I remember watching this "documentary" program on TV. Could not believe my eyes. It was one of the most exciting, paradigm-shattering experiences of my late childhood.
Central TV back then was the #2 authority, right after "Pravda". Anything shown or discussed on TV was "official", there was no room for bullshit on Soviet TV. And then, suddenly, comes this program, where Kuryokhin proves Lenin was a mushroom.
Lenin's figure was so much mythologized (there were even few research institutes dedicated to Leninism) that nothing seemed impossible. A guy which looked like a scientist equipped with complex diagrams and talking about mushroomness of Lenin on central TV - at some point the "documentary" crossed certain level of craziness that it became believable.
No other modern art performance, before or since, left such a deep mark on my brain.
This seems a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie . Well, I learnt (just now from that page) that the 'big lie' concept originated in Mein Kampf - Goebbels' later version was different. It seems Hitler's version that was meant here.
There is another angle to this story that the article misses. I think the "Lenin was a Mushroom" story was satire on the many Lenin stories that Soviet PR used to
paint him as a great guy. These stories, modern legends if you will, were sometimes so exaggerated that no one could possibly believe them - yet no one could say so publicly.
Here is one example[1]:
"One example, which all Russian people know by heart – Volodya Lenin was playing in the house and accidentally broke crystal graphene (crystal bottle for water or drinks). He was afraid that he would get punished, so he lied that he had nothing to do with this accident. But deep inside he was a good boy, so he felt bad about it. And several days later he told his relatives that it was him who broke the thing."
"Lenin was a Mushroom" was just taking this to an extreme and that's why people in early 90s USSR found it funny.
The "Lenin was a great man even in childhood" legend that I heard involves him eating apples that his mother told him not to, and then later his conscience nags him for it. In any event, Lenin was subjected to the same mythologization as George Washington who supposedly cut down a cherry tree and confessed to it.[1]
I still think there is an important difference here that made the joke[1] work in the USSR. I believe it wouldn't have worked in the US the same way.
In America, when children grow up, parents could have that talk with them about how George Washington really was a great guy and how much they appreciate if their children wouldn't cut down the cherry tree in the garden but also about how this story about George Washington is just that - a story.
I wasn't there at the time, so this is just my take on it:
I imagine in the USSR it could have been dangerous to talk to children like that and one way out was to exaggerate the stories until the child notices what's going on. Now daddy Sergei Kurekhin was doing that to the whole Soviet Union - and that's why they laughed about it.
[1] I call it a joke and not a hoax, because I think hoax kind of misses the point. I wasn't there at the time but this is my opinion: I don't think anyone believed it, I think people didn't say so partly because they didn't want to destroy the joke and partly because this was still the USSR.
Annecdotal Hear-say, but I have spoken to a few people who grew up under the Soviets. They all had stories of their parents being very explicit about what was happening and being told exactly what they could not say in public. Then again these are people who ended up in the US so maybe they were atypical.
You can't speak freely at home when your little children hear you, because there is a risk they will repeat your words in public, which can get you in trouble. It's probably also quite dangerous with teenagers around; they may get a wrong idea about appearing cool to their peers by saying something that can't be say, and then get reported on.
First, you need to make sure your children understand the magnitude of danger from repeating what they heard at home. That requires some maturity and intelligence, but more importantly the idea that "there are important truths that you can get punished for saying in a wrong place" is itself one of those important truths that you can get punished for saying in a wrong place, so you either need to approach this very very carefully or take a risk and hope for the best.
Are you talking out of experience or just theorizing? Because I was there. People were telling Gorbachov & Reagan jokes all the time in their kitchens, that was just a normal part of life.
Yes, some jokes were okay, especially the toothless ones. Like, making a joke about being poorer or having worse quality of products than the West was relatively safer than making a joke about party members killing each other or hurting random people.
It also depended on who could hear you, and what kind of a job your parents had. The better job, the greater risk of losing your job for saying wrong stuff.
Also, "speak quite freely at home" is more than just jokes. I am pretty sure most people would not feel safe discussing The Gulag Archipelago at home.
Well, I was talking about jokes. I do agree that people were more careful about voicing serious dissent, but then who actually did that? A very small handful of political activists, the rest just never went there, because
a) usually their friends and family already agreed with them about politics
b) everyone felt powerless to change anything
c) everyone was too preoccupied with survival in the tough Soviet reality.
