Welcome, comrades!

The "Soviet joke," or anekdot, was a common staple of life east of the Iron Curtain. It was common among all walks of life, from factory floors to Communist Party meeting halls, whispered and chuckled about when spoilsports and Stasi informants were out of earshot. They could be viewed with total distrust—after all, who would find reason to criticize the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism besides a reactionary wrecker—or with a degree of leniency, a sort of "release valve" for public discontent with the system. They could mock any facet of reality, or the government's steadfast refusal to acknowledge them all. They were made about every leader, every situation, every side of the issue one could possibly imagine. They were full of dry wit, clever wordplays, and the sort of cynical resignation about life's absurdity that can be described as quintessentially (or stereotypically) Russian.

However, when the Berlin Wall came down in '89 and the red flag over the Kremlin came down in '91, so did the steady supply of jokes. And the supply that we have now has not aged well; they are full of increasingly dated references, names of people and institutions fading from the public memory, and a general Cold War zeitgeist whose absence makes them feel a bit less funny today. Those who didn't grow up hearing them are undoubtedly approaching it from an academic outsider's perspective—those who only know the history because they've read about it, causing them to view the joke with a certain quaintness. It's like an exhibit in the Museum of Jokes, where we look at it for a minute, read the context, have an "A-ha!" when the joke finally clicks, chuckle insufferably at it like it's a New Yorker cartoon, and move on. One could argue that it's not even a joke at this point; explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog, as the saying goes.

I still find them funny, though, so I'll post every one I can find.

A note on variants:

Many of these jokes, being repeated endlessly by God knows how many people, have mutated many times over, and there are endless variants out there. For the sake of brevity and humor, I've only published the variants that I consider to be the funniest while still maintaining the impact of the original. If there are well known variants with a significant difference, I'll post a summary of changes on the post below the original.