“Our Friendship with  Czechoslovakia Does Not Know Borders”:  1968 in the Soviet Political Folklore

Abstract. The article analyzes the Soviet political folklore related to the topic of the intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The analysis of political jokes reveals a certain spectrum of public attitude to the actions of troops of the Warsaw block countries. There are several blocks of stories around which folklore texts were composed: “brotherly” and “friendly” assistance of the USSR to Czechoslovakia, which turns to its opposite, resulting in a gap between rhetoric and reality; playback of similarity of the names of Czech leaders, for example, “Dubcek” is similar to “oak” and “Husak” — to “goose”; subordinate position of Czechoslovakia after the events of 1968, when the new leadership of the country had to follow Moscow’s rules; analogies between the occupation of the country by German and Soviet troops. Despite the fact that the texts of the jokes can be regarded as critical to the events of 1968, they were aimed at mocking not the military intervention itself, but the power discourse that sought to make the introduction of troops legitimate. Thus, the jokes were located in the “grey zone” of the acceptable, they could not be recognized, and not punished, unlike public protests.

Keywords: 1968, Prague Spring, political folklore, Soviet anecdote.