Gorbachev and Reagan, sure. Even Brezhnev and Carter. But by then you'd have to tell particularly strong ones to get sent to a labor camp, unlike under previous regimes.
It truly boggles the mind when some kids from Berkeley (or Montreal, as the case may be) start telling people who actually lived it that it was all some "cold era Western propaganda" (whatever the hell this is supposed to mean).
Will you tell us next that Holocaust is just some Zionist propaganda?
They spoke freely but they still faced consequences. I know of someone who protested against the party in the early 80s in Moscow, only to undergo interrogation by the KGB and jailed for three weeks. Their pet bird died because they simply “disappeared” for that time and no one knew where they went.
Protesting publicly is one thing. Talking in your own kitchen is another. I guess some unlucky people got busted for that, but generally it was safe, as long as no one deliberately ratted you out (which didn't happen much since Stalin died). And even then, circumstances needed to be really hard against you.
Also, it obviously matters what it is you're saying. Most people just told jokes about the communist regime and talked about how shitty life was. Nobody cared about that as long as they kept it private.
You can "speak freely in private" because it's not free speech, which requires a public space. It's like saying "I am allowed to show my face under this bag I am required to carry over my head". Yes, you are, because you're not really showing your face, as long as that bag is in place.
And why would they (the KGB) have cared (about jokes)? The venting of steam, instead of letting it build up and affect change, would have to be invented if people didn't do it voluntarily. That kind of self-deprecating humour is all over our media these days, too, we love to bring up important subjects to channel them into harmless stuff, just because we can't pretend it's not there, but also not allow ourselves to actually see it and be serious in its presence.
It sounds like you're trying to disprove an argument I never made. Let me be clear about this: there was no free speech in the USSR and you couldn't sound criticism publicly.
But some assume that the absence of free speech means that everyone is either brainwashed or so terrified they are afraid to speak their minds at home. I just had to point out this is not how it was in the late USSR.
Dissidence was managed in the USSR. Individuals would be allowed to say enough things that would contribute to self-incrimination. When it was convenient for the party, the “debt” was called and individuals would then be held responsible for their actions.
The very point was that at least some double digit portion of population actually did.
The point is also that there is a not that small category of people who are ready to believe really everything for as long as they hear that from a smart looking guy in a suite, and it is "dumb and simple enough to believe." This the very thing going on now in Easter Europe with ultraright maxim "refugees steal your welfare" and "Soros conspiracy"
Now, this is being weaponized big time, against the US this time. It took Kremlin probably just few hundred man hours to make one of such guys to attempt assassination of Hillary Clinton.
Now imagine how things will turn if they will double down on that.
I think there definitely is some similarity between Kuryokhin and Zoshchenko. "Stories about Lenin" by M. Zoshchenko have some absurd/satire elements. And these elements were almost invisible for many Soviet citizens. They started to notice these moments in the text only after the dissolution of USSR.
You can find the same stories about Stalin coming from his "fans". How he recommended one person to attend to some baptist church to learn English. Or stories about North Korean leaders, what wise things they teach workers when they fail.
There were attempts to replace Christian symbols with Communist symbols. Like they replaced Christian trinity with Communist trinity: Lenin, Marx, Engels, for example. So they had to make up lots of legends about Lenin to make him new Jesus. How he was smart and when he was in jail he wrote with some sort of juice that made his texts invisible for guards.
Modern Russian TV is full of crazy hoaxes that people are quick to believe. The difference is that they are manufactured by the state at scale as part of its "hybrid warfare" campaigns (currently in Syria and Ukraine), as opposed to a lone prankster trolling people for fun. One could even say that Kurekhin's prank was a wildly successful POC.
My mother lost her mind recently. When I checked her youtube account, I found that it's full of these Russian hoaxes. She watched them extensively for last few years.
Could you give an example of a hoax that has the same monumental scale and consequences as, say, the weapons of mass destruction hoax that led to the 2003 Iraq war?
Remember seeing it back in Ukraine growing up; the premise was so outlandish to me that it was pretty much sci-fi. And it seemed to be especially impossible as Internet was becoming the norm.
