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Funny enemies: the ‘humorousperformative’ in the Stalinist masternarrativeNatalia Skradol aa European Forum, Hebrew University of Jerusalem , MountScopus , Jerusalem , 91905 , IsraelPublished online: 11 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Natalia Skradol (2012) Funny enemies: the ‘humorous performative’in the Stalinist master narrative, Journal of Political Ideologies, 17:3, 281-299, DOI:10.1080/13569317.2012.716617

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Funny enemies: the ‘humorousperformative’ in the Stalinist masternarrativeNATALIA SKRADOL

European Forum, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905,

Israel

ABSTRACT The article introduces the category of ‘humorous performativity’ asa characteristic feature of Stalinist public, judicial and political discourse. Takingthe lead from Judith Butler’s analysis of discursive performativity, the articlesuggests ways in which the application of the notion of ‘humorous performativity’can deepen our understanding of the mechanics of Stalinist terror. At the sametime, these reflections are an attempt to draw the attention of scholars to theimportance of humour as a performative force in the structuring of an ideology—atopic that remains virtually unexplored.

This article offers an analysis of the performative dimension of humour in avariety of forms of the official discourse of Stalinism. ‘Humour’ is understood herein a broad sense as including jokes, sarcasm, irony and mockery, in speech and inwriting alike,1 while ‘performativity’ is explored both in the Austinian sense of‘doing things with words’,2 and in the more general sense of referring to theatre-like performances, representations of people or events within a carefully stagedframework. The emphasis is placed on a core feature of the Stalinist masternarrative—the construction of the figure of the enemy, with respect to which mostother constituents of the Stalinist ideology were defined.The centrality of the figure of the enemy in Stalinist propaganda, that dark shadow

of the ideal hero, has been long acknowledged by researchers of Stalinism. KaterinaClark, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Igal Halfin are but some of the prominent scholars whoexplore this dimension of the Soviet totalitarianism. Their works will form the frameof reference in my analysis later, especially since all of them, regardless of theparticular approach and the disciplinary boundaries, touch upon issues of discursiveperformativity in the construction of the Stalinist world view, even if they do notnecessarily use this particular term in their analyses. My other major point of

Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2012),17(3), 281–299

ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/12/030281–19 q 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2012.716617

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reference is provided by the works of Judith Butler who, taking her lead from JohnAustin’s explorations of the performative power of language, examines the legal,political and social implications of various forms of performativity incontemporary—primarily American—public discourse. I hope to show that herreflections on the political implications of linguistic performativity can help deepenour understanding of the mechanics of Stalinist discourse.Igal Halfin, a historian who attributes a major significance to the discursive

dimension when analysing Stalinist penitentiary practices, claims that ‘asymptomatic reading of Stalinist language, written and oral, is necessary if weare to understand how texts generated meanings and shaped their subjects’.3

According to Halfin, an introduction of humorous elements at the key momentsof determining the nature of those who ‘belong’ and those who ‘don’t belong’ isone of such ‘symptoms’, pointing at hidden mechanisms of the formation ofpolitical subjectivity in Stalinism. I share this basic premise of Halfin’s research,and suggest broadening our understanding of the function of ‘Stalinist humour’through the introduction of the category of performativity.Humour (with all its varieties, regardless of how funny—or in most cases, how

not funny—these pronouncements appear to be today or actually were then) wasan integral part of the Stalinist discourse, and of the establishment of the Stalinistworld view as such. Indeed, as the society was becoming more and moretotalitarian, it was essential that it preserve the facade of openness, of a democraticinvolvement of its citizens in power structures at all levels, and of a dialogic,unconstrained nature of exchange between the leaders of the state and the rank-and-file.4 In this context, the use of humour as a performative tool was becomingincreasingly important. I propose to illustrate this growing importance of whatI would call the ‘humorous performative’ by means of three representativesamples of the Stalinist official discourse: Stalin’s speech at a party event in themid-1920s, verbal exchanges at show trials in the late 1930s, and finally, the textthat was to become the canon of Stalinist historical and political thought: Historyof the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)—Short Course. We will, thus,move from the relatively liberal setting of the XVth Party Conference in 1926,where jokes at the expense of political opposition could still be perceived asnothing but jokes, however cruel and vulgar they were, to the infamous show trialswhere humorous remarks mostly equalled a death verdict, and up to the quasi-sacred text of a new history that was irrevocably to determine the criteria fordistinguishing the good from the bad, the friend from the enemy in accordancewith the Stalinist world view.

The beginning

I beginwith two speeches delivered byStalin at theXVthPartyConference in the fallof 1926. These relatively early texts are crucial for an analysis of Stalinist rhetoric,since in them the criteria for distinguishing between friends and enemies wereannouncedwithmore precision and at greater length, compared to the previous partyforums. The remarks ‘laughter’ abound in published versions of the text. As in all

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other cases when published protocols of public events included similar remarks, wewill never know towhat extent they reflect the actual reaction of the public, but it canbe assumed that such remarks were introduced whenever, and wherever, the editorsdeemed them appropriate or necessary.And apparently they were considered appropriate and necessary primarily when

the internal party oppositionwasmentioned, and first of all Trotsky, the author of ‘awonderful and musical, completely useless reply’, the reference being to Trotsky’sbook Towards Socialism or to Capitalism? Stalin quotes the ‘confused’ partycomrade often and readily, but always asks his audience first whether they ‘wouldlike to hear’ what he has to say, and frames his quotes with comments on Trotsky’sawkward style:5 ‘As a system of revolutionary action, Leninism presupposes arevolutionary sense developed through reflection and experience, which in thesocial realm is equivalent to muscular sensation in physical labour’.6 Leninism, as‘muscular sensation in physical labour’. Isn’t it new, and original, and deep.Did youunderstand anything? (Laughter).7

Here is another example, from Stalin’s speech at the same event two days later8:

I am finishing, comrades. Comrade Zinoviev boasted a while ago that he can press his ear to

the ground (Laughter), and when he presses his ear to the ground, he can hear the steps of

history. It may well be so. But one should still acknowledge that comrade Zinoviev, though

able to press his ear to the ground and hear the steps of history, sometimes overhears certain

‘trifles’. So what follows from this? What follows is that the opposition apparently has

trouble with its ears (Laughter). Hence my advice: comrades from the opposition, find a cure

for your ears! (A prolonged ovation. The conference members stand as comrade Stalin leaves

the stage).

