School of History

Professor Judith Devlin (History, UCD)

Thursday 3 February 2022, 16.00 (4PM)

The paper will be delivered through MS Teams. To obtain a Teams link, please, contact Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel, School of History, UCC: j.aandewiel@ucc.ie

Paper The Russians are famed for their black humour. Despite the heavy penalties attached to it, political humour flourished in Stalin’s Russia and people enjoyed telling irreverent jokes about the leader, his cult and the regime’s policies. This paper examines what we know about the political culture of joke-telling, surveys some of the most popular jokes and discusses the problems of interpreting their wider significance. Professor Judith Devlin taught modern history in University College Dublin until her retirement in 2017. She has published books and articles on French and Soviet history. Her most recent publications are: World War 1 in Central and Eastern Europe co-edited with John Paul Newman and Maria Falina (London, New York, I.B. Tauris, 2018, Bloomsbury, 2019 pbk); ‘Art Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s’ in Rόisin Kennedy and Riann Coulter eds, Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork (London, New York, I.B. Tauris, 2018) pp.47-69; ‘The Stalin Cult in Comparative Context’ in Susan Grant and James Ryan eds, Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions and Controversies (London, Bloomsbury, 2020).