The Greeks had their myths, the Elizabethans had their plays. In the postwar period, pop music defined western culture in Britain and America. The communists had political jokes. Of course there was every other kind of imaginative activity under communism – films, rock, punk and classical music, plays and novels ... And of course the communists told the usual gamut of jokes – including ones about sex, stupid people and racial minorities. Yet political jokes were the dominant form.

“Anecdotes were our way of speaking the truth,” Gulag survivor Simon Vilensky told me. “I met people in the camps arrested for just listening to anecdotes.”