How many Russians does it take to change a lightbulb?

In 1969, the Slovak writer Jan Kalina published 1001 Jokes, a collection of (mainly) anti-Communist stories which sold out within a couple of days. This was during the permafrost that descended on Czechoslovakia following the Russian suppression a year earlier of the Prague Spring. The ruling regime’s retribution was predictable. Listening devices were placed in his flat so the authorities could find out who passed the jokes on to him, and after a year of this surveillance Kalina was charged with slandering the state. He was jailed for a couple of years. During his trial the prosecution claimed, hilariously, that the bugging equipment in his home had been placed there by Western secret agents. ‘I never told that joke,’ Kalina said in response.

As Ben Lewis explains in this charming, highly original, elegantly written and valuable piece of cultural history, the best Communist jokes were often — rather like the Kalina story — straightforward reportage of real events. They were also the product of a particular place and time, which can make them difficult to translate.

‘In Romania, what is colder than cold water? Hot water.’ When I first heard that, among friends in a freezing Bucharest flat, the Ceauçescu regime banned people from heating their homes for more than a couple of hours a day even in sub-zero temperatures. Telling and re-telling the joke seemed a way of keeping warm. Days after the Chernobyl disaster the joke was doing the rounds in Budapest among people terrified of radiation poisoning: ‘How many Russians does it take to change a lightbulb? None; they all glow.’

This book began life as a BBC television documentary and Lewis travelled widely throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in search of punchlines.