Soviet identity and Jewish Emigration on KVN

Another episode from the 1992 season of KVN (see Artifact #00133), this one is a fragment of the performance of the Israeli National Team, which came to compete at the Russia-based KVN under the framework of a “special project.” In the provided fragments, the team jokes about a former Soviet internationale settling in Israel, a collective that cares little for their new host country, that strangely feels a greater sense of all-Soviet kinship while living there than back in the original USSR, which no longer exists. At one point, the team wraps that sense of kinship around their old Soviet passports, which they still own. For Soviet JEws, these very passports with their “nationalities” bracket (that would list “Jewish”) were often the cause of antisemitic incidents while living in the USSR and could well be one reason why they left. At the same time, evidently the former Soviet ISraelis feel out of place both in Israel and in a post-Soviet Russia. But on the upside, they live in an era of open borders with non-Soviet states, a situation that allowed them to emigrate (during the decade starting with 1989, about a million former Soviet citizens with Jewish backgrounds moved to Israel alone), and also to return to Russia from Israel, a state with which USSR had no diplomatic relations, and from which it would have been impossible to come with such a visit just a few years prior.

What would that capacity to return, as well as that conserved 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 so happy to see the familiar faces of former KVN regulars, who are now emigrés, awards the Israeli team first place and laments that “apparently, the best KVN writers have already moved” to Israel. For other former-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 validation by the Soviet subaltern nationalities for the lost Soviet Russian imperium, and the apparent need to reconstitute it. In future decades, the latter sentiment would lead to the Putinist belief in the existence of the “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.