Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

by David Remnick

Political humor had always been a staple of private life in the Soviet Union, starring Brezhnev as the doddering fool or the corpse of Lenin as kopchushka, the “smoked fish.” But such jokes were never permitted in official publications. In the March 1988 issue of Teatr, the satirist Mikhail Zadornov adopted the voice of a resident of a town Gorbachev had just visited. He writes a letter to the general secretary telling him how the once dingy town had been transformed. “It is true that you informed our local authorities about your visit just three days in advance,” the mock letter to Gorbachev says, “but even in those three days they managed to do more for our city than they had in all the years of Soviet power. All the buildings that you were supposed to pass were painted, but then someone said that you like to swerve off your planned course and so our authorities were obliged to paint all the other houses in the city. They worked so hard that they painted the windows, too.” The joke was less on Gorbachev than on the vanity of the Communist Party and the Russian tradition of Potemkin villages.