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The comedy of Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, the two rude "tourists" from Russia who have denied on television their involvement in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, seems set to run. The Moscow press tells us that the Russian "gold mark" has given them a brand name for a company specializing in tourism, women's clothing and chemicals for the perfume industry.
Both tried to persuade the world that they had come to Britain simply to admire Salisbury Cathedral, its 123-meter high bell tower and its ancient clock. Alas, they lamented, luck was against them. They were first pushed back by the snow. (Really, the Russians can cope with the snow – the Russian trains, unlike the British trains, keep rolling even when the snow is one inch deep.) Then their busy schedule forced them to return prematurely to Moscow.
Was this improbable story a failed attempt by the Russian authorities to prove that their hands were clean? Even the impassive Russian television interviewer was visibly unimpressed. Was it an expression of contempt: look, in spite of your brilliant policemen, we can do what we love in your country? Was it a wrong joke, to which "Golden Brand" is trying to bring fuel? None of this makes sense. The Russian Embassy, generally so good at smothering the spirits, if the tweets are tasteless, could only pretend that the British had to do it.
In the end, it sounded like pure incompetence, the best explanation for most things that governments are mistaken. Yet, despite appearances this time around, the Russians have a very developed sense of humor. Some claim that it is very similar to ours.
Let's start from the top. Stalin's humor was sardonic but rarely concise. He once joked, "You have a man, you have a problem. Get rid of the man and the problem. The question has become a management principle. He kept his Politburo colleagues exceptionally competent by firing one or two shots every time things got tight. Sometimes he shot their wives instead.
Putin is not Stalin, despite the feverish comments you read in the Western press. But he too has a sense of sardonic and sometimes brutal humor. In 2013, I was at a conference in Russia just before the German elections. Putin gave a long and boring speech, but focused on the questions. A prominent German politician was on the podium with him. Having recently won his own elections, Putin asked who would be the next Chancellor. "Mrs Merkel, I suppose," replied the unfortunate German. "Really?" Putin pointed out, raising his eyebrows. "The third time in a row? What kind of democracy is it?
In the Soviet era, there was an official humor in "satirical" magazines like Krokodil. It was rarely funny. The greatest Russian writers were not very amusing either. But Nikolai Gogol, the author of the early nineteenth century The government inspectoris the real thing One of his characters attacks another in the corrupt and hierarchical provincial society of Tsarist Russia: "He takes bribes over his post".
A century later, Ilf and Petrov created the figure of Ostap Bender, the boss of Odessa who dreams one after the other of an ingenious system for milking the system. It comes naturally to a bad end: the price of publication in the Soviet era. But the satire of Soviet life – the bureaucracy, corruption, mistrust of the authorities and their representatives – continues to rage. Ostap Bender's lyrics are as common in Russian everyday life as Alice's Aphorisms in Wonderland. One of them – ironic in modern Russia – is "Stay strong. Foreigners will help us. But most do not translate well: they are too much tied to Soviet and Russian reality.
At a more popular level, Russian humor looks like the humor of Poles and Jews. The comparison irritates all three, but the affinities are clear. It is said that a Jewish joke is a joke that no one can understand and that every Jew has ever heard. Poles and Russians, too, believe that they are incomprehensible to foreigners. Russian humor, like Polish and Jewish humor, is born of the adversity, oppression and tragedies of history. The jokes are twisted and anti-authoritarian. They are an aid to survival in difficult times, an opportunity to express criticism, a tiny attempt at freedom.
In 1991, while I was ambassador there, a little book came out in Moscow titled The history of the Soviet Union in anecdotesand, indeed, they were jokes fiercely commenting on the events of the revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union, often in the form of questions and answers. "What is the difference between capitalism and communism? – Capitalism is the exploitation of the man by the man. Communism is the opposite. "" Will there be a war? – There will be no war. But there will be such a struggle for peace that no stone will be left on another. "
In Poland, answers were often attributed to wise rabbis; in the Soviet Union to the mythical Radio Armenia: Armenians are, after all, another people with a tragic history. One of my favorites was, "What is the difference between the dollar and the ruble? "The dollar is backed by gold and the ruble by tanks" (that was before Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard). Radio Armenia was so popular that its jokes flooded the capitals of the Soviet empire within 24 hours of a landmark event.
The Russians and we are not the only ones to share an inclination for dubious ethnic jokes: how many Irish, Poles or Chechens do you need to screw an electric lamp? And at the lowest level, the humor is the same everywhere. In 1964, a colleague of the Embassy and I spent five days on the Siberian railway, sharing a compartment with four Russians. It was a great opportunity: at that time, the KGB was doing its best to isolate us from the premises. Every time the train stopped at a station, a Russian rushed to buy vodka: the train itself was dry, but the compartment quickly became friendly. My colleague was the son of a great chess master and no nasty player himself. The Russians challenged him to a game and beat him. Then they sang endless Russian folk songs. We could only stumble across "Foggy, Foggy Dew". Then they started telling a series of jokes and wanted to hear the English equivalent. We could not remember it. The humiliation has demonstrated one thing. The Russians are much better than we are sounding the changes on a painfully limited vocabulary of rude words.
The two Russian tourists may not have done much. But British viewers have fallen on their mediocre performances with joy. Our newspapers were full of cartoons. Internet was full of tweets. A cheerful observer consoled Ruslan and Alexander with the thought that it could have been worse. If their mission had not taken them to Salisbury, they might have told the world, "We really had to visit Scunthorpe because it was a community opera of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad." entitled Cycle Song, devoted to a former metallurgist. no, there was really such an opera.
Russian humor may have triumphed on this train in Siberia. But this time, the British took the prize.
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