“All Jokes Aside”

Despair vs. the Capacity to Act

“Patriarch Kirill Warns Russians of the Dangers of Despair” — so read the headline carried by several state-aligned media outlets on the third day of Great Lent, February 25, 2025. Two weeks later, on March 12, Archpriest Alexander Ilyashenko echoed the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, reminding the faithful that despair is no better than “murder, theft, or drunkenness,” and warning parishioners of hellish torment for succumbing to depression.

Despair is one of the seven deadly sins; in Christian theology it is known as “acedia” — a complex concept encompassing Pushkin’s “languid idleness,” as well as apathy, listlessness, and melancholy. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, those guilty of despair languish in the fourth terrace of Purgatory. Dante drew on Aristotle’s theory of virtue — the idea that virtue lies between two extremes. The deadly sins, on his account, are pathological falls into one of those extremes. The despondent person, who lacks the strength to love the true good, sins no less than the one who plunges into the opposite extreme and loves a false one. Embedded in this theological framework is a premise that would later become central to modern political philosophy: despair is the loss of the capacity to act — political action included.

It is unlikely that Russia’s clerical establishment, in its campaign against despair, envisions a flourishing of joy, strength, or — least of all — the social and political agency of the people. In practice, the Russian state, using the church as one channel of ideological power, has done everything to ensure that despair is the only available condition. And it began cultivating that condition long before the war in Ukraine.

Attempts to treat despair in Russia have, in effect, been criminalized. Beyond the now-routine quasi-legal prosecutions for posts and memes, there is no shortage of indirect evidence. Among the most telling cases is that of Daria Belyaeva in Yekaterinburg: bupropion, a widely used and fully legal antidepressant until 2016, was classified by a forensic expert as a narcotic substance on the basis of a superficial similarity in chemical structure. A psychiatric evaluation declared her legally incompetent, and prosecutors sought compulsory treatment. This case sits alongside a broader revival of punitive tendencies in Russian psychiatry — the rejection of ICD-11, repression targeting people on the autism spectrum — all against the backdrop of a sharp surge in antidepressant sales nationwide.

A Political Philosophy of Sadness: Spinoza, Deleuze, Negri

To understand why the Russian state so consistently targets laughter, one must return to a question political philosophy posed as early as the 17th century: what are sadness and joy as political instruments? The first to formulate it was the Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza. In his Ethics, he developed a theory of affects — emotional states that move human beings. For Spinoza, life is a continuous movement between joy and sadness. Joy is an increase in one’s capacity to act; sadness is its diminishment. Beneath the geometric austerity of this scheme lies something of lasting political importance.

Spinoza is a paradoxical figure: at once a “satanic atheist” and a “saint of secular reason,” as the Italian philosopher Antonio Negri describes him in The Savage Anomaly. Negri contrasts him with Thomas Hobbes, the English thinker who argued that without an absolute sovereign, human life would devolve into a “war of all against all.” Hobbes constructs power as a mechanism of suppression — what Negri calls potestas. In Spinoza, by contrast, Negri finds a fundamentally different intuition: power arises not from above but from the very capacity of people to act together. Negri calls this capacity potentia — it requires no external coercion.

A key formulation from Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise reads: “Fear is the root from which superstition is born, maintained and nourished.” Fear and superstition form a self-reinforcing loop: fear drives people toward superstition; superstition entrenches ignorance and submission; submission reproduces fear. This is potestas — centralized, transcendent, command power over people. Opposed to it is potentia — the power of people themselves, their capacity to act. As Negri writes: “Power (potestas) is superstition, the organization of fear, nonbeing; power (potentia) opposes it by constituting itself collectively.”

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in lectures delivered between 1978 and 1981, brings Spinoza’s insight to a point of striking concreteness. The tyrant, the priest, the slave — all three cultivate sadness. “The tyrant for his political power needs to cultivate sadness; the priest needs to cultivate sadness.” Both depict human beings as wretched creatures, for from wretchedness follows commandment, and from commandment — obedience.

Deleuze returns to a question that, he notes, astonished Spinoza himself: “Why do people fight for their slavery?” The answer lies in the logic of affects. A life organized around fear, guilt, and resentment erodes the capacity to act. Such a person does not merely fail to want to rebel — he becomes incapable of wanting at all. His potentia approaches zero. From this follows the inverse: desire born of joy is, all else being equal, stronger than desire born of sadness. Joy is not merely a pleasant affect; it is the condition of possibility for action itself. Laughter, as an affect of joy, breaks the chain of fear and superstition — not necessarily because it exposes power, but because a person who laughs, even for a moment, steps outside its jurisdiction. His capacity to act — his potentia — increases. For a system built on fear, that alone is enough. 

