“This does not interest the court!”: the 1966 Soviet Satire Trial and its persistent legacy

Abstract Soviet writers Yuli Daniel (aka Nikolay Arzhak) and Andrey Sinyavsky (aka Abram Tertz) published several satires anonymously in capitalist countries during the Cold War. In 1965 both writers were arrested in the Soviet Union and they were put on trial in February 1966. They were charged under Article 70 of the Penal Code that criminalized libel and defamation of the state and agitation with the aim of undermining or weakening the state. Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in a labor camp and Daniel was given five years. This trial’s controversial discussions about authorial opinions and intentions and the complex relationship between satire and social reality remain highly relevant today. This article presents seven contradictions and ambiguities inherent to satire in order to disentangle different arguments and viewpoints in their context. The reception of satirical texts is complicated by issues surrounding ethics and violence, seriousness and non-seriousness, truth and fiction, ambiguous or dubious empathy, morality, political content in non-political texts, and the use of a fictional persona. The vagueness and in-betweenness of satire can pose a challenge to environments averse to ambiguity, as was the case in this Soviet trial, but also in similar cases until today.