Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil's Political Cartoons

GRAPHIC SATIRE IN THE

SOVIET UNION

GRAPHIC SATIRE IN THE SOVIET UNION

Krokodil’s Political Cartoons

John Etty

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by a grant from the First Book Subvention Program of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2019 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2019

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Etty, John, 1979– author.

Title: Graphic satire in the Soviet Union : Krokodil’s political cartoons / John Etty.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018025167 (print) | LCCN 2018029399 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496820532 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496820549 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496820556 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496820563 (pdf institutional) | ISBN 9781496820525 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781496821089 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Krokodil. | Political satire, Russian—20th century—History and criticism. | Soviet Union—Politics and government—Caricatures and cartoons. | Russian wit and humor, Pictorial.

Classification: LCC NC1578.K7 (ebook) | LCC NC1578.K7 E88 2019 (print) | DDC 741.5/6947—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025167

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Explaining Krokodil Magazine and the Soviet Media System

CHAPTER TWO

Krokodil’s Format and Visual Language

CHAPTER THREE

A School for Laughter: Carnivalesque Humor and Menippean Satire in Krokodil

CHAPTER FOUR

The Co-creation of Krokodil Magazine

CHAPTER FIVE

Participatory Reading: The Forms and Consumption of Soviet Satire

CHAPTER SIX

Making the Risible Visible: The Performative Construction of Non-Soviet Ideology in Krokodil

CHAPTER SEVEN

Krokodil’s Hollow Center: The Performance of Affirmation

CHAPTER EIGHT

Becoming Soviet in Krokodil

Conclusions

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people supported me in the writing of this book. The greatest debt is to Vlad Strukov, whose inspirational advice and encouragement saw me through years of research and writing. Paul Cooke’s assistance was precise and reassuring, and his feedback on numerous drafts shaped the way I saw my work. Sarah Hudspith and Mike O’Mahoney also provided generous encouragement. My panel colleagues at the ASEEES Convention in Boston in 2013, Annie Gérin and Stephen M. Norris, both provided motivation without realizing. Our discussant, Helena Goscilo, was as entertaining and encouraging as she was insightfully critical in her commentary, and she has continued to provide guidance ever since. Thanks also to Jonathan Waterlow, Simon Huxtable, Maria Popova, Tim O’Connor, Barbara McGowan, Svetlana Loukine, and Nellie and Doug Paul. Dima Frangulov granted me access to the database of digitized copies of Krokodil, which allowed me to broaden the scope of my analysis.

Thanks also go to my parents and my sister, whose examples I continue to follow, for their help and encouragement. Most of all, Kim has been a constant and patient supporter: her belief made me brave enough. Finally, this book is for Ivy and Sam: may it somehow enrich your lives, as it has done mine.

GRAPHIC SATIRE IN THE

SOVIET UNION

I.1. Kukryniksy. Through rose-colored spectacles (Skvoz’ rozovye ochki). Krokodil 1953: 7/16.

INTRODUCTION

The back page of Krokodil no. 7, 1953 (the first issue published after Josef Stalin’s death), features a cartoon warning against naivete, trustfulness, and overeagerness to forget the past (see figure I.1). Coming after six pages of tributes to Stalin, this image visualizes a bureaucrat welcoming a visitor into his office. As readers, we enjoy a privileged gaze; we appreciate the effect of a giant pair of rose-colored spectacles, while retaining our unimpeded vision of the scene. The figure approaching the desk appears either friendly or sinister, depending on which view we opt to take. As was typical of the magazine’s style, especially under the editorship of Dmitrii Beliaev (1948–1953), a degree of naturalism in the rose-tinted view is contrasted with a more grotesque image, to provide instruction on how to interpret the cartoon.

