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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
In this article, Natalia Skradol analyzes the laughing interventions of the participants at the Russian Communist Party plenum in 1937 at which Nikolai Bukharin was charged with conspiring against the leaders of the state. The era of high Stalinism was a state of exception, where the production and administration of law was based on unacknowledged ad hoc considerations that took shape only in the direct verbal interactions between participants. Thus the laughter at the plenum was completely consistent with laughter's function as a consolidating force among those representing the Stalinist system of legality. Elements of comedy made it possible for mechanisms of oppression to be exercised unhindered, without being framed, or limited, by any mediating factors.
1. This transcription was prepared by the Russian historians L. P. Kosheliova, O. V. Naumov, and L. A. Rogova on the basis of the original protocols. The parenthetical comments (“laughter,” “voices of approval,” and so on) appear in the original materials of the plenum. These sources first appeared in the journal Voprosy istorii, no. 2 /3 (1992) to no. 10/11(1995) and were later published on the Internet, with some additional historical and biographical materials. See Materialy fevral´sko-martovskogo plenuma TsKVKP(b) 1937 god a, http://www.memo.rti/history/1937/feb_mart_1937/index.htm (last accessed 15 March 2011). All translations from the Russian are mine.
2. Halfin, Igal, Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh, 2009), 14 Google Scholar.
3. Thurston, Robert W., “Social Dimensions of Stalinist Rule: Humor and Terror in the USSR, 1935-1941,” Journal of Social History 24, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 541–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4. Quoted in Christopher Campbell, ‘“Power Needs Obscene Comedy': Žižek Intros Duck Soup,” in The Reeler: New York Cinema, From the Art House to the Red Carpet, 20 April 2007, at http://www.thereeler.com/premieres_events/power_needs_obscene_comedy_zizek.php (accessed 2 April 2010; no longer available).
5. Agamben, Giorgio, “§ 10. The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans., with an introduction by Heller-Roazen, Daniel (Stanford, 1999), 161–62Google Scholar. The three titles in which Agamben develops the theory of the state of exception are Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power andBare Life, trans. Daniel-Heller Roazen (Stanford, 1998; Italian original, 1995); Remnants ofAuschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York, 2000; Italian original, 1998); and State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, 2005; Italian original, 2003).
6. For an example of an analysis of laughter in an official, but not legal, setting, see Skradol, Natalia, “Laughing with Comrade Stalin: An Analysis of Laughter in a Soviet Newspaper Report,” Russian Review 68, no. 1 (January 2009): 26–48 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7. Two examples of the many scholars who have argued this are Gorham, Michael S., Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, 2003), 122 Google Scholar, and Tucker, Robert C., Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above,1928-1941 (New York, 1990), 155 Google Scholar.
8. Agamben, State of Exception, 39, 40, and 50.
9. The following figures appear in this section of the transcript: Ivan Kabakov, the first secretary of a provincial party committee, arrested in April 1937, charged with high treason, and executed in October 1937; Semen Budennyi, one of the first marshals of the Soviet Union; Viacheslav Molotov, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars from 1930 to 1939; Valerii Ivanovich Mezhlauk, vice-chairman of the Council of People's Deputies of the USSR, People's Deputy of Heavy Industry.
10. The laughter of superiors over those who are weaker is described in Bergson, Henri, Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris, 1938), 103 Google Scholar.
11. See, e.g., Marmysz, John, “Humor, Sublimity and Incongruity,” Consciousness, Literatureand the Arts 2, no. 3 (December 2001)Google Scholar, at http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/users/dmeyerdinkgrafe/archive/marm.html (last accessed 15 March 2011).
12. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 165.
13. Ibid., 52.
14. Ibid., 114.
15. In this connection, see, e.g., Robert C. Tucker's argument, seconded by many other researchers, that following the suicide of Mikhail Tomskii, another prominent Bolshevik who was to feature on the list of traitors, Stalin “took special care to keep Bukharin alive,” since “the only notable Old Bolshevik capable of ‘individual terror’ as a political act was Stalin.” Tucker, Stalin in Power, 374-75. On the evolution of the perception of supsuicide during the Great Purges, see, in particular, Halfin, Igal, “Epilogue: Communism and Death,” in his Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 274–83Google Scholar. Halfin sees Tomskii's suicide as a turning point marking the transition from a “medicalization” of suicides to their “criminalization.“
16. The following figure appears in this section of the transcript: Kliment Voroshilov, at that time the people's commissar for defense.
17. Agamben, State of Exception, 71.
18. Bakhtin refers to “le monde à l´envers” in Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky'sPoetics (Minneapolis, 1984), 122 Google Scholar. The quote comes from Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and HisWorld, trans. Iswolsky, Hélène (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 211 Google Scholar.
19. Etkind, Alexander, ‘“Odno vremia ia kolebalsia, ne anarkhist li ia': Subiektivnost', avtobiografiia i goriachaia pamiat´ revoliutsii,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 73, no. 3 (2005): 49 Google Scholar.
20. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. McGee, Vern W. (Austin, 1986), 134 Google Scholar; also cited in Emerson, Caryl, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton, 1997), 182–27.Google Scholar For criticism, see, e.g., Eco, Umberto, “The Frames of Comic 'Freedom,'” in Sebeok, Thomas A., Eco, Umberto, Ivanov, V. V., and Rector, Monica, Carnival! (Berlin, 1984), 3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as Averintsev, Sergei, “Bakhtin and the Russian Attitude to Laughter,” in Shepherd, David, ed., Bakhtin: Carnival and Other Subjects. Selected Papers fromthe Fifth International Bakhtin Conference (Amsterdam, 1993), 13–19 Google Scholar.
21. Halfin, Stalinist Confessions, 151.
22. This, by the way, may be one of the reasons why the corpus of Iosif Stalin's own works is comparatively scarce, as noted by Evgeny Dobrenko, with the key works dating from the period after the purges and the show trials, that is, after the primary referential mechanisms of the society had been tested and set by means of oral practices. See Dobrenko, Evgenii A., “Bukvar’ dlia naroda: Pisatel’ Stalin i literaturnye istoki sovetskogo istoricheskogo diskursa,” Muzei revoliutsii: Sovetskoe kino i stalinskii istoricheskii narrativ (Moscow, 2008), 253–310 Google Scholar.
23. Jurij Murašov points out that most of the interactions between representatives of the higher state power and the citizens were oral, at least during the first decades of Soviet power. Jurij Murašov, “Schrift unter Verdacht: Zur inszenierten Mündlichkeit der sowjetischen Schauprozesse in den dreiβiger Jahren,” in Arnold, Sabine R., Fuhrmeister, Christian, and Schiller, Dietmar, eds., Politische Inszenierungim 20. Jahrhundert: Zur SinnlichkeitderMacht (Vienna, 1998), 83–94 Google Scholar.
24. On the Miranda warning, see the “Miranda Warning” site at http://www.mirandawarning.org (last accessed 15 March 2011).
25. Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), 39 Google Scholar.
26. Agamben, State of Exception, 40.
27. Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. Schwab, George (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 4 Google Scholar.
28. Evgenii Dobrenko says the following in his analysis of Soviet comedies of the period: “The culture of socialist realism, in so far as it was a truly people's culture (one of the main characteristic features of socialist realism, its ‘folk character,’ was a real feature of Soviet culture), was extremely egalitarian, which is why we should first of all speak of laughing culture in which, as we know, the attitude of the folk, of the masses, finds its clearest expression.” Dobrenko, Evgenii, Metafora vlasti: Literatura stalinskoi epokhi v istoricheskomosveshchenii (Munich, 1993), 39 Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original. I agree with Dobrenko that laughter was a primary marker of this all-inclusive, egalitarian spirit, but I would suggest that it was not limited to Soviet works of literature and the arts and extended to all spheres of Soviet reality.
29. Žižek, Slavoj, “When the Party Commits Suicide,” The. Human Rights Project, 1999, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-Eizek/articles/when-the-party-commits-suicide (last accessed 15 March 2011)Google Scholar.
30. The following figure appears in this section of the transcript: Nikolai Ezhov, a senior party official, at that time chairman of the Central Commission for Party Control.
31. Dobrenko, Evgenii, “Karnaval epokhi Moskvoshveia,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 79, no. 3 (2006): 69–72 Google Scholar.
32. Benveniste, Émile, “La nature des pronoms,” in Problems de linguistique generate (Paris, 1966), 1:255 Google Scholar; also cited in Daniel Heller-Roazen, “Editor's Introduction: ‘To Read What Was Never Written,'” in Agamben, Potentialities, 20.
33. Dobrenko, Evgeny, “Soviet Comedy Film: or, The Carnival of Authority,” trans.Savage, Jesse M., Discourse 17, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 54 Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original. For the Russian original, see Evgenii Dobrenko, “Gossmekh, ili Mezhdu rekoi i nochiiu,” Kinovedclieskiezapiski\9 (1993): 43.
34. Halfin, Stalinist Confessions, 125.
35. Ibid.
36. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 20.
37. Ibid., 20.
38. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever (with reference to Lefort), 40.
39. Hariman, Robert, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago, 1995), 146 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a similar vein, Walter Benjamin wrote in his working notes on The Trial that it was important “to construct out of this novel the theological category of waiting. As well as the theological category of delay.” Walter Benjamin, “Notizen zu Kafka Der Prozeβ,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main, 1972-89), 2.3:1153-1276, 1191.
40. See Skradol, “Laughing with Comrade Stalin,” 34.
41. Ibid., 53.
42. Halfin, Stalinist Confessions, 273.
43. Benjamin, Walter, “Franz Kafka,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 2.2:409–38Google Scholar.
44. Agamben, State of Exception, 65-73.
45. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 60.
46. The following figures appear in this section of the transcript: Matvei Skiriatov, a member of the Committee for Party Control; Aleksei Rykov, at that time people's commissar of communications, arrested, charged, and executed simultaneously with Nikolai Bukharin, shortly after the plenum; Akmal’ Ikramov, secretary of the Central Asian Bureau of die party, arrested in September 1937, executed in March 1938.
47. For a theoretically founded and solid exploration of these categories in Agamben's book Profanations, see de la Durantaye, Leland, “ Homo pro/anus: Giorgio Agamben's Profane Philosophy,” boundary 2 35, no. 3 (2008): 28–62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48. Bergson, Le rire, 39. For the English translation, see Bergson, Henri, “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,” in Sypher, Wylie, ed., Comedy (1956; reprint, Baltimore, 1980), 93 Google Scholar.
49. Boym, Svetlana, “Paradoxes of Unified Culture: From Stalin's Fairy Tale to Molotov's Lacquer Box,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 833 Google Scholar. This point is echoed by Eric Naiman, who is convinced that “the transition from slogans to events is almost a matter of synonymity in Stalin's representation of Soviet realia.” Eric Naiman, “Discourse Made Flesh: Healing and Terror in the Construction of Soviet Subjectivity,” in Halfin, Igal, ed., Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities (London, 2002), 299 Google Scholar.
50. Halfin, Stalinist Confessions, 4. See also Halfin's, “The Bolsheviks’ Gallows Laughter,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 3 (October 2006): 263–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
51. The famous phrase was pronounced by Stalin in 1935 at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites.
52. Just one of the numerous examples is the editorial in Pravda of 21 August 1936.
53. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 60.