Several factors have thwarted Russia’s plan for quick victory, but one of them is surely the witty spirit of the Ukrainian people.
On this April Fools’ Day, a Russian dictator is waging war on a Ukrainian comedian. The incongruity of that European tragedy is hard to fathom. Even as Volodymyr Zelensky resists Vladimir Putin’s assault on the battlefield, Americans are watching his comedy, “Servant of the People,” on Netflix. Several factors have thwarted Russia’s plan for quick victory, but one of them is surely the witty spirit of the Ukrainian people. Amid the images of Putin’s atrocities, we’ve all seen evidence of the Ukrainians’ adamantine humor. Millions have watched YouTube videos of Ukrainian farmers taking joyrides on abandoned Russian military equipment. Valeria Shashenok attracted more than 1 million followers to her TikTok page where she laughed in the face of the deprivations of war. (Shashenok is now a refugee in Italy; on Thursday she reported that her brother had been killed in Ukraine.) King Lear appreciates his Fool, but in real life, dictators are notoriously allergic to comedy. Soviet comrades were routinely sent to the Gulag for telling political jokes. Even 65 years after the old mass murderer’s demise, the Kremlin banned Armando Iannucci’s film “The Death of Stalin.” In 2013, the leader of one of Serbia’s pro-democracy groups wrote in Foreign Policy, “Laughter and fun are no longer marginal to a movement’s strategy; they now serve as a central part of the activist arsenal, imbuing the opposition with an aura of cool, helping to break the culture of fear instilled by the regime, and provoking the regime into reactions that undercut its legitimacy.