Gnomes, Puddings, Memes: A Brief History of Laughter as Resistance

If tyranny depends on despair, then anything that disrupts it is, by definition, political — even if the individual is unaware of it. It is precisely this question — how politics is articulated through laughter — that the scholar Patrick Djamario takes up in Laughter as Politics, introducing the term “gelopolitics” [author’s note: in Greek, gelōs means laughter]. Laughter destabilizes the hierarchies of sovereign power precisely because it lacks rational grounding: it is not built on argument. It simply, if only for a moment, lifts the subject out from under the jurisdiction of fear.

In Weapons of the Weak, the anthropologist James Scott described the everyday tools of popular resistance: foot-dragging, feigned compliance, malicious nicknames, anonymous sabotage — “a social avalanche of petty acts of insubordination carried out by an unlikely coalition of slaves and yeomen — a coalition with no name, no organization, no leadership.” Scott called this the “hidden transcript”: behind the façade of public conformity, there exists a parallel discourse — mocking, irreverent, dismissive of the hierarchies that appear unshakable on stage. Humor belongs to this transcript. It, too, is a “weapon of the weak.” A joke renders the “unimagined imaginable”: what passes as “just a joke” may later become reality.

History offers concrete illustrations. In West Germany in the 1960s, Berlin’s Kommune 1 pioneered the Spaßguerilla — “fun guerrillas” who staged “pudding attacks” on politicians and turned courtrooms into performance spaces. When the activist Fritz Teufel was asked to stand before the judge, he replied, “If it serves to help establish the truth” — prompting what observers described as “liberating laughter.” But when police shot and killed the student Benno Ohnesorg, humor vanished from the repertoire of protest: in the face of direct violence, laughter becomes impossible.

Poland’s “Orange Alternative” in the 1980s revealed a different logic. Activists took to the streets of Wrocław dressed as gnomes — figures from children’s rhymes. Humor paralyzed the state apparatus: the Soviet system had no mechanism for responding to absurdity. Soldiers could not raise their weapons against people in carnival costumes. The movement’s founder, Waldemar “Major” Fydrych, later recalled: “The Wrocław street slowly ceases to fear, and through participation in the fun, people learn to support more protest… and slowly the fear of detention evaporates.” Spinoza’s formula is almost literal here: joy increases the capacity to act (potentia), and that increase carries people from laughter into the public square.

But laughter is not always a reliable ally. The problem is not that it is weak, but that it is indiscriminate. Humor acts as an “epistemic acid”: it erodes the stability of all systems of meaning — repressive ones and those that hold resistance together. It functions equally well as a symptom of protest and as an instrument of consolidation around power — and it is not always clear which role it plays at any given moment.

In the late Soviet Union, political jokes reflected genuine public discontent, but they did not bring down the regime. They were better understood as symptoms of illegitimacy and impending collapse than as tools of dismantling it. The anecdote was the only available form of protest where all others were foreclosed — and precisely for that reason, it signaled the regime’s fragility without undermining it. In 1985, the scholar Aleksandras Štromas used Soviet jokes to argue that the collapse of the USSR was inevitable — six years before it happened. The jokes were the tip of the iceberg: beneath them lay a reservoir of discontent that would surface at the first opportunity.

Under Nazism, humor operated differently. The regime itself actively produced laughter: party publications issued satirical magazines, and official humor was part of the propaganda apparatus. Whispered jokes about officials were largely tolerated, as they posed no threat to the system. The postwar myth that such humor constituted “inner resistance” was, in hindsight, a form of self-exoneration. Laughter did not undermine the Nazi regime; it was woven into its culture and served to reinforce the cohesion of a totalitarian community. The distance between emancipatory and fascist uses of laughter is narrow — and it is precisely this that makes it a politically unreliable instrument.

This unreliability can be partly explained by the distinction between irony and cynicism. The scholar Maria Brock draws the line this way: irony “contains hope and a belief in the possibility of joy”; cynicism does not. She shows how late Soviet cynicism — “feigned disbelief,” participation in the rituals of ideology without faith in their content — gave rise to “steb,” a genre of parody based on hyper-identification with official discourse. Sergei Kuryokhin’s famous 1991 performance “Lenin Was a Mushroom,” which prompted an official rebuttal from the Leningrad Party Committee (“a mammal cannot be a plant”), is a textbook example of “steb”: the emptiness of official language is exposed the moment power is forced to respond seriously to absurdity. Under Vladimir Putin, however, as the journalist Peter Pomerantsev has observed, cynicism itself has been turned into an instrument of governance — “a world of masks and poses, colourful but empty, with little at its core but power for power’s sake.” In Spinoza’s terms, the distinction between irony and cynicism is the distinction between joyful and sad affects: both create distance from reality, but irony increases the capacity to act (potentia), while cynicism diminishes it.