True to the principle that everything written and said by anyone other than by thechief master of law and meaning production can only disclose its true sense inthe master’s interpretation, the Soviet leader does not just quote leaders of theopposition—he actually represents them, in the almost theatrical sense of makingpresent a particular image which would otherwise be restricted to an act of writing(as with Trotsky), or to a casual remark (as with Zinoviev).Jeffrey Brooks characterizes public speech under Stalin (though not Stalin’s

speech) as ‘a grotesque form of theatrical recitation’.9 The examples presentedearlier, however, clearly show that the opposite is true of Stalin ‘speaking in thevoice’ of his enemies: at those moments, none other than he himself wasconsciously engaging in such a ‘grotesque form of theatrical imitation’. Which isnot to say that Brooks’s observations on the language of Stalin and Stalinism lackfoundation. On the contrary, what is important is the very fact that at this initialstage of the shaping of the enemy image Stalin consciously divests himself of theauthority which is his due. A phrase once used by a political rival, a concept and ametaphor is turned into pure mockery simply by virtue of being quoted by the mostauthoritative voice in a manner which is deliberately clownish, grotesque, whichdeliberately negates all authority. The leader plays a democrat, not afraid to appeara figure of fun—but he is a figure of fun only in so far as he is a personification ofthose who are to be ridiculed.

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This (theatralized) performance, supposed to testify to the democratic essenceof the regime, illustrates Michel Foucault’s famous thesis concerning thenon-sovereign nature of modern power structures.10 One could say that a powerfulleader presenting himself as a figure of fun is an extreme example of a publicacknowledgement of this non-sovereignty. In the analysis of Judith Butler, whatused to be sovereignty returns as discursive performativity in language: ‘thehistorical loss of the sovereign organization of power appears to occasionthe fantasy of its return—a return, I want to argue, that takes place in language, inthe figure of the performative’.11

I would like to argue that in the early years of Stalinism, soon after the revolutionwhich had come to abolish the old—sovereign—law, this return to factualsovereignty through the performative could, and often did, occur in a ratherhumoristic key, as the examples examined here show. On the face of it, themechanism of ridicule is pretty obvious: the others—the soon-to-be arch-enemies—are ridiculed so that their opinions are discarded and the one whoridicules becomes all the more powerful. There is, however, more to it.Butler speaks of a ‘revised sense of the performative’, which is manifested in

hate speech in the absence of a sovereign narrative12 and which can be understoodas the establishment of versions of a sovereign rule not directly, but via themediation of a special modality of speech. In Stalinism, this ‘revision’ in theperformativity of power discourse is even more striking: he whose name will soonbecome synonymous with absolute dictatorship establishes his position as the soleauthority through playing a jester rather than by means of any kind of intimidating,authoritative discourse. Thus, when applied to an analysis of early Stalinism,the answer to Butler’s reflections as to whether ‘the figure of the sovereignperformative [can] compensate[s] for a lost sense of power’13 is an emphatic yes—provided we understand the ‘sovereign performative’ as broad enough a concept toinclude, for example, forms of the ‘humorous performative’ examined here.He who can afford playing jester himself so as to damage the status of his potentialrivals is in fact engaged in a performance, i.e. demonstration, representation, of hisown power—and in a parody of the democratic principle of allowing politicalopponents to voice their opinion, the implicit assumption being that only as a jestercan he adequately quote the ridiculous words of the enemies.I tend to agree with Igal Halfin who says that back then, in the 1920s, the

‘relatively innocuous friendly batter’14 had not yet turned into the deadly jokes ofthe late 1930s; back then, words did not automatically translate into action, didnot entail the loss of one’s status, one’s freedom or one’s life—or at least notimmediately. Another way to look at it is to say that the ‘humorous performative’ atthat time was mostly of a theatrical, representative nature, rather than overtlypolitical and legal. Characteristically, in an analysis of the cultural origins of theshow trials of the late 1930s, Julie Cassiday speaks of ‘the overall theatralization ofpublic life during the 1920s’, where she detects numerous instances which can beregarded as ‘the precursors of these legal melodramas [i.e. show trials]’.15 A moredetailed exploration of this particular facet of early Soviet discourse is beyond thelimits of this article, but it might, indeed, be illuminating to carry out a comparative

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study of humorous elements in the early Soviet theatre and in the political andpublic sphere of the time.Another prominent element of the theatrical performativity of the Soviet 1920s

is related to the image of a mask. Sheila Fitzpatrick, the author of a monographwith the telling title Tear Off the Masks!, is one of the historians of Stalinistcultural and political practices who pays particular attention to the discursivemanifestations and political implications of the metaphor of a mask. It is in theimage of masking and unmasking that Fitzpatrick discerns a continuity betweenthe early years of the Soviet state and the heyday of terror: ‘The theatricalmetaphor of masks was ubiquitous in the 1920s and ’30s, and the same period sawa flowering of that peculiar form of political theatre: the show trial’.16

Undoubtedly, it was the centrality of the issues of masking and unmasking,pretending and performing, that brought many researchers to identifycarnivalesque features in Stalinist practices.17 Without going into a detaileddiscussion of whether, and why, the Stalinist obsession with masking andunmasking was indeed akin to that of a carnivalesque setting, I would like toconcentrate on the less overt manifestations of this preoccupation with the obviousversus the hidden, the fake versus the real, the put-upon versus the authentic thatcan be observed in the early exercises in public rhetoric. Thus, in the examplesanalysed here the ‘humorous performative’—speaking in the voice of politicalrivals so as to ridicule their opinions, repeating their words so as to mock themthrough the simple act of overemphasis through repetition—does not bring to theforeground the notion of masks covering these people’s real faces, does notaddress such abominable qualities of the political rivals as duplicity andhypocrisy. All this will come later; at this early point in the evolution of theStalinist master narrative, it is about training the audience to recognize certaintypes of actors on the political arena as inherently ridiculous. Seen in the largercontext of disciplining the broad masses of the population, the ‘humorousperformative’ at the early stages of Stalinism can be regarded as an exercise in akind of ‘delegated performativity’, so that the actions and words of those ridiculedwould finally themselves automatically trigger the desired reaction (laughter,mockery) from the good, loyal citizens.In Stalin’s speeches the mistaken, confused, literally ridiculous logic and

rhetoric of the oppositionists is contrasted with the pedantically consistent logic ofthose who know the truth and who can point at the incongruities in the roles playedby the members of the opposition. The laughter seems to be deemed especiallycalled for whenever there are direct references to the roles played, or to the actors’own inability to perform those very roles adequately:

It is time to understand, comrades from the opposition, that you are neither revolutionariesnor internationalists, but windbags once associated with the revolution and withinternationalism. (Applause)It is time to understand that you are not revolutionaries of deed, but revolutionaries of loudcries and of cinematographic strips. (Laughter; applause)It is time to understand that you are not revolutionaries of deed, but cinematic revolutionaries[kino-revoliutsionery ]. (Laughter; applause)18

