Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union is an interesting new addition to the literature on the Thaw era in the USSR. Author John Etty is right in stressing the uniqueness of his study—first because it is a rare volume that considers visual, as opposed to literary or other kinds of written sources, and second because Krokodil, the most famous Soviet satirical magazine, has never been the subject of such an in-depth examination before. Over the span of eight chapters, the book clearly demonstrates that Krokodil’s cartoons were not direct mouthpieces of state ideology, but instead introduced elements of ambiguity into public discourse.
After taking the time in his first two chapters to outline Krokodil’s place in the Soviet media system and in the history of Russia, Etty begins his detailed analysis of the magazine's contents in Chapter 3. There he argues that Krokodil should be understood as a form of Menippean satire, since each issue dealt with hot topics of the day, but in a rather carnivalesque fashion where a multitude of voices were in constant dialogue. Etty also spends some time discussing how the red crocodile logo acted as a kind of trickster character whose presence often stood in for the magazine itself—a point he returns to in Chapter 8.
The level of Party and editorial oversight given to the magazine is the subject of Etty's next chapter. He notes that the Central Committee only intervened in its contents on four occasions; interestingly, in each instance, the editors were told to increase the number of contributors sending materials to the magazine. Etty's discussion of the production process, with its meetings devoted to setting themes, examining submissions, and setting layout, is particularly germane to his main point in this chapter: that each issue should be seen as a co-creation of many people. Etty also shows how what he terms “prosumers” (people who were both consumers of the magazine and producers of some its artwork) were responsible for a significant percentage of the cartoons in each issue.
That discussion leads nicely into the next chapter where the author addresses the ways in which Krokodil’s content spread beyond the printed magazine and formed a kind of participatory culture. It turns out that Krokodil engaged in all kinds of side media—everything from other printed materials (postcards, posters, and collected volumes of its cartoons) to animated films to appeals to build airplanes in its name. One of the most interesting ventures came in the mid-1960s when composer Dmitrii Shostakovich set five poems from the magazine to music and they were performed for the public. As Etty rightly points out, these various initiatives suggest that Krokodil consumers were rarely passive.
From there, Etty moves on to discuss the performance of identities in Krokodil. Tapping the scholarly literature on how language constructs identity, Etty applies it to his visual sources in Chapter 6. He notices how bodily surfaces were important in the establishment of recognizable figures such as the “fat capitalist,” but that Krokodil artists also played with the concept by showing that identities were not necessarily fixed or truthful. They did the latter by regularly showing figures wearing masks or disguises in their drawings. As the book goes on to show, no positive or affirmative type emerged on Krokodil’s pages to rival the negative figures that viewers were used to seeing. Etty suggests that this absence left the periodical with a hollowness at its core and, over the course of Chapter 7, he offers a series of possible explanations for that void.
In its final chapter, the book addresses the ways in which Krokodil’s images highlighted the discrepancy between official rhetoric and lived experience in the Khrushchev era. Subjects such as the leader's well-known housing campaign, the surveillance that was part of everyday life, and the treatment of the stiliagi are considered.
For a reasonably short book, Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union covers a lot of ground. I wish that the press had made many of its illustrations bigger so that dialogue boxes, slogans, and captions were always legible. I also found myself wishing that the author had included more information about the artists working for Krokodil and wondering whether the fact that the entire staff seems to have been male affected the content of the magazine. Finally, I wanted to know more about why particular designs submitted during participatory campaigns were rejected. These questions, however, did not overshadow my enjoyment of the book and of the thought-provoking conclusions that it raised.