For regular readers of Krokodil, this image would have seemed familiar. Binary compositions, juxtaposing representatives of opposing ideologies, frequently feature in Stalin-era poster and cartoon art. Opposing pairs of ideas—us/them, good/evil, communism/capitalism, now/then, here/there, either/or contrasts—were staples in the visual language of Stalinism (Bird, Heuer, Jackson, Mosaka and Smith 2011: 25). This visitor, who wears swastika spectacles and carries a briefcase embossed with US, is constructed in graphic terms that echo the discourses of cosmopolitanism in the postwar Stalin years, as well as those invoking Soviet patriotism in the 1930s, and the Nazification of the US that occurred in postwar Soviet graphic satire. His hunched shoulders, stooping gait, pallid skin, and unsmiling countenance contrast dramatically with the benevolent figures seen through the rose-tinted lenses. Ostensibly, echoing Stalinist rhetoric, this cartoon employs the glasses as a visual metaphor for ideological illusions or lack of vigilance: looking through rose-tinted spectacles blinds us to potential dangers. The glasses form the figurative and compositional center of the image, apparently dividing the image of the old man in two. The cartoon thus functions as a lesson in seeing and the power of ideology to act as a barrier to true recognition.

Like many cartoons published in Krokodil, this image, didactic and monologic though it seems, warrants more careful consideration. Rather than a binary vision—contrasting obstructed and unobstructed views—this cartoon presents three different versions of the old man. As if constructing a critique of Stalinism’s binarism, and preceding the pluralism that distinguished the post-Stalin era, this cartoon multiplies the visions of its object. Moreover, in doing so it draws attention to its own act of doubling. The two lenses offer different views of the visitor’s spectacles, smile, head angle, and clothing folds. We expect spectacles to correct or improve our vision, but these pink lenses distort. The cartoon thus creates and disrupts our understanding of this binary view: bi-ocularism multiplies and complicates.

The Kukryniksy collective, producers of this cartoon, frequently jointly created images, but the discrepancies are not the results of poor technique. The Chinese cartoonist Jack Chen, who knew many Soviet cartoonists, noted that the trio’s caricature of him was perfect though they drew me from three separate corners of the room [and it was] impossible to say where one’s line ended and another’s began (Chen 1944: 38).¹ Skepticism about the veracity of appearances and the importance of mastery of one’s own vision are recommended by this image. Here, Krokodil presents seeing as a habit to be learned—Michel Foucault calls such practices technologies of the self (1988: 18)—and, furthermore, one through which individuals may perform their own psychological shifts. Krokodil cartoons suggest that satirical vision might be considered one such technology or technique for altering the self. As this book argues, Krokodil repeatedly performed seeing for its readers’ benefit. Its satire taught a kind of X-ray vision, and was a thinking tool for rationalizing divergences between rhetoric and visual experience. While cautioning against naivete, this cartoon also interrogates the power of images, offering alternative visions.

Along with the leading institutions in the Soviet propaganda machine’s film, poster, and art sectors, Krokodil, such a prodigious publisher of cartoon satire after 1922, is associated with the construction of Soviet communism’s aesthetics. Krokodil was the longest-serving and most significant satirical journal in the Soviet Union, and it was unique in producing state-sanctioned graphic satirical comment on Soviet and international affairs for over seventy years. Krokodil no. 1(13) appeared on 27 August 1922, and the journal remained in continuous publication until after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.²

During that time, as noted by Evgenii Dubrovin, the magazine’s chief editor in 1982, Krokodil participated in the seminal events in Soviet history: it took patronage over the construction of ‘Magnitogorsk’ in the Urals […] participated in collectivization, [and] fought in the Second World War.³ Krokodil’s active support for the state at such pivotal moments, expressed forcefully in its best-known visual texts, leads many to accept official Soviet characterizations of satire’s role and regard it as a sharp ideological propaganda weapon in a geopolitical battle.

I.2. Maliutin, I. 1922. Krokodil’s first front cover. Krokodil 1922: 1(13)/1.

The topics Krokodil satirized and its ideologically inspired imagery suggest that the magazine’s producers had agitative intent. Nevertheless, as a theoretical model, this propaganda paradigm provides only limited insights into the diversity of Krokodil’s visual language, its ideological complexity, and the various production and consumption practices associated with the journal. Not least, it cannot account for readers’ zealous engagement with the journal. Contemporary and scholarly accounts show that Krokodil was enthusiastically consumed, but the journal’s readership was limited by supply problems.⁴ A technologist at the Izhevsk Steel Mill, A. Bataiev, in a Literaturnaia gazeta article, complained: "It is easier to win a state lottery ticket than to get a subscription you need … At least, I have already had four winning lottery tickets at the savings bank, but for four years a subscription to Krokodil has been only a dream" (Anon 1956).