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And comrade Zinoviev has the modesty to present all this incredible mishmash, this rambleand mess in his own head as if it were the ‘real’ revolutionary spirit, the internationalist spirit

of the oppositional bloc.Isn’t it ridiculous, comrades?19

The representation of others’ voices by means of the voice of the omnipotent rulerguarantees that they are included in the collective perception of reality as aninevitable and necessary part of the shared experience; taking apart the ridiculousbehaviour of the enemies-to-be in this consistent, logical manner ensures that thetypes are recognizable. Hence the comparison with ‘cinematic revolutionaries’:these were, back then, a kind of virtual heroes, figures from a comic strip,ridiculous exactly because they are predictable and one-dimensional. Remarkably,it is implied that all the actions of the oppositionists are but an unserious game,while on the other hand it is exactly this lack of seriousness that makes theseactions criminal. To laugh, then, means to recognize the ridiculous (¼ criminal)under the guise of the serious (¼ politically reliable). By the same token, confusedthinking is to be mocked: in an ideology where simplicity equals truth,20 any typeof confusion is to be considered incompatible with the honest way of life.Stalin’s speech culminates in a disclosure of the true nature of the

oppositionists. Their masks—pompous formulations of their political declarationsor impressively sounding titles—are torn off, and in the classical carnivalesquetradition a powerful, intelligent man is brought down to the lowest level of socialhierarchy:

Plainly speaking, comrade Kamenev has assumed the role of, so to say, a street-cleaner forcomrade Trotsky (laughter), cleaning the way for him. Of course it is sad to see the Directorof the Lenin Institute in the role of a street-cleaner for comrade Trotsky, not because thework of a street-sweeper is something bad, but because comrade Kamenev, undoubtedly a

person with professional qualifications, I think, could have found a job of a higherprofessional level. (Laughter)21

In this context it may be relevant that in the popular imagination of Russia at thattime, street cleaners not only cleaned: they were also popular heroes of urbanfolklore who enjoyed a particular kind of secret authority, dreaded by whoeverrisked disturbing the peace and the order of which they were loyal guardians,dangerous watchdogs.22 A street-cleaner disguised as the director of an instituteis not only ridiculous, but also implicitly dangerous—until the moment he isunmasked as one of a kind, as a representative of a type.In the context of the general policy of revealing the enemies’ true nature

and punishing them accordingly, it makes sense to suppose that one of theperformative qualities of the ridicule is to lead to a release of tension among thelisteners:23 the unclear threat coming from the oppositionists with their confusedthinking, from the loyal servants of suspicious party members who are determinedto abide by their mistaken views no matter what, has finally been exposed, andthus rendered harmless. Butler speaks of the ‘“linguistification” of the politicalfield’, when utterances in the public sphere acquire more and more performativepower.24 In the context examined here (and possibly in other contexts as well),

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the ‘linguistification’ is not limited to the direct impact of particular words, to theirperformative potential; rather, it postulates the creation of a whole narrative thatis supposed to be associated with particular words, names, with the mention ofparticular human types. As part of this ‘linguistification of the political’, the‘humorous performative’ creates more than just a laughing response that mightlead to action. It bestows upon the actions and words of undesirable political actorsthe structure of an anecdote, that is, of a schematic comic narrative where peoplefigure as types, and whose comic effect comes from an exposition of the essence ofaction and events in an expressive punch line. The confused, irresponsible officialsof government institutions turn out to be but awkward heroes of an anecdote ratherthan sinister figures of a grand narrative. Once one has laughed, the mystery of anenemy threat has been disclosed, the sense of wholeness and clarity has beenrestored, and the world has become simple, clear and safe.For the time being, the plot of this narrative is rather short and relatively simple;

the jesters and jugglers, who had been presenting themselves as the masters oftheory and action, are put to shame. For the time being, the performative potentialof the mockery by the powerful leader lies but in unmasking the confusion andideological unreliability of the rivals. A few years later both meanings of plottingwill collapse into one: invented stories with plots involving conspiracies willbecome equivalent to conspiratorial plots themselves. However, as we will see,the ‘humorous performative’ will not lose its importance in the discursiveconstructions of the enemy figure; if anything, its function was becoming moreimportant as the totalitarian rule was becoming more rigid.

The monster of wit

Fast forward to the heyday of Stalinist terror. Stalin is no longer the principal voiceof the master narrative—at least not in public. Now, this master narrative beingindistinguishable from the narrative of law and punishment, the loudest voice isthat of the State Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinskii. The numerous curses andmockeries with which he interspersed his accusatory speeches were simul-taneously jokes (since the audience was willing to laugh at them, if the protocolsare any indication) and death verdicts (since the butts of the prosecutor’s jokesrarely survived). In analysing Vyshinskii’s speeches, we follow Michel Foucault’srecommendation to ‘try to fixate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it isalways less legal in character’25—and there are few things further removed fromthe core of formal law than laughter in a courtroom, when the death verdict isabout to be spoken.The quotes from the published protocols of court sessions did not always

contain the remarks laughter. The examples for analysis are chosen based on thegeneral stylistic principle: all of them contain mocking insults, curses andridicule—instances of usage of humour for rituals of humiliation which arediscussed at length in classical literature on the subject, including Henri Bergsonand Mikhail Bakhtin. The nature of curses and insults as speech acts integratedinto judicial rhetoric remains practically unexplored by scholarship to this day.

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However, no analysis of Stalinist official discourse can claim validity without atleast some attempt to account for the function of insults and swear words in thelanguage of masters of law—nor, as it appears to me, can they be analysed withoutalso taking into consideration other practices of mockery in official discourse.26

The setting being that of a court of law, the insults and mocking remarks werequite often masked as a scrupulous, uncompromisingly fair questioning of theaccused and the defendants—it is just that the insistence on the supremacy of truthquickly acquired grotesque forms. The following exchange between Vyshinskiiand two defendants at one of the show trials is representative27:

Vyshinskii: So what did Sedov say to you?

Shestov: He just gave me not letters, but, as previously agreed, a pair of boots.

Vyshinskii: So you received not letters but boots?

Shestov: Yes. But I knew that they contained letters. There was a letter sealed into each of the

boots. And he said the envelopes would be marked. One was marked ‘P’—that meant for

Piatakov, and the other one was marked ‘M’—that meant it was for Muralov.

Vyshinskii: Did you pass the letter on to Piatakov?

Shestov: I gave him the letter marked ‘P’.

Vyshinskii: And the other letter?

Shestov: The other letter, marked ‘M’, I gave to Muralov.

Vyshinskii: Defendant Muralov, did you receive the letter?

Muralov: I did.

Vyshinskii: With or without the boot? (Laughter in the room).

There are variations upon this rhetorical device, such as citing repeatedly one andthe same word, allegedly taken from the statements of the defendants themselves,until its meaning is so transformed that the word itself nearly turns into a piece ofevidence, as in the following excerpt:

Zinoviev said: ‘We have set out on the way of a carefully thought through and deeply

conspiratorial plot, we considered ourselves Marxists and, remembering the formula “an

uprising is an art”, we changed it to fit our purposes, claiming that “a conspiracy against the

party, against Stalin is an art”’. Here are masters of this ‘art’, sitting in the prisoners’ dock.

