Soviet Jokes

THE ALL-UNION INDIGENE: THE CHUKCHI IN SOVIET JOKES AND
CINEMATOGRAPHY
The paper deals with a unique type of “ethnic” Soviet jokes – jokes about the Chukchi.
On the one hand, it is closely associated with the group of “ethnic” jokes. This group is
very informative, because it allows tracing the patterns used in the everyday culture to
construct imagined communities (ethnic, as in this case). On the other hand, ethnic jokes usually have no definite source representing traditional, if not archaic, sets of stereotypes originated from oral narrative genres that appeared long before mass urban societies (just in the same way as “micro-social” jokes based on playing with the micro-group interaction contexts and animal jokes, to some extent). However, the Chukchi jokes stand apart in this sense, because their source can be easily determined – two Soviet polar “eastern” set in Chukotka. These films represent two essentially different epochs in the history of Soviet cinematography: “Alitet Goes to the Mountains” (1949) was shot by Mark Donskoy, a classical film director of the Stalin’s time, and “The Chukchi Chief” (1966), shot by a post-Thaw debutant Vitaliy Melnikov.
The Chukchi joke is a treasury of the Soviet colonial discourse. It can translate different, even opposite, moduses, from a straightforward translation of colonial stereotypes to their total deconstruction, yet, the colonial discourse as it is remains its framework.
The collision between primitive and modern in Chukchi jokes occurs primarily on the
discourse level: placed in the “natural” context, the elements of the “civilized” discourse
gain a counter-intuitive behaviour. The first of the two films mentioned above offers a
“direct” interpretation of this model. In “The Chukchi Chief” by Vitaliy Melnikov the
colonial plot of “Alitet” undergoes a radical ironic turn, thus losing one of the two absolutely indispensable elements – the figure of a “big white man”. As a result, Melnikov creates a Chukotka, where we witness a collision not between a savage and a “man of culture”, but between two savages: one is a “collective Chukchi”, the other is a “puny white man”. And the Chukchi usually appears much more sane than its “white” counterpart, even in those cases when the latter is supposed to be an expert. In the post-Soviet culture both perspectives – straightforwardly colonial and “deconstructing” – coexisted within the same performative situations, thus showing another example of the discursive and performative strategies based on the “outsidedness”.