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up could still play pranks. They could also tell jokes. So ubiquitous and so varied were the jokes told in communist regimes that numerous academic tomes have since been written about them, though the use of jokes as a form of passive resistance in a repressive political system was nothing new. Plato wrote of the “malice of amusement” and Hobbes observed that jokes often serve to make the joke teller feel superior to the objects of his humor.George Orwell observed (as quoted above) that “a thing is funny when it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.” In the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, where there were so few opportunities either to express malice toward authority or to feel superior, and where the desire to upset the established order was both strong and forbidden, jokes flourished. 24
    Jokes also served a wide variety of purposes. The Soviet dissidentVladimir Bukovskii probably expressed their main function most precisely when he pointed out that “the simplification of the joke exposes the absurdity of all propaganda tricks … In the jokes you can find the thing that has left no trace in the printed sources: the people’s opinion of events.” 25 Certainly jokesallowed the joke teller to refer aloud to otherwise unmentionable truths, such as the fact that the Soviet Union bought Polish coal and other Polish products far below the international market price:
    Negotiations are going on between Mao and Stalin. The Chinese leader asks the Soviet leader for help: “We need a billion dollars,
fifty
million tons of coal, and a lot of rice.” Stalin turns to his advisers: “Dollars, okay. Coal, okay. But where will Bierut get the rice?”
26
    Also the fact that the Polish army, in the 1950s, was led by a Soviet general with a Polish surname:
    Why did Rokossovskii become a marshal of the Polish army?
    Because it’s cheaper to dress one Russian in a Polish uniform than to dress the whole Polish army in Russian uniforms.
    Or the fact that even artists had to be forced to conform under communism:
    What is the difference between painters of the naturalist, impressionist, and the socialist realist schools?
    The naturalists paint as they see, the impressionists as they feel, the socialist realists as they are told.
    Or the fact that supporters of the deeply unpopular regime were too embarrassed to admit it:
    Two friends are walking down the street. One asks the other, “What do you think of Rákosi?” “I can’t tell you here,” he replies. “Follow me.”
    They disappear down a side street.
    “Now tell me what you think of Rákosi,” says the friend.
    “No, not here,” says the other, leading him into the hallway of an apartment block.
    “Okay, here then.”
    “No, not here. It’s not safe.”
    They walk down the stairs into the deserted basement of the building.
    “Okay, now you can tell me what you think of our leader.”
    “Well,” says the other, looking around nervously, “actually I quite like him.”
    As was the case in so many spheres of life, the communist monopoly on power meant that jokes about anything—the economy, the national soccer team, the weather—all qualified, at some level, as political jokes. This was what made them subversive, as the authorities understood perfectly well, and this is why they went out of their way to quash them. A letter from Budapest youth movement authorities to Hungarian summer camp counselors solemnly warned them to be prepared: campers might well indulge in “vulgar”joke-telling sessions. In case such a thing should happen, the counselors should cheerfully participate in these occasions in order to divert the crowd toward more tasteful andpolitically acceptable forms of humor. 27
    Not all youth leaders were so understanding. In reports sent to the Education Ministry about the general mood of students in Poland, “chants, jokes, rhymes, and graffiti” were judged a sign of “oppositional feelings,” perhaps even