Book review: Hammer and Tickle: A History of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes

THE FIRST COMMUNIST JOKE I heard, in 1960s Moscow, was: "How do you catch a lion? Easy: you catch a rabbit and beat it till it confesses to being a lion."

Ben Lewis's grimly entertaining study

is no mere joke compendium. In preparing a BBC4 documentary on the subject, he travelled the former Eastern Bloc in search of material, sketching in the history of communism and ruminating on the place of humour in totalitarian regimes.

There are postmodern touches – discussions with his German girlfriend, an artist earnestly nostalgic for the Honecker era, as she puts together her new show of painted-over communist propaganda – but Lewis keeps his feet on the ground. He is right to argue that not all those who told jokes were anti-communist; many were just grumbling about shortages and public lies. Yet Russians didn't make fun about prison camps from light-mindedness but from fear or horror: everyone knew some of the 20 million or so who had been tortured, starved and killed in them.

The Russian surreal tradition of Gogol and Bulgakov was alive and well in many of the jokes, notably my favourite: a (true-life) party boss and obsessive anti-Semite is appointed Soviet ambassador to China. Seeing the dignitaries lined up at Beijing, he says: "Ah, you Yids, always something. Now you're squinty-eyed." The notion of all foreigners being Jews in disguise is superb and that "always something" sublime.

In the 1930s, when satirical writers such as Mikhail Zoshchenko were still around and the revolution was newer, the jokes were fewer. Things got funnier, as it were, with Stalin, and the worst jokes were by the great leader himself. "If he doesn't do his job properly we'll hang him," he told General de Gaulle over dinner, pointing to his air force commander Novikov, and adding: "People say I'm a monster, but you see, I make a joke out of it." Novikov was lucky: he wasn't hanged. He got 15 years' hard labour.

Lewis helps to make communist humour a little less alien: "Jokes were Eastern Europe's jazz, the music of the oppressed." In post-communist Russia the tradition lives on. The last anekdot I heard concerned a bloody decapitated corpse found one snowy morning in Red Square. It is the billionaire Russian refugee Berezovsky. At a press conference, a BBC man asks whether there is any indication of official involvement. "Typical BBC lies and slander," replies a Kremlin spokesman. "After all, it wasn't as if he was a young man."