Authors

Discussion

Despite the abundance of research on the social and economic history of the late Soviet Union, little attention has been paid to a specific phenomenon – nesuntsvo – that involved stealing from the workplace. These individuals – nesuny – were one of the most frequently encountered anti-Soviet social elements and effectively manifested multiple shortcomings of the Soviet system. The Soviet satirical visual propaganda, including the newsreel Fitil and magazine Krokodil, which I use as primary sources for my presentation, portrayed them with the same regularity as binge-drinkers and social parasites.

In my presentation, I aim to deliberate on how Fitil and Krokodil function as an effective visual supplement to written sources and discuss the manner in which graphic satire portrayed nesuny and how this phenomenon developed during the Brezhnev era. I will specifically concentrate on the fact that nesuny were depicted exclusively as ordinary Soviet citizens. However, even though satirising the Soviet party leadership was taboo for the official visual propaganda, it still appeared in caricatures behind the scenes as incompetent leaders who closed their eyes to this economic and immoral crime, and in some cases, even encouraged this anti-Communist practice and set a negative example to their subordinates.