A CAUCASIAN fruit trader is standing on Red Square with a big juicy watermelon under his arm. Leonid Brezhnev comes up to him and says: "I'll have a watermelon my man." "Certainly, Leonid Ilyich," says the trader. "Which do you fancy?" "What do you mean `which do I fancy'?" growls Brezhnev. You've only got one." "Well," says the trader, "there's only one Brezhnev but we still go to the polls to choose you.
They don't tell them like that in Russia anymore. In Soviet times, when the media was censored and dissidents were gagged, the anecdote was the only safety valve for a people imprisoned in a cruel and absurd system. But democracy has been the death of the great Russian political joke. There is no need to laugh in private when the press is free to excoriate the occupants of the Kremlin.
Some Russians feel a certain nostalgia for the old anecdotes, which were very funny. Here is another example: A student goes into a shop and buys a record of Brezhnev's speeches to the Congress of the Communist Party. He takes it home, plays it and is delighted. "Hey guys," he tells his friends, "do you want to listen to the latest sex music? If you speed up the record, all you hear is kiss, kiss, kiss, clap, clap, clap." (This is a reference to Brezhnev's fondness for kissing comrades and his love of applause.)
With his slurred speech and monstrous eyebrows, Leonid Brezhnev, who died in 1982, was a gift to joke tellers. "You didn't need to make them up," said Dmitry Sokolov, a French teacher who loves a laugh. "In real life, Brezhnev was a walking joke. I remember once he went on an official visit to France. At the airport he said to his host: "I have brought you ... what's the Russian word for it ... a souvenir." "We just fell about when we saw that on television."
Today's free speech has made the political anecdote obsolete. Whatever his faults, this is the great achievement of Presidents Boris Yeltsin. He has removed the cloud of fear which hung over Russian people and exposed every politician, himself included, to constant public criticism, no doubt, turns in his grave every Saturday night when the popular satirical puppet show Kukly (Dolls) goes out on national television. A former prosecutor tried to ban the programme, which is similar to Spitting Image, but the broadcasters proved stronger and it was the prosecutor who lost his job.
Mr Yeltsin and his ministers have been mercilessly satirised. In one episode, the Prime Minister, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin, was portrayed as a tramp begging for money on the Moscow metro. But surely, we all thought, Kukly would draw the line at making fun of Mr Yeltsin's health problems. Not so.
Last Saturday night, Kukly portrayed Mr Yeltsin as a taxi driver carrying different politicians in the back of his cab. One of them was Mr Alexander Livshits, the unfortunate Finance Minister who is being blamed for the backlog in payments to State sector workers and pensioners.
Mr Yeltsin sneezed at the wheel and said: "There's a nasty flu going about." "Yes," said Mr Livshits, "you want to be careful, it could turn into double pneumonia" (from which Mr Yeltsin is actually suffering now).
If political jokes have lost their role, however, a new form of Russian anecdote has appeared in which the poor sometimes laugh at themselves, but more often make fun of the vulgar nouveau riche. An example for the former would be the joke about the poor worker who takes sandwiches to the factory. His mates see him spreading what looks like black caviar on his bread. "Hey," they say, "you've got 10 children to feed, so how can you afford caviar?" "It's not caviar," he sighs. "I opened a tin of sardines for the kids this morning and now I'm eating the sardines eyes.
In a popular joke about the new rich, a fat cat businessman goes into a gallery to get his wife a birthday present. He dismisses the paintings which cost $1 million and settles for a Picasso costing $2 million. "Good," he says to himself, "I've got her the card. Now what am I going to buy for the present?"
In another such anecdote, a New Russian comes out of a casino and cannot find a taxi, so he stops a bus. He gives the driver crisp $100 note. The driver throws all the poor passengers off the bus and takes the rich man to his luxury home outside Moscow. They have nearly arrived when the driver stops his vehicle and says: "I can't go any further. There's a great tunnel here." "Oh, that's nothing," says the rich man, "it's just that last night I took the metro home.
The point of these jokes, of course, is that it is now the rich, many of whom have made their fortunes by criminal means, rather than the politicians, who have the real power in Russia now. Like Brezhnev, they do not answer to the people. And therefore there is nothing ordinary folk can do but tell anecdotes about them.