From the “Motuznaya Effect” to Meme Warfare

The Russian state has long understood that laughter is a political act. If politics is taken to mean mechanisms of nonviolent persuasion and influence, then humor is political by its very nature: dissent hides in jokes, criticism spreads through them, and opinions take shape in their wake. In a system where organized opposition has been crushed and public dissent criminalized, laughter becomes one of the few remaining forms of political expression. That is precisely why the crackdown on humor is no laughing matter.

A defining moment in Russia’s prosecution of memes was the case of Maria Motuznaya, a 23-year-old from Barnaul charged in 2018 under Article 282 of the Criminal Code (incitement of hatred) and Article 148 (offending the feelings of believers) for memes she had saved to a VKontakte album three years earlier. At the Interior Ministry’s anti-extremism unit, Center “E,” she was persuaded to sign a confession with assurances the case would never reach court — but it did. At the same time, similar cases were unfolding in Barnaul: the student Daniil Markin was charged with extremism for a meme featuring the resurrected Jon Snow from “Game of Thrones,” and construction worker Andrei Shasherin for religious caricatures. All three cases were initiated following complaints by the same two law students, who specialized in combing through others’ social media accounts for “offensive” content. The human rights group Agora dubbed it the “Motuznaya effect”: the case drew widespread media attention and triggered a chain of events that led to the partial decriminalization of Article 282. But the “effect” proved temporary. Softening one statute did not alter the system’s underlying logic: charges of “inciting hatred” were replaced by laws against “discrediting the army,” “spreading knowingly false information,” and “disrespect for authority,” while prosecutions for old posts only intensified.

Another mechanism was exposed in the case of Aleksei Sverdlov, a law student from Krasnoyarsk (2017). Sverdlov was studying to become an investigator and was interning with the Investigative Committee in his second year. That June, he was detained outside his home, taken to the FSB, and presented with printouts of memes saved on his VKontakte page — images from popular VKontakte public communities like MDK and “Orlyonok.” FSB officers reportedly chuckled at the jokes themselves — then offered collaboration. Sverdlov refused; four months later, he was charged under Article 282. Here, memes were used not as grounds for punishment but as leverage for recruitment: the institutional logic of authoritarian power turns any material into an instrument of coercion.

By 2026, the repressive apparatus had reached a new level. In March, “Novaya Gazeta” published an investigation titled “Post Sdal,” documenting systematic sweeps of social media archives by Center “E”: citizens are being prosecuted for posts from 10 or 15 years ago — legal at the time they were published. A National Bolshevik activist was detained over a 2016 post. A woman in Nizhny Novgorod was fined for a photograph from a trip to India featuring an ancient solar symbol. A Moscow resident was detained over a 14-year-old video and charged with “LGBT propaganda” under a law passed 12 years after the video was posted. Russia’s Constitutional Court has effectively sanctioned the practice, introducing the doctrine of a “continuing offense”: as long as a post remains accessible online, the violation is ongoing — regardless of its legality at the time of publication.

The state is not merely prosecuting memes — it has built an entire legislative architecture to do so. Aleksei Semenenko, editor of Satire and Protest in Putin’s Russia, describes how Article 282, the 2014 “bloggers’ law,” the 2016 ban on using images of public figures in memes, and the 2019 law on “disrespect for authority” form a system he characterizes as a condition of “dual reality”: satire exists simultaneously in official and unofficial spaces, balancing between the permitted and the prohibited. This structural duality is familiar from the Soviet experience; the difference is that the unofficial sphere has migrated online — where, unlike the Soviet underground, it remains broadly accessible, but for that very reason also subject to state surveillance.

There is, however, another paradox. Critical memes about Vladimir Putin, for all their aggression, can simultaneously reinforce the mythologization of his image. Semenenko shows how years of online satire — jokes, caricatures, memes — have contributed to this process: Putin’s figure gradually transforms into a mythological character whose persona substitutes for ideology itself. The researcher Bradley Wiggins, analyzing 167 memes from the 2014 conflict, demonstrates how this works in practice: pro-Russian memes leaned on an image of Putin’s masculinity and strength, while pro-Ukrainian ones mocked Russian leadership through humor and references to Hollywood films. Yet both centered on the same figure. In memes, Putin is not a politician with a program but a character — endowed by supporters with strength and moral superiority, and by opponents as a target of ridicule. This is the “personalization of politics as spectacle”: power rests on image, and even critical memes operate within that spectacle.