I wouldn’t call them superb masters. Rather low-grade masters these are! But they still

succeeded in realizing their base intentions. So what was it, this ‘art’ of theirs?28

In his analysis of the absurdist texts of Daniil Kharms, which he reads as aresponse to Stalin’s quasi-legal performances, Mikhail Odesskii notes that Kharmschose the technique of ‘an enlarged dissection and an almost protocol-specificreproduction’29 as most appropriate for a meditation on the absurd nature of theevents. Kharms could have well been inspired by the unpretentious jokes of theState Prosecutor, in whose speeches multiple repetitions and an exaggeration ofdetails ultimately replaced factual procedural rhetoric. The boot as a centralelement of accusation becomes not so much a proof that the letter had (or had not)been opened before it was delivered to the addressee, as a ridiculous technique oftransferring secret messages; the word ‘art’ after multiple repetitions loses thepathos of a revolutionary slogan and just emphasizes the criminal absurdity of thedefendants’ actions. As the subject of discussion becomes the object of ridicule,

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the mocking repetition turns into an interpretation, quantity turns into quality,suppositions become proof, insults become judicially significant statements and anew level of meaning is produced, where some individuals, and in a broader sensesome forms of life in the socialist society, are inherently ridiculous, unsuitable forthe new order and hence criminal.In her reflections on the nature of hate speech in contemporary public discourse,

Judith Butler says that ‘hate speech is understood not only to communicate anoffensive idea or set of ideas but to enact the very message it communicates; thus,the communication itself is at once a form of conduct’.30 In the context of theStalinist show trials, the State Prosecutor’s offensively exaggerated attention tothe details of evidence can undoubtedly be classified as hate speech, on a par withnumerous mocking remarks and insults. Because of the legal setting, and becausethe speaker is a figure of highest judicial authority, these utterances achieve thehighest degree of performativity. In fact, in this particular case we can speak of adouble performativity embedded in Vyshinskii’s mocking words, since his nearlyobsessive insistence on the precision in the presentation of the details not onlyshapes the attitude of the (laughing) audience, thus justifying the inevitableverdict, but in fact creates the evidence itself, as the overemphasis on particularelements of an action charge it with the meta-significance that is characteristic of acoded criminal communication. This is just one out of many examples illustratinghow ‘humorous performativity’ of statements in the Stalinist courts of law waspart and parcel of the machinery of legalized terror.The creation of evidence and, ultimately, of the very crimes ascribed to the

defendants, through a change in the register of language so that mockery andinsult become part of the legal discourse, is also best understood in terms ofthe performative potential of ‘hate speech’ in Butler’s analysis. In the theorist’swords, ‘[h]ate speech as a performative also deprives the one addressed of preciselythis performative power, a performative power that some see as a linguisticcondition of citizenship’.31 In the cases examined here, because of the legalisticnature of the discursive situation, the appropriation of the performative powerthrough the use of hate speech in the form of mockery and insults by one side notonly completely deprives the other side of a ‘linguistic condition of citizenship’;it also denies to the defendants the very right to being what they really are,by creating evidence of allegedly committed crimes and thus turning them intocriminals.Vyshinskii’s mocking insults, repeated over and over again by the

top representative of supreme judicial power in the strictly ordered context ofshow trials, fixate the civil and judicial status of the accused—and not only theirs.Thus, Kamenev’s introduction to an edition of Machiavelli’s writings becomes aproof of the old Bolshevik’s anti-Soviet intentions, the word ‘dialectician’ beingused ironically with reference to the Italian philosopher: ‘According to Kamenev,this Machiavelli is a dialectician! This inveterate scoundrel becomes adialectician!’32 The indignation of the State Prosecutor is so great that he turns tothe judge with the appeal to ‘regard this book as part of the factual evidence in the

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given case’. Here, too, the very fact of emphasized repetition becomes a strategy ofturning a name/neutral definition into mockery into insult into criminal evidence.In creating the evidence which helps ascribe crimes never committed to

innocent people, and in ultimately punishing them for these crimes, the Stalinistlegal system reaches the highest level of discursive performativity—and I wouldlike to argue that it is exactly through the use of the ‘humorous performative’ thatthis becomes possible.In his work on the symbolic power of language Pierre Bourdieu notes that the

striving towards, or an exercise of, performativity is what the lowest registers oflanguage havewith the language of the law.According to him, ‘[l]egal discourse is acreative speech which brings into existence that which it utters. It is the limit aimedat by all performative utterances—blessings, curses, orders, wishes or insults’.33

Judith Butler goes even further and obliterates any distinction whatsoever betweenhate speech and the language of the law: ‘What the law says, it does, but so, too, thespeaker of hate’.34 In the Stalinist judicial system, it is the merging of the twoextremes, the two types of the performative—the legal and the mocking, thelanguage of the law and the language of hate speech—that ensures an increasedperformativity. We may remember here one of the fundamental premises of thetheory of humour, which states that the combination of the incompatible is at thecore of any humorous situation, regardless of whether the resulting impact isgenuinely funny or not.35 In so far as the Stalinist show trials were invariablydefined by the introduction of the lowest stylistic register of language into thetraditionally highly formalized, ritualistic framework of a courtroom, thecombination of the incompatible, and thus the ‘humorous performative’, was partand parcel of the discursive situation in the Soviet courtrooms of the late 1930s.Indeed, from the point of view of the traditional norms the leading Soviet

lawyer spoke in a language which was somewhat out of place in a court of law,combining as it did the primitive vulgarity of obscene curses with the full legalauthority to bestow punishment suitable for the most serious crimes. WhenVyshinskii mocks the ‘“foreign policy” program of these people’, adding that ‘forthis “program” alone our Soviet people will string up the traitors at the very firstgate! And they well deserve it!’, the insistent ironic repetition of the key word(‘program’) and the use of the common colloquial ‘string up at the very first gate’suggest that the prosecutor was counting on the laughter of the audience. Indeed,this phrase could have been a not-too-funny joke—except that the execution of thedefendants (the ‘stringing up’) happened for real. When the prosecutor invites hisaudience to make sure, yet again, that the prisoners’ dock is occupied by ‘liars andjesters, contemptible pigmies, pugs and dirty mongrels who dared to attack anelephant’,36 his words may be shocking in their tasteless brutality—but they are infull conformance with the general direction of Stalinist judicial rhetoric, and are aguarantee of the death verdict.This realization of jokes in real life annihilates the carnival aspect of Stalinist

courtroom performances. Igal Halfin’s remark that ‘obscene language iscarnivalesque [being] the inversion of official, measured speech’37 is only partlyjustified; the moment the ‘inversion’ is transformed into a violent act, the carnival

