An essay by Ilya Kalinin, “The One Who Must Not Be Laughed At,” is now available on the Republic website. The piece explores Russian satirical TV series produced in the pre-war period. During these years, the Russian television industry developed a recognizable image of the “discreet charm” of Russian bureaucracy – one that combines a formally reproduced public demand for justice with a substantive removal of social contradictions. In this essay, the author seeks to reconstruct the internal tensions of this denunciatory–reconciliatory dialectic.