Such anecdotes raise further questions about the nature of officially approved graphic satire and its intended effects. How, for instance, did Krokodil combine the serious business of Soviet ideology with making jokes? As the sole humorous-satirical journal in the USSR, Krokodil represents, according to Sergei Mostovshikov, editor of History through the Eyes of Krokodil (2014–15) and deputy editor of Izvestiia, a pretty honest archive [and] an unprecedented spectacle (Fedotova 2014).⁵ Indeed, in the introduction to his anthology of Soviet satirical classics, Peter Henry suggests that, "in the history of Soviet satire, Krokodil virtually requires a chapter of its own" (Henry 1972a: xx).

No history of Krokodil exists, and although it does not aim for anything so comprehensive, this is the first book-length study of Krokodil. Based on original research and utilizing a unique approach, it offers an analysis of Krokodil and its graphic satire that challenges previous interpretations. This book aims to reconsider Krokodil and answer the question of how an empirical analysis of Krokodil allows us to extend and nuance our understanding of Soviet graphic satire beyond the concept of state-sponsored propaganda. To consider the nature of the Soviet satirical aesthetic, its humor, and its critiques, this book sets out to re-evaluate Krokodil magazine, its construction of satirical visual texts, and its performance of an active satirical sociopolitical role, the combination of which made it unique in Soviet printed media. On average, images took up approximately 50 percent more space in Krokodil than text, and one issue of Krokodil magazine in the period from 1954 to 1964 typically contained between twenty-five and thirty-five images. This book considers the entire corpus of images from across a decade and gives close readings of numerous cartoons of various types. The primary approach is to look beyond content analysis and consider how meaning was made in Soviet cartoons, but treatments of related subjects across different media are compared. Krokodil was not a closed system, and this book explores how Krokodil transgressed media boundaries in order to construct new satirical critiques. The impulse to highlight discrepancies between official rhetoric and lived experience, often assumed to be satirical and even subversive, was manifested in many Krokodil cartoons. Studying graphic satire in Krokodil, therefore, offers opportunities to consider the presentation of ideology in media that use the visual to challenge the primacy of the written. The image theorist W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that the threshold between the verbal and visual reveals the fundamental contradictions of our culture (1986: 44), and this book focuses on Krokodil’s ability to reflect tensions, and it interrogates the manifestations and implications of ambiguities revealed by ironic, self-reflexive images that suggest multiple meanings.

This book investigates the graphic construction of ideology, as well as cartoons that use the resources of graphic satire, in order to highlight the importance of critical distance. As figure I.1 suggests, obstacles to clarity of ideological vision, and their removal, are key themes in Krokodil’s content during the period of 1954 to 1964. Implicitly referring to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s argument that ideology is a system of socially created (false) consciousness, Krokodil visualizes the construction of an ideological attitude, inviting readers to recognize and remove their own ideological blinders. This act of demystification (the central element in Krokodil’s satire) is performed in political cartoons, the content, form, or context of which sometimes imply surprising or ambiguous messages about all ideologies.

In contrast with existing studies that adopt the propaganda paradigm, this book rejects the notion that Krokodil’s cartoons were the visual representation of authoritative political speech. Krokodil was not intended to obscure truth or present a warped vision; instead, Soviet satire represented an ideological performance and a graphic exploration of the visual’s power to reveal truth. This book traces the complex acts of representation that reveal, draw upon, and even extend the shared cultural and ideological assumptions of artists and readers, which were constructed through the lexicon of Soviet satirical art. Indeed, as chapter 3 shows, an analysis of intertextual and intermedial relationships is essential for revealing satirical critiques that sit between texts.

Disrupting Structures: Re-contextualizing Krokodil

Krokodil’s satirical mechanisms remain unfamiliar to most Western readers, so, to demonstrate better the nature of Krokodil’s graphic satire, this book presents an interdisciplinary interpretation of the journal’s cartoons. In several ways, it challenges existing approaches to Soviet graphic satire: it analyzes material not previously explored, including cartoon types not discussed before. Significantly, this involves close readings of these visual texts, looking beyond content analysis to consider visual language and the performative construction of character. Critically engaging with the propaganda paradigm for understanding Krokodil magazine, and highlighting the shortcomings of this approach, this book proposes new theoretical frameworks for the analysis of the journal. It explores the magazine’s productive part in Soviet visual culture. To a degree, this approach represents an attempt to re-conceptualize and re-contextualize Krokodil, but the aim is to shift the theoretical parameters within which we place the journal, rather than to deny its historical and cultural circumstances.