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spirit vanishes. In fact, Halfin himself seems implicitly to acknowledge the primacyof the ‘humorous performativity’ in the language of Stalinism when he says:‘[o]bscenities are prime examples of incantatory language: spoken facetiously ordirected at thewrong person, they nevertheless retain their effectiveness. It was as ifthose who uttered obscenities did not recognize any separation between speech actsand actual events—tomockmeant to destroy’.38 InHalfin’s analysis, the focus is ondaily interactions between partymembers in the course of the purges, rather than onthe show trials. In this latter case, I think it is safe to say that the speakers knew verywell that there was, indeed, no separation between the words they uttered and theactual events that followed—and, evenmore importantly for our analysis here, theyknew that the style of the utterance, the combination of the language of the streetwith the power of the law, was an integral part of the performative potential of whatthey said.Coming back to Butler’s point concerning hate speech replacing the structures

of sovereign power, we can say that the Stalinist legal discourse exemplifies a casewhen hate speech becomes one of the performative tools of state power, whichopenly proclaims having left behind old governmental structures, while in factseeking to reintroduce sovereign governmentality. It is exactly the introduction ofthe language of the street into the highly formalized setting of a courtroom thatcreates, by means the ‘humorous performativity’, the desired effect. This effectis multi-faceted: it is not limited to the immediate relationship between theProsecutor’s pronouncements in the courtroom, the verdict and its execution, butalso ensures that there is an illusion of a democratic exercise of justice, the men oflaw speaking in the language of the street.According to Judith Butler, ‘[t]he power attributed to hate speech is a power of

absolute and efficacious agency-performativity and transitivity at once (it doeswhat it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by thespeech)’.39 The introduction of the category of ‘humorous performativity’ allowsus to understand how ‘agency-performativity and transitivity’ could include notjust the direct addresses of the utterances, but also those who were supposed tolaugh at the allegedly funny utterances; that is the audience present, and thereaders of newspapers in which the reports were published, ultimately the wholepopulation of the Soviet Union, which was the true addressee of theseperformances as disciplinary measures.40

Mladen Dolar, discussing the celebration of the living voice in the court of law,once perceived as a victory of democracy, points out that ‘making fun of the legalprofession was one of the highlights of Enlightenment comedy’.41 Dolar alsospeaks of Stalinism as ‘heir to the Enlightenment,42 though strangely he does notaddress in this connection the issue of absurdly colloquial and base speech of thecountry’s leading man of law at the court sessions. At those sessions, the extremesmet: as law was abolished in favour of a parody of the freedom of speech—vulgarridicule and mockery—that ridicule and mockery acquired, through the ‘humorousperformative’, all the significance of the letter of the law, in order then to providethe foundation for the major written text of Stalinism.

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The sense of an ending

We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one

of the great charms of books that they have to

end.

Frank Kermode

The Sense of an Ending

Published in 1938, Stalin’s History of the All-Union Communist Party(Bolsheviks)—Short Course,43 popularly known as the Short Course, not onlyestablished a canonical Stalinist reading of the history of the party and the Sovietstate, but also set the ultimate criteria for differentiating between those whobelonged and those who did not, between those who engaged in constructivelabour and saboteurs and spies—quite simply, between the good and the bad in thecontext of the Soviet ideology. If Mladen Dolar44 is right in that the voice of the(Soviet) sovereign is essentially an oral voice, then it may well be that in the caseof the Short Course we have a somewhat paradoxical example of oral rhetoricfixed in writing. This appears to be supported by the extensive use of a variety ofrhetorical devices whose role in the creation of the ‘humorous performativity’ willbe examined here.In both its construction and its intended function as the definitive history of the

political struggles leading up to the victory of socialism (i.e. Stalinism) in theSoviet Union, the Short Course is similar to an epic narrative in the Bakhtiniansense of the term, applied to the Soviet narrative by Katerina Clark. Drawing onthe Bakhtinian explorations of the epic, Clark writes: ‘[t]he epic is told as legend;it is sacred and incontrovertible’ and, even more importantly for our analysis here,the epic depicts what ‘ought to be’.45 Thus, having stated that ‘[t]he history of thedevelopment of the inner life of our party is a history of struggle and defeat ofopportunistic groups inside the party—the “economists”, the Mensheviks, theTrotskyites, the Bukharinites, the national deviators’,46 the author of the ShortCourse goes on to describe how, in fact, the victory of good over evil had beenpredetermined from the very beginning, because the true nature of all the partiesinvolved in this vicious struggle had been obvious to him—the actor and theauthor—from the very beginning.As befits the author of an epic narrative sprinkled with elements of suspense, the

narrator offers his readers cues to the understanding of the story he is telling,revealing hints that make one privy to the once-secret knowledge of who are thefriends and who are the enemies of the new and better world order. Just as in theoral examples quoted earlier, so in the Short Course, too, those whose fate it is tobe unmasked as enemies and traitors appear or, rather, are created as clownishfigures in the most mundane actions: they do not occupy a professional position,but ‘sit’ in a certain organization, like ‘the Trotskyite Piatakov’; they do notsubmit political statements, but ‘stick out their heads’; they ‘make a sortie’, ‘getsucked up deep into the anti-Soviet bog’, perform ‘all kinds of dirty tricks’,‘concoct . . . ridiculous theories’.47 And here, too, the ‘humorous performative’

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plays an important role, one of the obvious examples of its presence being thenumerous quotation marks.Since it was impossible to add the remark ‘laughter in the hall’, mockery, irony

and sarcasm had to be marked differently in the book than they were in thenewspaper reports. Thus, for example, quotation marks (or else inverted commas,when the words in question are not supposed to be quotations) acquired a specialsignificance in the Short Course—they literally turned into a part of the plot.Quotation marks abound in the text, especially in the chapters describing the firstyears of the Soviet power—there they are used almost as frequently as full stopsand commas. The readers learn of ‘the so-called “military opposition”, [which]united a significant number of former “left communists”’ in 1918; they discoverthat at party congresses, oppositionists ‘brought . . . examples from “thepractice”’, that ‘left communists’ hide their true nature behind ‘“left” phrases’, andread about the participants of a party congress who ‘rejected the views of an anti-party group of “democratic centralism”, [ . . . ] which was advocating anunrestricted “collegiality” and irresponsibility in the management of industry’48—there is no end to examples.Scholars have already written on the function of quotation marks in the written

discourse of Stalinism. Svetlana Boym says that ‘everything that appeared inquotation marks in the criticism of the Stalin era was meant to be an insult; itparodied the words of the invisible enemy that was everywhere’; Galina Orlovaspeaks of the ‘imprisonment [of concepts] within ironic quotation marks,demonstrating that the particular construct was foreign to the language of power’.49

