I visited the Irkutsk Resource Center for Pensioners a week before America’s presidential elections. Their electricity was out that day, so I met with the eighteen senior-citizen English language learners and their teacher in a large wood-paneled room streaked with Siberia’s silver wintertime sunlight. I gave a short presentation about California, stressing the beauty of redwood trees and the state’s historical relationship with Russian traders, then the students asked me questions. “What is the state flower of California?” “Why is the capital in Sacramento?” “What is the highest mountain in California—I know! It is Mount Vitni!” They asked about the weather, about Silicon Valley, about Hollywood. “California—it is American dream. It is every American dream,” one man speculated. Their questions were fairly tame in comparison to the first things most Irkutsk university students asked. “What do Americans think about Russia,” they would say. “Is it true that Americans hate Russia?” I always explained that America was a country of immigrants, that millions of Russians and Russian speakers lived in America, and that Americans had Russian neighbors and friends and teachers and definitely did not hate Russians. The second question most university students asked was, “What do you think of Trump?” The senior citizens, though, reared in the Soviet Union, thought less about politics, feelings, and even sanctions. Their minds skipped straight to war.
After the official presentation, one woman in her sixties came up to me and said, “I am afraid Hillary will start a war.” Another grandmotherly-looking lady with dyed jet-black hair and piercing blue eyes continued, “It is just like with Kennedy. Back then, with Cuba, when the missiles were already ready to go. Sometimes Hillary does not think about what she is saying. She doesn’t understand that we can surround [the United States]—like that! You understand, we have a large territory. The United States is small. We are a big country. We have enough. We understand this. We have understood this since back then.”
In essence, someone’s dear babushka was arguing that Russia could survive a nuclear strike, even a first strike, and the U.S. could not. And she seemed, personally at least, willing to risk it. Kto kogo: who will beat whom? Stalin’s catchphrase formulation always functioned as challenge, not rumination.
I trudged through heavy snowfall the following week, ducking under awnings and brushing large flakes off my phone screen to check election results as they rolled in. The polls swung to Donald Trump just before I met with a young woman who taught me about traditional doll-making and its relationship to Slavic cosmology. “Oh, fantastic!” she said when I told her Trump had won. She hugged me and continued, “I hope now our countries can live in friendship.”
It was in this political context that I researched student comedy in Irkutsk. The “Club of the Merry and Clever” (Klub Veselykh i Nakhodchivykh, or KVN) is a humor game developed by the Soviets that combines sketch comedy and improvisation. Just as Americans play in soccer and tennis leagues, people across the former Soviet bloc play KVN—in schools, in universities, and on an international, professional, televised level. Irkutsk has some of the the strongest performers and writers in the country. Three teams advanced to the pro level in 2017, and two Irkutsk writers have moved to Moscow, where they write material for top teams full time. At both the student and televised levels, Donald Trump became a popular character in KVN skits. In a December final round, for instance, an all ethnic Buryat team made some jokes about the incoming president’s stance towards ethnic minorities:
Dmitry: Guys, this is the final! With this kind of silliness we won’t win.
Trump: I know how to win with nonsense!
Aldar: Oho! It’s Donald Trump!
Trump: Oh. I thought you “Russians” would look a little different…
A bit edgier, though, was a skit about Donald Trump made during the final, televised round of the professional league in Moscow. A line of of outgoing and presumed incoming foreign leaders stood on stage: Chancellor Angela Merkel and German president Joachim Gaouk; Belarusian president Aleksander Lukashenko and his son; and Barack Obama and Donald Trump. When the skit finished, the team told Obama “goodbye” and the German politicians “auf Wiedersehen.” Then he leaned in towards Trump’s ear and said with a conspiratorial smile, “Do svidaniya.” A deft joke. While many of those in the audience may have really, really liked the idea of Putin turning the U.S. into a puppet state, I think, as possibly the only American sitting in the theater near the Kremlin that night, I may have been alone in catching the full kick of irony.
Most jokes, though, made either in in Irkutsk or Moscow, concerned everyday life rather than politics. University students wrote skits about events in their departments, their town’s changing retail landscape, and, as always, about young love. Grade school students also spoofed the topics they knew the most about: mean teachers, lack of gourmet options in the school cafeteria, parents, and, as always, young love. I felt very privileged to sit on the jury for the grade school league’s two quarterfinal matches in December. And so, there were even a few jokes about an American judge. KVN games around the winter holidays universally feature “Father Frost,” the Russian Santa Claus. Instead of Mrs. Claus, though, Father Frost has a young blonde-braided companion, Snegurochka. Partway through one team’s skit about Father Frost and Snegurochka, a young man said. “Whoa, wait. Amy doesn’t know who Father Frost and Snegurochka are. Hold on, I’ll explain.” He then turned to me, pointing to the pair, “Amy, this is Santa. And this—this is Barbara.”
No trip to Russia has ever proved boring to me. But the inherent drama of the U.S. elections, combined with accusations of Russian hacking, made this a particularly interesting time to be an American in Siberia, watching Russians make spectacle of U.S. political carnival.