Russian jokes are short fictional stories or dialogs with a punch line, which commonly appear in Russian humor. Russian joke culture includes a series of categories with fixed settings and characters. Russian jokes treat topics found everywhere in the world, including sex, politics, spousal relations, or mothers-in-law. This article discusses Russian joke subjects that are particular to Russian or Soviet culture.
Three of the most famous bogatyrs, Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets and Alyosha Popovich, appear together in Victor Vasnetsov's 1898 painting Bogatyrs.
Armenian Suren Spandaryan (left) and Georgian Joseph Stalin in 1915
Mercedes-Benz S600 (W140)
Zaporozhets 968
Russian political jokes are a part of Russian humour and can be grouped into the major time periods: Imperial Russia, Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. In the Soviet period political jokes were a form of social protest, mocking and criticising leaders, the system and its ideology, myths and rites.
Quite a few political themes can be found among other standard categories of Russian joke, most notably Rabinovich jokes and Radio Yerevan.
A group of khodoki (petitioners) come to make a request of Lenin; such meetings were often depicted in propaganda stories about Lenin, and in jokes making fun of such stories.
Joseph Stalin
"Khrushchev demands: overthrow Adenauer; now more than ever CDU"
Leonid Brezhnev
