Jokes from the Darkness

People living under the repression, scarcity, and occasional sheer terror of Marxism, have often dealt with it by coming up with some deliciously dry, dark humour. The jokes are often not just funny, but enlightening. I’ve gathered and re-told some of them here. I hope you enjoy them.

***

It’s 2016, Fidel Castro has just died, and he presents himself at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter takes a brief glance at the very long scroll with Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz written at the top and shakes his head, saying. “Not a chance Fidel. You are going to the other place.”

Castro sadly makes his way down to Hell where Satan greats him enthusiastically. “Fidel, what kept you? Great to see you!”. Then Castro realises he’s left his luggage up in Heaven and starts to head back up to fetch it.

“Don’t worry about that.” Says Satan. “I’ll send a couple of demons up to get it. You go and have a drink with Ché, he’s beating Stalin at pool over in the Murderers’ Bar.”

So, the two demons go up to Heaven, but when they get there, there is a long queue snaking out from St. Peter’s lectern just inside the gates. One demon goes to the back of the queue, tapping his hoof. The other demon slaps the back of his head. “What’re you doing? We’re demons! We don’t queue!”

They go along the wall of Heaven a little way and climb over. St. Peter sees them jumping down on the other side. He sighs and says to the newest arrival. “Look at that. Castro’s only been in Hell ten minutes and already we’re getting refugees!”.

***

Moscow, 1938. A man is running through the streets screaming “I can’t take it anymore! This tyrant with his silly moustache! The killings! The terror! The horror!”

An NKVD officer sees him and arrests him. He takes the man straight to Stalin himself and relates what the man was shouting.

Stalin’s eyebrows go up in surprise and he asks the man, “Comrade, what were you thinking of, shouting such things?”.

The man replies “Well, I was thinking of Hitler of course.”

Stalin smiles and nods, saying “Ah, of course.” Then the smile fades and he turns to the NKVD officer, “Who were you thinking of?”

***

Q: What is the difference between a capitalist fairy tale, and a Marxist fairy tale?

A: A capitalist fairy tale starts with, “Once upon a time there was…”. A Marxist fairy tale starts with, “One day, there will be…”.

***

Moscow, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev is making his famous speech denouncing Stalin to the Party Congress. He is waxing lyrical about the horror of  Stalin’s purges. During a dramatic pause a voice calls out from the hall. “Nikita Sergeyevich! While all this was happening, where were you?”

Khrushchev is livid. His face flushes red and he roars, “WHO said that!?”. The crowd is utterly still, their collective blood is frozen, every eye is staring at the floor, the silence is total. After a thirty endless seconds Khrushchev says more quietly, “THAT, is where I was.

***

A man is standing in a queue for meat during the period of relaxation of state control known as Glasnost in the late 1980s. The queue is long, and he has been in it for three hours when it is announced that there is no more meat. The man cannot help himself and shouts loudly about the failings of the communist state and its inability to provide even the staples of life.

A man in a trench coat and dark glasses walks up and puts his hand on his arm. “Comrade, calm yourself, you’re causing a scene. Be grateful, only a few weeks ago we would have shot you for an outburst like that.”.

The man trudges home and sits at the bare kitchen table, his head in his hands. His wife puts her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t tell me, they’ve run out of meat again?” she says.

The man looks up, shaking his head. “It’s worse than that, they’ve run out of bullets!”.

***

The Warsaw Pact were holding winter military exercises in a Polish forest. A Russian soldier and a Polish soldier each get lost and both end up together in a ramshackle old hut deep in the snowbound forest. They find one loaf of bread, a bit stale, but edible. The Russian soldier says, “We’re share it in the brotherly, socialist way.”.

The Polish soldiers snaps back, “Brotherly, socialist way my a***! We’ll have half each!”.

***

Following the Winter War between the Soviets and Finland in 1939-40, a joint Finnish-Soviet group is marking out the new border after the Soviets annex several Finnish border regions. The job takes months and by the time they come to Lapland in the far north it is deep winter again. They come across an old Sámi man in a remote forest, living in a tiny hut, half hidden in the snow. The hut is right on the new border line. So, they let the man decide which country he wants to be in, to remain in Finland, or be in the Russian Soviet Union. The old man asks them to let him spend one night as a Soviet citizen before he decides. They agree and go back gladly to their warm accommodation.

Next day they return, and the man says he wants to continue being in Finland. The leader of the Soviet delegation is offended. “Why don’t you want to be in the Soviet Union?” he demands.

The old man smiles and says, “I’m very sorry, but I’m an old man and I really don’t think I could stand one of your Russian winters.”.

***

A man walks into a butchers shop in Leningrad and asks if they have any bread. The butcher replies, “No comrade, this is a butchers, this is where we don’t have any meat. It’s the bakery over the road where they don’t have any bread.”.

***

August 1939 and Hitler and Stalin held a top-secret meeting to agree the final terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. When they had finished, their respective foreign ministers, Ribbentrop and Molotov, came in and were told the details of the partition of Poland and the plans for the Third Reich and Soviet Union afterwards. Molotov looks solemn and observes, “Many will die, maybe millions.”

Stalin puffs on his pipe and replies. “Oh, twenty million, easily.” He paused, “Twenty million, and one bicycle repair man.”.

Molotov and Ribbentrop both look puzzled and ask in unison, “WHY a bicycle repair man?”.

Stalin grins and turns to Hitler and says triumphantly, “See? I told you they wouldn’t care about the twenty million!”.

***

Finally, this one isn’t really a Soviet/Marxist joke, more a Russian military one, but I couldn’t resist including it.

***

The commanding officer of the Russian Spetsnaz special forces was worried that selection was taking too long and that recruits were not as manly as they were in his young day, so, he came up with a streamlined, but robust, selection process.

Potential recruits had to first drink a whole litre of vodka, then wrestle a bear. Finally, they had to make love to the Russian women’s weightlifting champion.

The first candidate presented himself. He chugged down the vodka in one go. Then he was shut in a railway freight car with the bear. There was banging, roaring, screaming and the freight car rocked on its wheels. After a long time, the door slid open and the recruit came out, bleeding from a hundred scratches, one eye blacked, three teeth missing, and swaying from side to side. He staggered up to the drill sergeant, straightened up, clapped his hands and asked, “Right! Where’s this weightlifter I’ve got to wrestle?”.