Joking About Stalin
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2020
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jonathan Waterlow joined me on the podcast to explore how ordinary people used political jokes to cope with and make sense of their lives under Stalinism in the 1930s.
Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got a podcast about humor today. |
| 0:04.1 | Luckily, it doesn't involve many attempts by me to be funny. I'll leave that up to the heroic |
| 0:10.2 | population of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s who had the nerve or the gall, |
| 0:15.2 | the courage to make jokes about Stalin and the terror. This is such an interesting subject. |
| 0:20.4 | It is Jonathan Waterloo's a historian, the Soviet Union, an author of a new book about joking |
| 0:24.8 | about Stalin. We talked about some of those jokes and tried to work out where the humor is as |
| 0:29.8 | subversive as people think it is. At the end of the day, people might have been laughing at Stalin, |
| 0:34.8 | but I think he had the last laugh. For more podcasts about Stalin, the Soviet Union, in fact, |
| 0:40.3 | all of record into history. Please go to History Hit TV. It's a new digital history channel with |
| 0:44.1 | audio and video. You can go on there. You can look up Soviet history, Russian history. You can do |
| 0:48.8 | all sorts of things and you'll have a plethora of things to watch and things to listen to. |
| 0:53.2 | So go and check it out. If you use code pod1, don't forget POD1, you will get a month for free. |
| 0:57.0 | And your second month for just one pound euro or dollar. In the meantime, everyone, let's tell some jokes |
| 1:01.4 | about Stalin. |
| 1:08.9 | John, thank you very much for coming on the pod. My pleasure, thanks for having me. How did you get the |
| 1:12.7 | idea to write a book about people making jokes about Stalin? Where does that come from? |
| 1:16.5 | I think it was just the sheer paradox of it because immediately we think, how could that be? That |
| 1:21.2 | doesn't sound right whatsoever. Surely the risk would be too great and people wouldn't do that. |
| 1:25.8 | And yet when I was an undergrad and after that, I kept coming across these little bits of |
| 1:30.1 | creative seasoning in the books about popular opinion. They would say, oh, and this joke was told |
| 1:36.0 | and then they'd move on. And I thought, wait a minute, this doesn't fit with anything I think I know |
| 1:40.9 | about this. And it seems very often we still think of the people must have either been silent |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of History Hit and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.