In Soviet times, Stanislav Belkovsky says, jokes about the rulers was “a powerful channel of popular satire,” one especially powerful because no one knew who the author of this or that joke was and therefore the anecdotes told at that time “expressed not an individual opinion but a collective point of view.”

A true political joke, the opposition commentator says, is “a classic example of a subject-less statement.” Such jokes exist “in present-day Russia,” but “they don’t take root or develop” because their authorship is always known because it consists mostly of comics who are working for the regime”........

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