As the Kremlin has grown increasingly repressive since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian comedians have had to choose whether to leave the country or stay and deal with hardening censorship.

In September, Russian comedian Dima Gavrilov was sentenced to 13 days in jail for “inciting hatred” over a video from one of his shows in Tbilisi. After mobilization was announced in the autumn of 2020, Gavrilov moved to Georgia but later returned. His jokes touched on mobilization, his decision to leave and “Russophobia.”

Even posting jokes on social media can lead to imprisonment. For example, last year a man from Ryazan Region was arrested for a humorous post on his page on the Russian social media network VK about Ukraine’s recapture of Kherson Region.

He wrote: “[Putin says to Shoigu:] ‘Sergei, why are we retreating from Kherson?’ [Shoigu responds:] ‘Volodya, you yourself ordered us to liberate Ukraine from the fascists and Nazis.’”

According to human rights monitoring and defense group OVD-Info, Bolshakov has been released on his own recognizance and faces up to three years in prison.

Comedians who have stayed in Russia and want to keep performing either completely avoid political topics in their stand-up routines or tell jokes in a thoroughly veiled way. Kostya Pushkin, a stand-up comedian who remains in Russia, said during a solo show in January, “just in case, I am not going to call a spade a spade.”

“Have you noticed that movies are not as interesting to watch anymore? It’s like they cannot quite keep up with real life in terms of drama... ‘Have you seen Oppenheimer?’ ‘No, but I think I will watch it soon in 7D with presence effects. And then absence effects,’” Pushkin joked at his performance.

He also jokes that people come to his shows because all their favorite comedians have left the country and now they need a new one: “if you do not laugh enough, I will leave too.”

Political humor has never fully disappeared in Russia or the Soviet Union, even under Stalin, for example. Russian historian Mikhail Melnichenko has published a thousand-plus-page book called The Soviet Anecdote: A Guide to Themes. One joke dates back to the 1905 Revolution.

“Two policemen are leading two men to be hanged – a Bolshevik and a Menshevik. The guards want to go for a drink but are afraid to leave the prisoners unattended. Upon learning who they are, however, they head to a tavern. If it were only Bolsheviks or only Mensheviks, they would definitely run away. But since they are together, they will argue and forget about it,” Melnichenko recounts.

Political jokes became ubiquitous during the Brezhnev era, when the regime grew softer compared to Stalin’s times and one did not risk a trip to the gulag for a joke. People mocked Brezhnev’s thick eyebrows, saying they were “Stalin’s mustache, but at a higher level,” as well as his slur when he had grown old and sick and developed speech problems.

A famous joke goes like this: “Brezhnev is reading a greeting to the athletes at the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow: ‘O! O! O! O! O!’ His referent whispers to him: ‘that’s not an ‘O,’ those are the Olympic rings! The text is below!’“

By the 1990s, people in Russia enjoyed broad freedom of expression, and political satire even made its way onto TV. In 1994, during prime time on Russia’s first-ever private TV channel, NTV, a satirical show called Kukly (“puppets”) debuted. It was modeled on the British program Spitting Image and sharply mocked the authorities, starting with Yeltsin and later Putin.

In an episode from 1999, politicians are discussing the war in Chechnya. A puppet with Putin’s face says: “there is no war – it’s just a regular special operation.” Twenty-five years later, Putin used the same phrase to describe the war in Ukraine.

One of the most famous episodes about Putin was called “Kroshka Tsakhes,” based on Little Zaches called Cinnabar, a nineteenth-century story by the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann. A fairy casts a spell on an ugly dwarf – Putin – making everyone see him as a handsome, tall man. This Kukly episode aired in 2000 amid a huge PR campaign to promote Putin as Yeltsin’s successor. At the end of the episode, the spell is broken and everyone sees that the dwarf is actually ugly. Soon after, NTV was taken over by the state-run Gazprom. Even though the reasons for the takeover ran much deeper than the audacity of Kukly, it arguably still played a role.

Making jokes about politics on Russian television remained possible for a while, but it had to be done very carefully. One of Russia’s most popular comedy shows is KVN (standing for “club of the funny and inventive”), where teams compete by performing funny skits. In 2020, a joke about the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny aired. One of the team members was called “Novichok,” which means “novice” or “rookie” in Russia, but is also the name of the nerve agent used to poison Navalny. In the skit, to become the captain, he hits another team member called “Alexei” with a bat, while a man in a police uniform and a Duma deputy look on without interfering.

“Are you stupid? Why did you knock him out? Do you realize how the media is going to blow this up? Right in front of an MP, ‘Novichok’ knocks out Alexei and the police do nothing,” says the deputy afterward.

In 2023, a skit aired where contestants on the Russian version of the American game show Wheel of Fortune, needing to complete the word “__kraine,” pretend that they cannot guess the first letter for two hours.

“I think if I win now, I’ll lose,” says one of the contestants.

Joking about politics in a sharper manner is no longer possible. Almost all comedians who dare to mention the war in Ukraine find themselves under intense pressure, labeled “foreign agents” and banned from performing in Russia. Many chose to leave the country.

One of the most well-known instances is that of Russian comedian and TV show host Maxim Galkin. Before the war, he featured on a dozen major prime-time entertainment shows on Russian state TV channels, performed solo concerts at the Kremlin and ran a YouTube show with Russian celebrities that garnered millions of views.

As unthinkable as it might seem today, just one year before the annexation of Crimea, Galkin cohosted a New Year’s show on the main state TV channel, Russia-1, alongside a Ukrainian comedian named Volodymyr Zelensky. Among the celebrity guests who laughed at their jokes was Vladimir Solovyov, a prominent Kremlin propagandist and now a frothing-at-the-mouth warmonger.

Now, Galkin has been labeled a “foreign agent” and gives performances abroad, telling jokes about his persecution. During one such act, he said that it all started after Zelensky became president.

“They immediately started looking at me, our Russian authorities, like, “what, are you planning to do that too?” Galkin jokes.

Russian comedians performing abroad typically dedicate a large chunk of their shows to politics. Sometimes, however, they face serious criticism and even threats. Danila Poperechny, a well-known Russian stand-up comedian who moved to the US and speaks out against the war in Ukraine, joked about the battles for Izyum, mocking the Ukrainian city’s name because it translates to “raisin” in Russian.

“I think when they named the cities [in the Soviet Union], they were not really prepared for the possibility of a war. I am a very empathetic person, I worry about everything. But when I read the news like, ‘the fierce battles for Izyum have been going on for three days,’ I cannot relate to that. It’s nonsense, like ants are fighting it out. But real people are dying there! And I think: ‘ha, they found an old raisin and cannot decide how to share it,’“ the comedian said.

Later, Poperechny recorded a video stating that the joke was taken out of context and that he was “trying to lighten the mood.”

Another well-known Russian comedian who has been labeled a foreign agent is Ruslan Belyy. He gained fame for his stand-up performances on Russian TV, but then spoke out against the war and was “cancelled.” Last year, he released an antiwar show recorded in Moscow in December 2022, 10 months into the full-scale war. The comedian said that filming it in Russia was a matter of principle for him.

“I thought that if I recorded it outside of Russia, it would not have the value I intended to convey with the material,” he said in an interview with the Russian media in-exile Meduza. “I intended to send a message: this concert is not for those who left, but for those who stayed or were still in Russia at that time. I wrote the jokes while I was in Russia, and I wanted to perform for a Russian audience.”

Now, Belyy says he has no idea when he will return to Russia.