Just as in the examples of oral insults and mockery of the victims of show trials,here, too, the stubborn repetition of concepts thus parodied gradually replaces anyother kind of definition of political actors (‘various oppositional ‘leaders’),movements, events and actions (‘economists’, ‘new opposition’, ‘democraticneutralists’, ‘so-called “workers” opposition’; ‘“leftist” shouters . . . “claimed”that . . . ’, ‘direct capitulators . . . worshipped the “might” of capitalism’, supportersof Bukharin developed their ‘“theory” with a “new” slogan’),50 so that the ironiccharge turns into an integral part of the definitions themselves.This extensive use of ironic quotation marks is an example of the

characteristically Stalinist use of the ‘humorous performative’ in writing.Presenting the names, nicknames, definitions and quotations of certain people inquotation marks, i.e. inverted commas, equals an act of creation of these actors ofthe recent history of the state as negative characters doomed to a lifetime ofconfusion, mistakes, evil deeds and hopeless struggle on the wrong side. Oncefixed in writing in what was destined to become a definite vision of the past and thepresent, the performative potential of the assignment of strictly defined roles andpersonal qualities to real people is higher than that of oral utterances analysedearlier: here, the people described become actors in the epic sense of the word,participants in a battle of the creation of the new world, and the ‘humorousperformative’ encoded in the ironic quotation marks defines or, rather, createstheir very essence which supposedly predetermined their role in the developmentof the grand plot. Not less importantly, the use of the ‘humorous performative’ that

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insists on the perception of certain characters as inherently ridiculous creates aspecial type of reader, the one who is called upon to create fixed associations witha whole cast of the epic-political characters who were to be perceived as inherentlyvicious, but also doomed to failure, and thus worthy of mockery and ridicule.In this sense, the ironic quotation marks turn the Short Course into a pinnacle of

the Stalinist ‘humorous performativity’, as the text brings into being, on the onehand, a version of events of the past and actors involved in those events, and on theother an ideal reader, somebody who would be open to the fixed associationsbetween specific characters and their characteristics as imposed by the text.If Judith Butler in her analysis of the performative in the public sphere speaks ofthe ‘“linguistification” of the political field’, then it seems logical to suggest thatthe Short Course offers an example of a politicization of the linguistic field, aspurely linguistic or, rather, typographical means are recruited with the aim oftransmitting an ideological message.The ‘humorous performativity’ of the ironic quotation marks must be

approached with reference to the general practice of citationalism—the obligatoryreferences to the primary ideological sources that framed any text of the period.This practice was central to Stalinism and to the Soviet discourse in general, ofwhich the Short Course is a celebration.51 Quotation marks appear in this text notonly in connection with parodying and ridiculing the opponents’ very being in theworld: canonical authors, and first of all Lenin and Stalin, are quoted a lot, with allthe veneration due to them. The two extreme practices of meaning productionin Stalinist discourse go side by side in this text, with quotations of the mostpolitically reliable and the most abominable, the canonized and the clownish. Thisis not surprising, since both rhetorical devices are based on the principle ofestablishing fixed associations with certain concepts and names—a principlewhich Umberto Eco has defined as ‘reflex action’ in discursive settings.52

Purely structural tools play an important role in distinguishing what was to beworshipped from what was to be ridiculed in the Short Course. For example, Leninand Stalin are usually quoted in whole sentences, by means of relatively longexcerpts from the original texts, whereby the inherent logic of the narrative isemphasized (‘Lenin advised that the party be completely cleaned of “ . . . rascals,of the bureaucrats, of the duplicitous, of wavering communists and of theMensheviks who have repainted their “facade”, but have in fact remainedMensheviks in their soul”’53; ‘Comrade Stalin said: “Either we will create a truearmy of workers and peasants—mainly peasants—highly disciplined, able todefend the republic, or else we will perish”’).54 At the same time, when enemiesare parodied, it is single words (apparently taken out of context) that are usuallyquoted, very rarely longer statements. In this case the emphasis is placed not on themeaning of the quoted pronouncement, but on introducing associations withspecific words that lose any claim to seriousness through the simple fact of beingreferred to so often—but only in quotation marks and in a disparaging context.Thus, the performative potential of quoting the sacred figures of the Soviet

master narrative is mirrored in the ‘humorous performativity’ of the ironicpresentation of the enemies of the regime. Let us remind ourselves of one of Judith

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Butler’s principal theses concerning the lost sovereign power returning ‘inlanguage, in the figure of the performative’.55 Leaving aside for a moment thestatus of sovereign power in Stalinism (i.e. its presence de facto with the officialpropaganda claiming the opposite), it seems logical to ask ourselves whether theeffect of the performative in public discourse is not strengthened by the parallelexistence of various modes of discursive performativity, as is obviously the case inthe Short Course, with the canonical quotation marks and the mocking invertedcommas working together to create the desired ideological effect.Walter Benjamin famously pronounced: ‘to write history means to cite

history’.56 In the Stalinist universe, to cite history, i.e. to write an epic narrative ofthe creation of the new order through an extensive use of quotation marks, meansto write history. Quoting is directly related to an expression of authority: he whoquotes aims to get to the origin of phenomena, of knowledge and expression. Thisimplicit claim of a possession of knowledge and control is always present inquoting, regardless of whether the quotation marks are a claim to authenticity or asign of mockery. The mechanism is the same in both cases: the one who quotesstands beyond the quoted narrative, establishing the frame for it, knowing theexact function that the words appearing in quotation marks have in the narrative asa whole. By making an extensive use of both types of quotation marks, the voicebehind the Short Course persistently reminds the reader that the text is an authenticaccount of the words, definitions and events as they were pronounced, decidedupon and as they took place, while also suggesting that the writer knew, from thevery beginning, the real meaning of everything he records—and most importantly,that he could identify, behind the treacherous masks and the phony words, the trueessence of the enemies, of ‘the so-called “workers’ opposition”’, ‘the so-called“new opposition”’, ‘the so-called “platform of the 83”’.57 In his double role as theall-knowing author of the plot and a supposedly objective chronicler of history, hewho wrote the Short Course, anonymous but known to all, appears as the only onewho realized that, whatever the malicious enemies do, they only do so that theycan, like evil spirits, ‘at “an appropriate moment” crawl back to the political stageand sit on the neck of the nation as its “rulers”’.58 The ironic quotation marks thusare a promise of the end, of the resolution, when all those who were not quotedrespectfully will be dispensed with—as they were in the late 1930s.Roman Jakobson wrote that minor narrative genres reflect the same principles

as the ones underlying epic texts.59 An analysis of mocking remarks in the ShortCourse illustrates this proposition. The structure of the whole text to a great extentreproduces the structure, and more importantly the performativity, of thecondensed mini-narratives in the oral interventions quoted earlier, with theirinsistence on the predictability of roles performed by the parties involved and withthe presupposition of an immediate connection between the pronouncement ofmocking words and the performance of an action—be it the creation of a certaintype of character, or the subjection of the character thus created to a punishment.Naturally, the performativity of the Short Course was of a different nature than

that of the examples analysed earlier—after all, at the moment of its writing mostof the butts of the author’s sarcasm had either been dead, or about to be convicted

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and executed. The performative potential of the book was in the final fixation ofthe roles, the definitions of character traits and modes of behaviour—and none ofthis would have been possible without the ‘humorous performative’ charge of thetext. In the definite work of Stalinism, sarcastic insults and vulgar humour,previously rehearsed in the oral discourse, brought into existence a particularvision of history—of the past, present and future, with the omnipotent Author asits creator and centre.

