UCLA

This dissertation argues that the massive Soviet socialization project, one that re-arranged people’s relationships to time, to space, to money, to information, and to each other, left a legacy of traditions that re-entrench Soviet-marked moral frameworks. The ethnography describes one of the most popular extracurricular activities in the former Soviet bloc, the Club of the Cheerful and Clever (Klub Veselykh i Nakhodshivykh, or KVN), a team improv and skit game for young people that began in the Soviet 1960s, paying particular attention to the relationship between macro-level political structures, micro-level interpersonal discourse, and the traditions that result from the interaction between the two. The war that began in Ukraine in 2014 rocked the KVN world, creating physical barriers to travel between the two countries, media blockages, and cleavages in KVN organizations that had operated for over fifty years. I examine how team comedy institutions in Russia and Ukraine changed in the wake of the war, but it is people, unfortunately, have been divided more than institutions as such. In the main, this dissertation describes how, and why, social structures get reproduced. People re-make, alter, and reinscribe traditions as they orient towards locally-constructed regimes of value. I draw on data from archival sources, participant observation, interviews, attendance at live competitions, and analysis of fifty years of performance footage to trace moral evaluations in the activity that Russians call the “national game” (“narodnaia igra”), focusing on two cities: Irkutsk, Russia and Odessa, Ukraine. KVN offers a lens through which to investigate moral stancetaking in Russia and Ukraine—two countries where the “same” traditional game indexes different narratives of belonging, exclusion, nation, and personhood. By linking discourses of ideal virtues to the everyday practice of contemporary KVN—brainstorming sessions, rehearsals, parties—I survey the institutional, interdiscursive, and interpersonal dynamics that led Soviet ideology to outlive the Soviet Union.