Authoritarian Laughter

Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania

By: Neringa Klumbyte

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Paperback | 1 November 2022

At a Glance

Paperback
306 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
15.3 x 22.7 x 2.1

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Authoritarian Laughter explores the political history of the satire and humor magazine Broom published in Soviet Lithuania. Artists, writers, and journalists were required to create state-sponsored Soviet humor and serve the Communist Party after Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. Neringa Klumbyte investigates official attempts to shape citizens into Soviet subjects and engage them through a culture of popular humor.

Broom was multidirectional-it both facilitated Communist Party agendas and expressed opposition toward the Soviet regime. Official satire and humor in Soviet Lithuania increasingly created dystopian visions of Soviet modernity and were a forum for critical ideas and nationalist sentiments that were mobilized in anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Authoritarian Laughter illustrates that Soviet Western peripheries were unstable and their governance was limited. While authoritarian states engage in a statecraft of the everyday and seek to engineer intimate lives, authoritarianism is defied not only in revolutions, but in the many stories people tell each other about themselves in jokes, cartoons, and satires.

Industry Reviews

This book-a historical ethnography of Soviet Lithuania's satire magazine The Broom-is an insightful reading produced thirty years after the state discipline of Soviet socialism was replaced by the self-discipline of Lithuanian nationalism.

* The Russian Review *

This book provides a valuable contribution to studies of Soviet authoritarianism by exploring the dynamics between the authoritarian government and its citizens, the resistance to state power, and the role of state propaganda and popular participation. These topics have long been of interest to scholars studying the region.

* AB IMPERIO *

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