yearning to reconstitute it. In future decades, this revanchist sentiment would contribute to the belief in the existence of a “Russian World” of Russophone former Soviet citizens, who seek to rejoin Russia contrary to the wishes of their sovereign national governments, and who must be “aided” politically and militarily by a more assertive, more unabashedly imperialist and anti-Western Russian regime.