Krokodil was a relic of the unique circumstances of the Soviet republic’s revolutionary phase. Almost 250 publications like Krokodil existed in the 1920s (Stykhalin and Kremenskaia 1963: 458–66), but by 1933, when Krokodil came under the aegis of the Pravda Publishing House, which produced the newspapers and magazines of the Communist Party, most other journals had closed. Practical difficulties (paper shortages and printing problems resulted in infrequent publication), editorial deficiencies leading to uninteresting content, and intervention by the Central Committee after 1927 combined to privilege Krokodil’s position after the extension of state control over cultural production.⁶ This outcome was no coincidence: Krokodil’s editors, through close associations with Rabochaia gazeta and Pravda, and in their own right, had inside knowledge of Central Committee priorities. Despite later debates among party theorists about the place of laughter in the Soviet state (outlined in chapter 5), Krokodil survived. For many commentators and scholars outside the USSR, Krokodil typified the Soviet state’s propaganda efforts, and the rhetoric of the Cold War infused many Western interpretations of the journal. As chapter 1 explains, however, the hostility of the Cold War impeded more nuanced investigations of Soviet graphic satire. In most cases, the literature on Krokodil is based on overly selective methodologies, betraying the influence of Cold War ideological biases. Many studies downplay the journal’s significance, relegating it below other forms of satirical or humorous commentary, or using blanket terms such as propaganda to describe the magazine’s form, contents, and sociopolitical functions.

Only since around 2005, with the advent of a hermeneutics of Soviet graphic satire, prompted by growing interest in Soviet visual culture, has there been interest in reinterpreting Krokodil. Exhibitions in Russia, the US, and Britain have all raised the profile of Soviet graphic satire and the genre’s leading artists.⁷ In Russia, increased interest in Soviet and pre-revolutionary graphic satire has led to the publication or reproduction of several important works.⁸ A Krokodil page (http://old-crocodile.livejournal.com/) on the Live-Journal network contains material related to the magazine and its artists, and the Ne Boltai! online gallery (http://www.neboltai.org/) hosts preliminary drafts and original artwork from Krokodil and other Soviet publications.⁹ In April 2015, a complete collection of Krokodil magazine (1922–2004) became available via online subscription.¹⁰ The encyclopedic History through the Eyes of Krokodil (Istoriia glazami Krokodila 2014–15) was crowd-funded online, which is testament to nostalgia for Krokodil and the USSR, as well as to popular interest in cartoons. Such widespread enthusiasm has preceded scholarly reconsideration, and it indicates greater willingness in the post-Soviet period to recognize the validity of approaches to Krokodil that are not dominated by Cold War politics.

Studying political cartoons is handicapped by practical difficulties as much as problems of interpretation. Despite being mechanically reproduced in the millions, cartoons are ephemeral, fugacious, and—most important—unindexed. They therefore remain inaccessible for most scholars, usable only as decontextualized illustrations or evidence of opinions on certain events. In Krokodil’s case, only one archival fond exists in Russian state archives.¹¹ The primary evidence base for this study is therefore instead drawn from the 396 issues of the magazine published between January 1954 and December 1964, wherefrom themed sub-collections were organized. Many existing studies make little reference to specific images, while others rely heavily upon the magazine’s high-profile images: those that appeared in full-color and large scale. Trends in these sub-collections were analyzed, and representative images were selected. Issues of Krokodil from outside the period of 1954 to 1964 and other visual satire publications from pre-evolutionary and post-Soviet Russia were also consulted. This book’s contribution to the scholarship on Krokodil is therefore based on an evidence base substantially larger than any previous study.

