Group Representations (and other themes) in Soviet Satire from Krokodil

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2023-04-14

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In its most general form, this project explores recurring themes in satirical texts and images from the journal Krokodil, a long-running and important satirical publication from the Soviet Union. Previous analysis of how Soviet Jewry was depicted in Krokodil’s satire showed a marked change between the pre- and post-World War II periods. This project aims to expand the focus to and compare the treatment of other notable ethnic and social groups invoked in the publication. The project first converts Krokodil issues into machine-readable text and then uses several methods for identifying themes or topics in Krokodil articles from 1953. These include topic modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation and clustering texts at various aggregate levels using HDBSCAN. Both topic modeling at the issue level and clustering at issue and sub-issue levels achieve mixed results for finding substantive patterns. Much of the structure picked up in these approaches relates to the format of the publication rather than commonalities in the narratives. The highly referential nature of the satirical articles poses challenges for future development of this project. Increasing the size of the corpus to cover a greater timespan may help by increasing the likelihood of repeat references. Similarly, it may be more meaningful to compare issues across years rather than within a given year.

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IDAH, Spring Symposium, Soviet Union

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