'We’re the Last National Team of the Union': (Post-)Soviet Narodnost on KVN in 1992

• In Event: From Popular Will to Popular Culture: Socialist and Postsocialist Imaginaries for the Russian Mass Polity

Abstract

As the Soviet Union splintered into independent republics over the course of 1991 and finally dissolved by the end of that year, the process was observed and satirized on KVN, a TV sketch comedy show whose competition format and institutional identity had been hardwired for years to the idea of a modernized, urbanized, Russophone, pan-Soviet collective. Perhaps the culmination of this collective’s ideological commitments appears on display in the performances of the Odessa State University and the Israeli national teams on KVN in 1992. My paper will examine the ways in which both sets of performances position the teams’ recently-former-Soviet Jews as the ideal bearers of a “Soviet peoplehood” project that actively tries to keep open the possibility of a continued existence of such an identity, alongside the dissolution of the state that had given birth to it.

Author

• Pavel Khazanov, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey