Back in my undergraduate days, I studied Russian for one year, and learnt three things.
The first was that accent and attitude get you shamefully far: if, like me, you can affect a world-weary manner and follow it up with a series of murmured zeds and softened Ds, as if Count Dracula and Borat were muttering to themselves while eating succulent plums, you will sound vastly more proficient than you are.
The second is that being able to murmur convincingly in an incoherent Russian-esque pidgin doesn’t mean you’ll pass any written exams.
And the third is that Russian humour is a form of self-care.
I still don’t know very much about Russian comedy. The only show I’ve seen was a very broad, on-the-nose satire in which Julius Malema visited the Russian ambassador in Pretoria to show support for an imperial war of aggression Russia would start losing six months later.
The jokes I heard, however, glittered with darkness and a kind of defiant despair, like the one told to us by the head of our department, who delivered it without a hint of a smile.
A young jobseeker hoping to work in the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union arrives for his interview, and is told to sit down opposite a senior bureaucrat and his assistant.
“Tell us,” says the bureaucrat. “What is one plus one?”
“Two?” replies the applicant, somewhat taken aback.
“And two plus two?” asks the bureaucrat.
“Four,” replies the applicant with growing confidence.
“And finally,” says the bureaucrat, “what is three plus three?”
“Six!” cries the applicant triumphantly.
The bureaucrat nods slowly and makes some notes. Then he pulls out a pistol and shoots the applicant dead. His assistant is alarmed and asks him why he just murdered the young man.
The bureaucrat shakes his head sadly and says: “He knew too much.”
The ANC quickly made it clear that it wouldn’t put political opponents in prison, and has since expanded that policy to include political allies, international war criminals, domestic ordinary criminals, and pretty much anyone who can get their docket lost.
Then there’s the joke made famous by Ronald Reagan, based on the claim that private citizens wanting to buy a car in the USSR needed to pay in full and then go onto a 10-year waiting list.
And so it happens that this particular Russian arrives at the dealership and pays his money, and the dealer tells him to come back in 10 years.
“Morning or afternoon?” asks the customer.
The dealer is bemused: “Ten years from now, what difference does it make?”
“Well,” replies the buyer, “the plumber’s coming in the morning.”
I thought of these jokes, and the soul-sucking dysfunction that inspired them, as I read that Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has been exhumed and thrust into the ANC leadership race by Jacob Zuma.
I thought about how, as the apartheid state began to topple, and the ANC prepared to step into government, conservatives warned each other that the party, armed and educated by Moscow, was about to unleash Soviet-style oppression on us; that SA would be a place of gulags and mind control.
As it turned out, those last two didn’t really materialise. The ANC quickly made it clear that it wouldn’t put political opponents in prison, and has since expanded that policy to include political allies, international war criminals, domestic ordinary criminals, and pretty much anyone who can get their docket lost. As for mind control, well, you first have to know what a brain is before you can wash it.
Those crusty doomsayers, however, didn’t get it completely wrong, and every so often a lump of Soviet gristle has floated to the surface of the ANC’s roiling policy soup.
Consider, for example, the ANC’s anti-capitalist façade, inherited almost intact from those Soviet hypocrites who spent their mornings denouncing Western decadence before going home to their gilded pleasure domes to worry about the plight of the workers and whether the next shipment of French champagne would get through the Austrian border without being nationalised again by that goddamn Hungarian police chief.
Cadre deployment, likewise, was a mainstay of the Soviet state, with political lackeys shoehorned into every conceivable opening, regardless of — and usually despite — their ability to do the job.
But perhaps the greatest similarity between the ANC and the dying USSR, at least right now, is all-pervading stagnation; that intellectual and spiritual miasma of anachronism, conservatism and stupidity that hangs over almost every aspect of the state; snuffing out the spark of innovation and suffocating any prospect of real renewal.
Certainly, Zuma’s latest plan is so unoriginal that it was already stale by the time of the Russian Revolution. I’m sure Dlamini-Zuma will have had her strings replaced since her last leadership contest, and had a fresh spritz of Q20 to make sure that her mouth opens and shuts and her eyes roll from side to side nice and smoothly, but a puppet is still a puppet, and installing one to do your bidding is a move straight out of the Middle Ages.
When Mikhail Gorbachev revealed his policies of glasnost and perestroika, or openness and reconstruction, both implied happy continuity, but I suspect that he knew they were a form of euthanasia; that real renewal of a broken system requires that system to die.
Gorbachev knew that one plus one equals two. He knew too much.
Zuma’s faction still knows nothing except its own immediate appetites.
It’s a joke, of course. It’s just not funny any more.
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