The internet meme is Scott’s “hidden transcript” brought from backstage onto the public stage. In "Internet Memes and Society,” the scholar Anastasia Denisova describes memes as a “digital carnival” — a space where hierarchies are subverted and official language loses its monopoly on describing reality. Memes function both as “mindbombs” — symbolic explosive devices that may lie dormant until the right moment — and as “fast-food media,” brief teasers for more substantial investigations and political statements. One Russian meme creator Denisova interviewed back in 2014 put it bluntly: “Satire and humor permit keeping a sane mind when reading Russian news bulletins. If you stay serious perceiving all that stuff, there are not many options left for you, either a suicide or a mental institution.” Denisova calls this “slow-burn resistance”: in conditions where open protest is impossible, memes become a form of smoldering resistance — sustaining an alternative flow of ideas and providing psychological self-defense against state propaganda. Meme-makers hide behind pseudonyms, run anonymous Telegram channels, and distance themselves from organized politics — yet in their practice, they continue the older tradition of Soviet samizdat. Technologies change, but the logic remains: to appropriate elements of dominant culture and turn them into tools of critique.

The scholar Svetlana Shomova, who analyzed more than a thousand memes from Russian protests in 2017–2019, identifies their defining feature: memes do not remain online. The rubber duck from Alexei Navalny’s investigations appeared in public squares as a physical object; paper airplanes — the logo of the now-blocked Telegram — flew from windows; the “Bund!” monkey meme showed up on protest signs; demonstrators in St. Petersburg carried a stylized icon of Pavel Durov. This marks a crucial difference from Soviet-era jokes, confined to private kitchens: contemporary memes materialize, take on physical form, and enter public space. Robert Panchvidze, administrator of the largest Vkontakte meme page MDK, stated plainly in an interview with Shomova: “Nowadays memes are a universal unit of communication, not only among the youth, but also for audiences up to 45 years old. That’s why, by constructing the right meme or using a template, you can draw attention to a political personality as well as to a political event.” Memes have become a political instrument — and in Russia, both sides understand this: those who create them and those who bring criminal charges over them. Yet Russia is far from the only example.

The Russian case shows how laughter survives under state pressure. The Ukrainian case shows something else: what happens when humor is directed not against a domestic regime but against an external aggressor. On February 24, 2022 — the first day of the full-scale invasion — a Ukrainian border guard on Snake Island responded to a Russian warship’s demand to surrender: “Russian warship, go f*** yourself.” The phrase went global: it appeared on postage stamps, billboards, and memes in multiple languages. Within months, Ukraine had turned memes into a distinct instrument of wartime resistance. The scholar Tine Munk describes this as “meme warfare” — a component of cyberwar and information conflict in which memes serve as an informal defensive tactic, countering Russian propaganda, sustaining the informational flow of the war, and mobilizing international support.

The anthropologist Lada Bilaniuk, studying this explosion of social media creativity, has proposed the metaphor of “memes as antibodies”: memes function as an immune response to invasion and to a war that is also, in part, a struggle over the existence of the Ukrainian language and culture. Some memes directly respond to the Russian narrative that Ukraine is “part of the Russian world.” Among them is “Say palianytsia” — a code word turned meme: the name of a traditional round bread that is difficult for non-native speakers of Ukrainian to pronounce correctly, and that proved more effective than documents at identifying Russian soldiers at checkpoints. As the anthropologist Catherine Wanner has observed, “the intensity of dispossession and feelings of betrayal have, counterintuitively, found expression in humor that has been weaponized to strike a blow.” Here, memes are not a safety valve; they are a fully fledged instrument of war. In Negri’s terms, this is the constituent power of the multitude — not an authoritarian force imposed from above, but the power of people themselves, their capacity to act. It “explodes any prior equilibrium” — in this case, the one imposed by the aggressor.

In neither the Russian nor the Ukrainian case do memes offer a vision of a better world. But in both, they register a refusal to accept the existing political order as given. Patriarch Kirill warned of the dangers of despair — but it is precisely despair that the Russian state produces. Memes are dissent embedded in reality itself: they expose the absurdity of the system and open the possibility of imagining alternatives. That is the political meaning of humor. It does not overthrow power; it creates people who are no longer afraid of it — and in doing so, it builds the living force of the multitude capable of action.