Conclusion

Judith Butler sees the task of her analysis in ‘discover[ing] what version of theperformative is at work’60 in a particular discursive situation. This article is anattempt to answer this question with reference to the Stalinist master narrative. Thetotalitarian system established and affirmed itself through the use of various kindsof performativity, the most obvious ones being theatricality and discursiveperformativity. It appears that the distinct character of the Stalinist universe cannotbe accounted for without addressing the particularity of its performative character,and the category of the ‘humorous performative’ seems helpful in analysing one ofthe main features of the Stalinist discourse—the establishment of the chiefauthority that was to preside over the division into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies,’ trueand false, loyal and criminal. This ‘humorous performativity’ is also part andparcel of the main law of Stalinism, in so far as it was not contained in its criminalor civil code. Rather, this was the law of the narrative authored by the dictator,promising satisfaction from mastering what appeared complex, frightening andconfusing—and what turned out to be simply ridiculous. In the context of theStalinist law-positing history the one who laughs is, indeed, the one who laughslast, since only those who have the right to laughter have the right to tell thestory—and to act it out, that is, to perform.

Acknowledgement

The article forms part of a larger project on Stalinist humour.

Notes and References

1. Sarcasm, irony, mockery, ridicule, etc., have traditionally been regarded as forms of humour. For a usefuloverview of theories of humour, see, e.g. S. Halliwell, Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology fromHomer to Early Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. p. 7. In the context of theresearch of Stalinism, a useful reference is Igal Halfin who speaks of mockery, scorn and sarcasm as ‘types ofhumour’ (Halfin, ‘The Bolsheviks’ gallows laughter’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 11 (3) (October 2006),pp. 247–268, at p. 268).

2. The classical references are J.L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words (London/Oxford/New York:Oxford University Press, 1962), and ‘Performative utterances’, in J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (Eds)Philosophical Papers, 3rd edn (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 233–252.

3. I. Halfin, Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh,PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), p. 380 [endnote 78].

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4. On this paradoxical omnipresence of the official, exactly because the spirit of the time was supposed to befree, relaxed, comradely, see Natalia Skradol, ‘“There is nothing funny about it”: laughter at a Stalinist partyplenum’, Slavic Review, 70 (2) (Summer 2011), pp. 334–352.

5. I. Stalin, ‘O sotsial-demokraticheskom uklone v nashei partii: Doklad na XV Vsesoiuznoi KonferentsiiVKP(b) 1 noiabria 1926 goda’, in I. Stalin, Sochineniia, Vol. 8 (Moscow: OGIZ, 1948), pp. 234–297 [‘On thesocial-democratic deviation in our party, 1 November 1926’], in XV Conference of the All-Union CommunistParty (of Bolsheviks), 26 October–3 November 1926, Stenographic Protocol (Moscow/Leningrad: StatePublishing House, 1927), pp. 420–463. All the quotations from the original sources throughout the article aremy translations of the original Russian texts, though I sometimes used the available English translations forconsultation.

6. The text gives a reference to Trotsky’s text (L. Trotsky, The New Course (Moscow: Krasnaia Nov’, 1924),p. 47).

7. Stalin, ‘O sotsial-demokraticheskom uklone v nashei partii’, op. cit., Ref. 5, p. 275.8. I. Stalin, ‘Zakliuchitel’noe slovo po dokladu “O sotsial-demokraticheskom uklone v nashei partii”’, na XV

Vsesoiuznoi Konferentsii VKP(b) 3 noiabria 1926 g [‘Concluding remarks on the social-democraticdeviation in our party’], paper presented at the XVth All-Union Conference of the CPSU(b)). Stalin,‘O sotsial-demokraticheskom uklone v nashei partii’, op. cit., Ref. 5, pp. 298–356, at pp. 354–355.

9. J. Brooks, ‘Stalin’s politics of obligation’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 4 (1) (2003),pp. 167–170, at p. 50.

10. M. Foucault, ‘Two lectures’, in C. Gordon (Ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,1972–1977, trans. C. Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 78–108, at pp. 78, 103–105.

11. J. Butler, ‘Sovereign performatives in the contemporary scene of utterance’, Critical Inquiry, 23 (2)(Winter 1997), pp. 350–377, at p. 356.

12. Ibid., p. 351.13. Ibid.,14. Halfin, Stalinist Confessions, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 262. For a more detailed discussion of the issue, see Halfin,

‘Bolsheviks’ gallows laughter’, op. cit., Ref. 1.15. J.A. Cassiday, ‘Marble Columns and Jupiter Lights: theatrical and cinematic modeling of Soviet show trials

in the 1920s’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 42 (4) (Winter 1998), pp. 640–660, at p. 642.16. S. Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton,

NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 13. See also her discussion of the practice of staging trials atvarious levels, and her use of the metaphor of the theatre, in ‘How the mice buried the cat: scenes from theGreat Purges of 1937 in the Russian provinces’, Russian Review, 52 (1993), pp. 299–320, esp. p. 301.

17. For discussions of the Stalinist carnivalesque, see, besides the often referred to in this article, Halfin (e.g.Stalinist Confessions, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 425 [endnote 49], where he addresses the debate between SheilaFitzpatrick and Michael Ellman as to the justifiability of the application of the term ‘carnival’ to the Stalinistuniverse), also E. Dobrenko, ‘Gossmekh, ili Mezhdu rekoi i noch’iu’, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 19 (1993),pp. 39–45, at pp. 41–43 (‘Soviet comedy film: or, the carnival of authority’ (trans. Jesse M. Savage)),Discourse, 17 (3) (Spring 1995), pp. 49–57); S. Zizek, ‘Toward the theory of the Stalinist musical’, in TheParallax View (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 288–295; R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams:Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York/Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1989), p. 99. Cf. also Katerina Clark’s suggestion of a direct connection between Bakhtin’s writing onthe carnivalesque and the theatricality of the period, since ‘masking, or more particularly unmasking, werecentral to Stalinist rhetoric about “tearing off the masks” of the enemies of the people to reveal their trueselves’ (K. Clark, ‘M.M. Bakhtin and “World Literature”’, Journal of Narrative Theory (Special issue:Benjamin and Bakhtin: New Approaches, New Contexts, ed. John Docker and Subhash Jaireth) 32 (3)(2002), pp. 266–292, at pp. 282–283).

18. Stalin, ‘O sotsial-demokraticheskom uklone v nashei partii’, op. cit., Ref. 5, p. 332.19. Stalin, ibid., pp. 330–331.20. See, e.g. A. Bogdanov, Vox populi: Fol’klornye zhanry sovetskoi epokhi (Vox populi: Folk Genres of the

Soviet Era) (Moscow/St.Petersburg: NLO, 2009), in particular pp. 58–63 (chapter ‘O prostote i pravde’(‘On Simplicity and Truth’), as well as N. Kozlova, ‘Uproshchenie—znak epokhi!’ (‘Simplification is a Signof the Era!’), Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia (Sociological Investigations), 7 (1990), pp. 11–21.