Questions about the boundaries of acceptable satirical comment, artistic free expression in less liberal contexts, and content that escapes the media and/or context in which it was created are not abstractions removed from us by geopolitical or temporal lacunae. This book was drafted during the final months of the 2016 US presidential election, as the British electorate chose Brexit, and as far-right parties threatened to upset democracies across Europe. In the era of post-truth politics and information wars, visual literacy and the ability to identify and interpret partisan images are crucially important. Visual propaganda abounds in the social media age and, as the Jyllands-Posten Muhammed cartoons crisis of 2005 shows, modern politics is conducted in images and symbolic actions as much as in words. That Russia’s role in such developments, often associated with malicious hacking and media propaganda campaigns, is so frequently asserted in the West indicates a latent mistrust of Russian official messaging, as if the practices of the Putin state differ little from those of the Soviet regime.¹² This book went through final re-drafts as Turkish courts heard the case of Musa Kart, a political cartoonist, and his journalist colleagues on the newspaper Cumhuriyet, who were accused of terrorist offenses.¹³ As we know from Mad, National Lampoon, Punch, Private Eye, and Charlie Hebdo, the satirical cartoon is a special type of political image. They are prized contributions and indicators of healthy public discourse in the West, and often also considered subversive free speech acts in less liberal regimes. They may be more fully understood with an appreciation of the enduring influence of Soviet visual satire.

The Thaw, 1954–1964

The decade between Krokodil’s first 1954 issue and the last issue of 1964, which follows the death of the Soviet premier Josef Stalin (1878–1953), coincides with the post-Stalin power struggle, the leadership of Nikita Sergeievich Khrushchev (1894–1971; First Secretary of the USSR’s Council of Ministers, 1953–1964), and the era of the Thaw. This period, so named because of the influence of Il’ia Ehrenburg’s novel Ottepel’ (The Thaw, 1954), saw a relaxation of political regulations governing personal freedoms, as well as Khrushchev’s 1956 Twentieth Party Congress Secret Speech, which generated de-Stalinization and other shifts in policy, cultural practices, and popular attitudes. At this time, Krokodil was among the most popular of over one thousand magazines in print, each with an average circulation of 94,500 (Hopkins 1970: 227), and the years between 1954 and 1964 were those that saw the most sustained period of circulation growth (from 400,000 up to 2,000,000) in the magazine’s history.¹⁴ Krokodil’s circulation was smaller than only a few of the national newspapers and magazines by 1968.¹⁵ One noteworthy consequence of the magazine’s expanded circulation is the relative ease of access to surviving copies of the magazine. Indeed, some methodological difficulties in using political cartoons as evidence were avoided early in this project by securing a complete set of the magazine from 1954 to 1964. Other material is also used to extend the analysis, however.

A study of Krokodil in the period of 1954 to 1964 is revealing for three reasons. First, investigating Krokodil during this period provides the opportunity to consider the zone in which sanctioned visual critiques of Soviet ideology and graphic discourses about the priorities of state and populace were created in a time of liberalization and de-Stalinization. Scholarly attention on such questions has conventionally been directed at literature, which is generally considered to have been the principal medium for high-cultural reflection on contemporary politics and recent history.¹⁶ This tendency stems from assumptions about Russian culture’s logocentricity, now challenged (see Hutchings 2004). My analysis of Krokodil magazine, however, is grounded in analysis of the combination of visual and verbal languages, and my study offers important conclusions on how graphic satirical discourse engaged with the politics of de-Stalinization. Second, the post-Stalin period offers insights into the nature of Soviet satire because, according to Karen Ryan-Hayes, it represented a Silver Age for Soviet satire (1995: 2).¹⁷ For Ryan-Hayes, this renaissance occurred because of the reissue of many of the best satires from the 1920s, but studying this decade enriches our understanding because, as contemporaries observed, 1954 to 1964 saw Krokodil’s satire became more incisive.¹⁸ Finally, this decade was the historical moment when postmodernism originated in the USSR.¹⁹ Writing specifically about Russian culture in the Soviet era, Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover argues that during the Thaw, Russian culture opened up to, represented, and assimilated an abstracted American other into its discourses. This shift, she suggests, was part of the normal evolution along the trajectory of modernism/post-modernism that Russian culture followed approximately coevally with the West (1999: 32). While an American other was absorbed into Russian literary modern/postmodern liminal discourses at this time (Vladiv-Glover 1999), the study of Krokodil offers us the opportunity to consider a different transformation—the process of using satire to re-view the Soviet self and the other that existed in Soviet society—that was under way at the moment when Stalinist modernity was re-evaluated by its survivors.