Boy was I wrong. There are so many alternative realities out there now that soon it'll be hard to find two people living in the same one.
> There are so many alternative realities out there now that soon it'll be hard to find two people living in the same one.
They were always there. Absolutely nothing has changed about how crazy people are. Now it's merely easier to commiserate or fight about it with more people.
Well USA has Trump, UK has Brexit, ... seems a pretty widespread phenomenon. Only difference is perhaps it is coming from the state machine vs people who are major authorities in the state machine?
We've certainly been lied to on major issues recently by our State machine in the UK too.
Lies are probably necessary at some times; but these don't seem to have been.
> We don’t have in Russia, or in the West, a situation where there are certain types of discourse or figures that are off limits for critical, ironic investigation.
The linguistic anthropologist cited in the article is wrong about at least one thing.
The article doesn't do justice to the hilarious reference to the wave-particle duality that Kuryohin makes when he equates mushrooms to radio waves. This is the part that still makes me giggle when I recall this prank.
Yeah, that is the only place where waves are mentioned. I don't know whether the author of the article even realized that was a reference to the wave-particle duality.
As a kid I read a book which seriously made the case that Jesus was a magic mushroom - the English archaeologist and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John M Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970)
"Allegro's book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) argued...that stories of early Christianity originated in an Essene clandestine cult centred around the use of Psilocybin mushroom, and that the New Testament is the coded record of this shamanistic cult. ...that the authors of the Christian gospels did not understand the Essene thought..[that] the Christian tradition is based on a misunderstanding of the scrolls. ...that Jesus in the Gospels was in fact a code for a type of hallucinogen, the Amanita muscaria, and that Christianity was the product of an ancient 'sex-and-mushroom' cult."[0]
Well, I learnt since that Santa Claus is a mushroom myth[1], and the soma of the Vedas (the earliest Hindu texts) sure sounds like mushrooms..
edit: Added last paragraph and..Ok downvoter, care to explain? Maybe you have some good reason, but it just makes me dislike HN when people downvote for apparently no reason but..well, who knows.
Thank you, I will, downloaded it already. I've not read much PKD at all, but read some of his VALIS writings after seeing A Scanner Darkly and Radio Free Albemuth, which both seem about 80-90% autobiographical. Radio Free Albemuth strongly reminded me of the amazing movie Equus (1977), also (you could say) about the founder of a religion.
tl;dr - During (on the eve of) the decline of The Soviet Union, a trustworthy news magazine program on state-sponsored television, hosts a performance artist for a segment of his choosing, in which he spouts absurdities and nonsense. During the segment, the performance artist deadpans details of Lenin consuming psychedelic mushrooms in quantities which ultimately transform Lenin (somehow). Everybody laughs.
Not exactly a hoax, but more a wink and a nod at the bastardization of the media apparatus of a totalitarian state that is soon to be replaced, and thus no longer requires donning the pomp and circumstance of official government communications.
Russian rulers are pretty strange. Another couple of facts you probably didn't know: Putin is crab and Medvedev is a bumblebee.
For Medvedev it's pretty simple: in his young years he sang on a party popular song "Woolly bumblebee" from a popular movie and told that to journalists. That was probably the most interesting part of interview and search engines got flooded with queries like "Medvedev bumblebee". So the phrase became viral and now everybody is aware of his true nature :)
For Putin it's even funnier: he told the journalists that during his presidency he works as a slave on a galley. In Russian words "slave" and "crab" are pretty close: "rab" and "crab". And the word "as" contains the first letter from "crab". So there was a typo in the newspaper stating that Putin works as crab on galley: "как раб на галере" > "как краб на галере".
Ever heard of "Winnie-the-Pooh" [0] and "The Toad" [1]? It seems having some memes referring to the head-of-state is a common pattern in countries with authoritarian governments, since calling them directly by names is, at least, uncomfortable.
First of all, Kuryokhin was a brilliant musician for his time and one of the few Russians known in the Western experimental-jazz scene, he played in at least one concert with John Zorn and Bill Laswell (with Valentina Ponomareva as the frontwoman). There's a great excerpt from a TV show where complaints thrown at his band are so typical and predictable they're laughable (it's in Russian though): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJTAhNhaaY
But also, his bullshitting skills are unparalleled, you literally never know if he's saying something he believes. There are sort-of “behind the scenes” clips for the absurdist movie ‘Two Captains 2’—where he as an actor, and the director Sergey Debizhev talk to different reporters by making up each their own plot on the spot. There's a 40-minute TV interview where the interviewer admits he doesn't know if a single true thing was said. In the second clip from the OP article you can see how both Kuryokhin and Sholokhov had trouble holding in the laughter while recording their “talk,” and that's just a part of the full video.