21. Stalin, ‘O sotsial-demokraticheskom uklone v nashei partii’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 316.22. On the history of this figure in the urban folklore of St. Petersburg, see I. Borisova and G. Priamurskii,

‘Peterburgskii dvornik: Gosudarstvo i chistota’ (‘The Street-Cleaners of St. Petersburg: The State andCleanliness’), Neprekosnovennyi Zapas, 2 (2006), pp. 241–256.

23. The release of tension has traditionally been seen as one of the primary functions of humour, and of laughteras a reaction to it. See, e.g. M. Weeks, ‘Beyond a joke: Nietzsche and the birth of ‘super-laughter’, Journal of

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Nietzsche Studies, 27 (2004), pp. 1–17, at p. 4; V. Holman and D. Kelly, ‘Introduction: war in the twentieth

century: the functioning of humour in cultural representation’, Journal of European Studies (Literature and

Ideas from the Renaissance to the Present), 31 (3–4) (123) (September 2001), pp. 248–263, at p. 248.

24. Butler, ‘Sovereign performatives’, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 353.

25. Foucault, ‘Two lectures’, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 97.

26. In one way or another, nearly all the analyses of the Stalinist discourse referred to in this article mention the

insulting language of the show trials. However, not one of them focuses on the particular performativity of

curses and insults in this context.

27. Protsess Antisovetskogo Trotskistskogo Tsentra (23-30 ianvaria 1937) (The Trial of the Anti-Soviet

Trotskyist Centre (23–30 January 1937)) (Moscow: Iuridicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1937), p. 27.

28. A. Vyshinskii, Sudebnye rechi (Court Speeches) (Moscow: Gosiurizdat, 1955), p. 398.

29. M. Odeskii, ‘Absurdizm Danilla Kharmsa v politiko-sudebnom kontekste’ (‘The absurd in Daniil Kharms’s

writings in the political and social context’), Russian Literature, 69 (3–4) (August–November 2006),

pp. 441–449.

30. Butler, ‘Sovereign performatives’, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 351.

31. Ibid., p. 360.

32. Vyshinskii, Sudebnye rechi, op. cit., Ref. 28, p. 402.

33. P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Ed. and intro. John B. Thompson, tr. Gino Raymond and

Matthew Adamson) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 42.

34. Butler, ‘Sovereign performatives’, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 360.

35. R.A. Martin, The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (New York: Academic Press, 2006), p. 63;

M. Weeks, ‘Beyond a joke’, op. cit., Ref. 23, p. 3 (this latter author refers to Kant, who is famously

considered to be ‘the father of the “incongruity theory”’).

36. Vyshinskii, Sudebnye rechi, op. cit., Ref. 28, p. 390.

37. Halfin, ‘Bolsheviks’ gallows laughter’, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 262.

38. Ibid., p. 261.

39. Butler, ‘Sovereign performatives’, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 356.

40. For an alternative point of view that emphasizes the performativity of the show trials in the theatrical sense,

see Julie Cassiday’s text, where she claims that, ‘[a]lthough the stage and screen were initially intended to

augment the propaganda of actual trials, they ultimately modified the very message they disseminated and

made the Stalinist show trial a theatrical spectacle played to a movie audience’ (‘Marble columns’, op. cit.,

Ref. 15, p. 642).

41. M. Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2006), p. 201 [endnote 3].

42. Ibid., p. 119.

43. The first edition of the text came out without an indication of the name of the author. On the question of the

authorship, see, e.g. E. Dobrenko, ‘Total’naia lingvistika: Vlast’ grammatiki i grammatika vlasti’ (‘Total

linguistics: the power of grammar and the grammar of power’), Russian Literature, LXIII (2–3–4) (2008),

pp. 533–621, at p. 593; E. Dobrenko, ‘Mezhdu istoriei i proshlym: Pisatel’ Stalin i literaturnye istoki

sovetskogo istoricheskogo diskursa’ (‘Between history and the past: writer Stalin and literary sources of

Soviet historical discourse’), in H. Gunther and E. Dobrenko (Eds) Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (The Socialist-

Realist Canon) (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2000), pp. 639–672, here p. 640.

44. Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, op. cit., Ref. 41, p. 113.

45. K. Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 1985),

p. 38. I thank the anonymous reviewer of this article for drawing my attention to this point.

46. J.V. Stalin Archive, Istoriia Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (Bol’shevikov). Kratkii Kurs (Moscow:

Goslitizdat, 1945), p. 4 [History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course]

(New York: International Publishers, 1939).

47. Ibid., pp. 253, 263, 270, 272, 277, 280.

48. Ibid., pp. 225, 224, 139, 229.

49. S. Boym, ‘Paradoxes of unified culture: from Stalin’s fairy tale to Molotov’s lacquer box’, The South

Atlantic Quarterly (Special issue: ‘Socialist Realism without Shores’, edited by Thomas Lahusen and

Evgeny Dobrenko), 94 (3) (Summer 1995), pp. 821–834, at p. 830; G. Orlova, ‘Rozhdenie vreditelia:

Otritsatel’naia politicheskaia sakralizatsiia v strane Sovetov (20-e gody)’ [‘The birth of the saboteur:

negative political sacralization in the country of Soviets (1920s)’), Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 49

(2003), pp. 309–346, at pp. 311–312.

50. Stalin Archive, Istoriia Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi, op. cit., Ref. 46, pp. 241, 24, 265, 240, 244, 246,

247, 262.

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51. On this see, e.g. M. Geller, Mashina i vintiki: Istoriia formirovaniia sovetskogo cheloveka (London:Overseas Publications Interchange, 1985), p. 272 [Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man] (trans.David Floyd) (New York: Knopf, 1988).

52. U. Eco, ‘Il linguaggio politico’, in I linguaggi settoriali in Italia. A cura di Gian Luigi Beccaria (Milano:Bompiani, 1973), pp. 91–105, at p. 101.

53. Stalin Archive, Istoriia Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskioi, op. cit., Ref. 46, p. 247.54. Ibid., p. 225.55. Butler, ‘Sovereign performatives’, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 356.56. W. Benjamin, ‘Geschichte schreiben heißt also Geschichte zitieren’, in Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann

Schweppenhauser (Eds) Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main, 1972–1986), p. 595.57. The instances are too numerous to list as page references.58. Stalin Archive, Istoriia Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi, op. cit., Ref. 46, p. 278.59. R. Jakobson, Iazyk i bessoznatel’noe [Language and the Subconscious] (Moscow: Gnozis, 1996), pp. 96–98.60. Butler, ‘Sovereign performatives’, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 353.

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