The jokes, and why they are hard to translate

Russian internet humour lives mostly on Telegram, in channels rather than feeds — you subscribe and things arrive, and the joke often depends on a chain of references from earlier in that same channel. Some of it crosses over to VK, some to short video, but Telegram is where a format usually starts.

A lot of the humour is deadpan and self-deprecating, aimed at bureaucracy, weather, prices and the small absurdities of a day. Animals do enormous numbers — pet accounts are among the largest channels there is.

Translation is where it breaks. A caption that reads flat in English is often carrying a grammatical joke, a rhyme, a quote from a Soviet film everyone has seen, or a word that means two things at once. Explaining it kills it, which is why most collections of "Russian memes" abroad end up being the three or four that survive without context.

We broke down a set of these in detail — Russian memes explained