Combatting Russian authoritarianism with comedy

0:01This week on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, we talked to best-selling author Caro Claire Burke about how it feels to write the hit book of the summer. I've been very dissociative, so that's a problem for my future therapist. Yeah, I see. Let's talk about the fact you're not in therapy. That's fascinating. Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games. Listen to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Today on State of the World, combating Russian authoritarianism with comedy.

0:32You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. There's a well-known Russian fairy tale about a princess who never smiled. Her father, the king, says anyone who can make her smile can marry her. And spoiler alert, it's a humble worker that succeeds. Well, a Russian journalist now living in exile has come up with a comedy routine that uses the fairy tale's premise as the basis for his act. It's called The Realm That Never Smiled. As NPR's Michelle Kellerman tells us, it has Russian-speaking audiences laughing at their own history.

1:13Vladimir Raevsky has been thinking a lot about his birthplace and laughing about it.

1:19Vladimir Raevsky:There is this enormous empire, and it never smiled, on itself. And we started making a show about a country that is not used to smile at itself.

1:37His stand-up routine is all in Russian, and at this show in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, he incorporates a lot of research. He tells NPR that he's been digging into stories from the Tsarist era, the Soviet era, and Vladimir Putin's Russia.

1:52Vladimir Raevsky:I was always looking at this history full of these inflated figures, full of these people who thought they were great, but they were not. These ridiculous documents, ridiculous orders. I was just looking at it and asking why nobody looks at it as a comedy. Take Tsar Paul I, the son of Catherine the Great, who waited for years to ascend the throne in the late 18th century. Rajevsky calls him a one-man legislative firehose because he knew he had little time to rule over the Russian Empire. He decided that every word of his is now a law. So he stumbled at the ball dancing waltz and he bent the waltzes the next day.

2:34The next order was to ban shoelaces, which may have caused the Tsar to stumble. The 40-year-old Raevsky was also fascinated by Ivan the Terrible, who wrote letters to Queen Elizabeth I to try to form a military alliance. Since Raevsky now lives in London, he went to the archives to pick them up and read them.

2:55Vladimir Raevsky:The way he writes her is hilarious. What was so funny about them? Because he was approaching her like on a dating app. His jokes mix modern-day references to Russian history, and that was a highlight for Rostoslav Siyamenka, who met NPR producer Daniel Offman after the show. Siyamenka calls it an intergenerational show, though he says an older gentleman next to him didn't seem to understand some of the modern references. And I was quite sure that he got some of the USSR jokes that I did not understand. And at the same time, we both laughed a lot. So I came away with a really amazing impression of what he's able to tie together, so many different things.

3:37Also in the audience was Olga Nekrasov, who says she's been following Raevsky on Instagram. She says Russians need humor more than ever. I'm glad we still can laugh. This is what will save us, probably. Although it's harder and harder every day to laugh. Harder because of Russia's war in Ukraine, the war that prompted Vladimir Raevsky to go into exile. He says it was impossible to work as a journalist in Putin's Russia. And in a way, poking fun at history is a way to counter Putinism.

4:07Vladimir Raevsky:Putin has weaponized Russia with history, with creating this myth, again, grand and serious. And I think we have to weaponize ourselves with laughter. He doesn't target average Russians for these jokes, but rather figures like Joseph Stalin, who's revered in patriotic Russian histories for winning World War II, but who also oversaw the great terror in the Soviet Union and a forced famine in Ukraine. Braevsky paints Stalin as a nervous micromanager who hand-wrote instructions to the authors of his biography. I found Little Coleman written by Stalin. So he advises his authors to insert a phrase that Stalin never had any trace of self-admiration or vanity.

4:54This is the kind of show that Ryavsky can only do in exile. He can't return to a country that has labeled him a foreign agent for his past reporting. But he's getting an online following and hopes Russians inside the country can eventually watch his show on YouTube, the show that's based on the old fairy tale The Princess Who Never Smiled.

5:14Vladimir Raevsky:Whenever we teach ourselves to be self-ironic to laugh at ourselves and to laugh at our history maybe that will be the time for change for Russia and maybe that will be the end of the fairy tale. A happy ending, he hopes. With reporting from NPR's Daniel Offman I'm Michelle Kellerman in Washington.

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