Elena Grossfeld, "It’s no laughing matter. Soviet jokes as a basis for intelligence analysis in the Cold War & beyond."

Throughout the existence of the Soviet Union, neither the purges nor the trials and multi-year prison sentences could arrest the clandestine creativity of citizens in authoring political jokes or diminish its reach. Political jokes were used in an attempt to reconcile lived experiences with the propaganda narrative and as a bonding mechanism in a society built on denying reality in favor of performative norms. Soviet political jokes were a popular public outlet in a totalitarian regime with absolute censorship and extensive propaganda, where the state manufactured statistics and election results were known years in advance. During the Cold War, the CIA collected and used jokes to gauge Soviet citizens' public sentiment and dissatisfaction. Still, it is unclear whether Western intelligence, struggling to produce estimates of Soviet military and economic capacities, used jokes to augment the analysis. Yet, given the challenges the Western intelligence organizations faced in their intelligence collection efforts…