The thing about late 80s–early 90s Russian media and arts scene is, it was “anything goes,” a period of braindump after the suffocating atmosphere of the USSR. (I barely caught the end of the time of change in the late 90s, and still the influx of modern arts was like enlightenment and nirvana after both stale Soviet standards and the sugary shitshow of the local pop music).
In this scene, a lot of talented people just did weirdest things they could with the extremely low budgets, because the old rules were thrown away, and no new ones were made yet. Sex, blood, shit, you name it, we had a lot of that, mostly in abominable taste and quality. There are plenty of bands of varying degree of absurdism from that era: Nogu Svelo, NOM, GrOb, Mango-Mango, the parody of Boney Nem, etc. Pranksters and jesters became important in all forms of media since they were showing people that life could, and probably should, be a lot different. Kuryokhin worked closely with the gang of the Leningrad “rock club,” but I'd say he was sorta ahead of them, being in free jazz and modern-classical music and known in the West (playing on one stage with Zorn in '91, come on).
A repetition of that experience is impossible unless we have another go with the Iron Curtain. In the past thirty years, media and show business here have settled a lot just like they did in the West, disregarding even the whole oppression stuff. Now there are things that you can do to get any kind of known, and making an absurdist band is not really one of them. (Though the post-indie antifolk wave from ~five years ago was pretty good.) For my taste, we're in dire need of fresh big time satire that cuts deep and hurts a lot.
When I lived in Russia, I knew one promising youngster who unfortunately chose to "come to the dark side." He himself was a hardcore marxist, but nevertheless went on to develop himself as "political technologist," offering his services to anybody ready to dish out a sum.
The two quotes from him I remember to this day: "with enough time and money, I can make a city to vote even for a devil himself," and second "people believe in whatever is easiest to believe, the bydlo did once believe that the earth was flat after all"
It might be tautological, but it's probably necessary to say that the side that thinks that the people with no resources should be treated better, that side also has radically fewer resources. They usually spend their bodies, freedom, and lives; things that by definition all humans have some degree of.
Bydlo is Ukrainian word and it literally means "cattle". It can be used also to describe somebody, who will eat his food and do his job slowly and silently, withstanding any tortures, and doing nothing to help himself or to help others.
Russians picked up this word recently and use it as synonym for "redneck", often used as label for Ukrainians.
The word bydlo was borrowed into Russian (from Ukrainian, which in turn got it from Polish) a very long time ago, and has been used in works of Russian literature (Aksyonov, Strugatsky brothers, Sholokhov, Kuprin) through the entire span of the 20th century, including before the revolution. According to the Russian National Corpus, the earliest usage in Russian print was in 1869.
The word and its usage has nothing to do with Ukraine, and is not used as a epithet for Ukrainians or any other particular ethnicity - unless talking about specific Ukrainians (or Russians, or Americans, or whoever else) who act like bydlo.
«Bydlo» has root «byt`», which mean «to live», so «bydlo» in Ukrainian literally means «an animal, which lives with someone», i.e. cattle. Only Ukrainian language still have calling form of words in use, so, if this word is borrowed, it's borrowed more than 1k years ago, i.e. at times of Volyniana, kingdom of all Slavs, before kingdom was split into parts.
For us, with more than thousand years of history, few decades ago is recent history.
Central TV back then was the #2 authority, right after "Pravda". Anything shown or discussed on TV was "official", there was no room for bullshit on Soviet TV. And then, suddenly, comes this program, where Kuryokhin proves Lenin was a mushroom. Lenin's figure was so much mythologized (there were even few research institutes dedicated to Leninism) that nothing seemed impossible. A guy which looked like a scientist equipped with complex diagrams and talking about mushroomness of Lenin on central TV - at some point the "documentary" crossed certain level of craziness that it became believable.
No other modern art performance, before or since, left such a deep mark on my brain.