Inside Soviet Film Satire: Laughter with a Lash is a lively collection of sixteen original essays by Soviet and American scholars and film commentators. It is the first in-depth examination of an important genre within the Soviet film tradition. From its origins, humor and satire have been closely linked in Soviet cinema. Nowhere in this tradition is there the pure comic genre typified in the West in films by Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton; by contrast, Soviet comedy can best be described as "laughter with a lash." Films made during the early years of the communist regime depicted characters and situations at a moment when the promise of socialism had yet to be realized. By the final years of totalitarian rule, filmmakers had found ways to create satiric films that powerfully indicted communism itself.

Offering a general overview of the evolution of Soviet film satire during a seventy-year period, this volume also provides in-depth analyses of such classics as Kuleshov's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks; Volga, Volga, a popular musical of the Stalinist period; and the bitter and surrealistic Zero City, The Fountain, and Black Rose, Red Rose of the glasnost period. It also examines the effects of communism's collapse in 1991 on the tradition of satire and includes an interview with the renowned Soviet filmmaker Yuri Mamin.