Outline of the Book

This book argues for a revision of the interpretation of Krokodil and its graphic satire. By investigating the frameworks within which Krokodil operated, chapters 1 to 3 argue that existing interpretations are inadequate for understanding how the magazine’s satirical critiques were formulated graphically. Whereas previous interpretations of the magazine’s satire have focused on binarism, the ideological forces that shaped the representation of the celebrated and the satirized, and the boundaries that delineated these two categories, the approach in this book is to view Krokodil not simply as an institution of the state propaganda machine, but as a cultural phenomenon with deep and expansive roots. The first three chapters therefore argue that three dimensions—conceptual, visual, and satirical—of previous interpretations of Krokodil’s visual satire require revision, and in each case, this book argues that Soviet graphic satire is better understood when the contexts are broadened beyond the political. I do not deny the significance of the Soviet political context, of course. The middle chapters of this book consider the essential relationships between Krokodil and the discourses and representatives of Soviet ideology. Instead, this book argues that other theoretical approaches to Krokodil’s cartoons enrich our understanding of politics, satire, media, and society in the USSR. Chapter 3, for example, argues that Menippean satire describes Krokodil’s output better than propaganda. Furthermore, prosumer principles more fully explain the production of the journal’s satire (chapter 4) and transmedia extensions enable more fruitful explorations of readers’ consumption practices (chapter 5). Rather than viewing the boundaries of acceptable public discourse as immovable (fixed by political authorities), I argue that Krokodil’s contributions were 1) of ideological significance, 2) expressed in satirical visual language, and 3) produced in various media. Considering Krokodil as a transmedia product that was the outcome of a co-creative production process allows me to propose a new interpretation of the magazine as a site for dialogic and cooperative interaction between state-employed media professionals and readers in a way that changes our perception of Krokodil and in turn allows us to rethink the nature of satire, laughter, graphic art, media, and representations of politics in the USSR.

Chapters 6 to 8 consider the implications of this reinterpretation of Krokodil’s satire. They explore the reiterative and discursive creation of ideological identities in Krokodil and reveal the centrality of performance to the magazine’s satirical vision. My close readings of Krokodil’s cartoons demonstrate how creators and consumers engaged with Soviet ideology through extralinguistic discursive modes. Together, these chapters propose a performative paradigm for interpreting Soviet satire: they argue that presence and absence in Krokodil cartoons are not stable concepts, nor are they determined by the face-value content of an image. The study of the apparent dearth of images of leading Soviet politicians in Krokodil conducted in chapter 7 prompts interesting questions about the destabilizing consequences of this ostensible absence. I show that, in the Thaw, Krokodil visualized social types who had not appeared before, and the magazine used satire as a means of re-viewing the recent Soviet past, including the most traumatic episodes of the Stalin period. Moreover, as chapter 8 reveals, the real target of Soviet satire was not its apparent objects but rather its absent readers. My objective is to provide a detailed study of Krokodil, to explore the journal’s transmedia impulses and the political cartoon as a mode of graphic persuasion—a technology aiding the self-construction of Soviet subjectivity—and to investigate the performance of ideology.

Conventions

This book follows the convention of referring to Krokodil magazine in the untranslated form, since the magazine was world-famous under that name. In English-language popular and academic discourses about graphic satire, numerous terms coexist and may be used interchangeably, even if they are not, strictly speaking, synonymous. I use cartoon to describe Krokodil’s graphic satire, for example, which derives from the Italian cartone (a large sheet of heavy paper) and was first used in Punch magazine in 1843 to describe a set of satirical illustrations by John Leech. Soon afterwards, cartoon was applied to any amusing graphic comment, and was distinguished by the media in which it appeared (typically newspapers or magazines) and by stylistic conventions, including physical distortion, exaggeration, and certain comics techniques. The tendency towards simplification in modern cartoon art leads some scholars to use cartoon to denote an artistic style (McCloud 1994, and Molotiu 2013), but I understand this usage as a descriptor of an artistic technique, rather than a definition of the genre.

A distinction must also be made between cartoon and caricature. The word caricature, also derived from the Italian caricare, means to load or exaggerate. Caricature, or joke mock-portraiture (Gombrich and Kris 1940: 10), was pioneered in Italy by Annibale Carracci around 1590, and developed into modern satirical graphic comment in France and