He received a mere eight-year sentence in the Gulag after Soviet authorities intercepted a letter he wrote to a friend in 1945 that made a crack about Stalin and criticized the Soviet system. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, got off a bit easier. The joke is hardly the funniest ever told, but Orman was nevertheless one of countless Russians in the Soviet Union who received a 10-year stint in a labor camp for uttering the jibe. Realising whom he had saved, the peasant cried out: ‘Nothing! Just please don’t tell anyone I saved you!’” “Stalin asked the peasant what he would like as a reward. A peasant who was passing by jumped in and pulled him safely to shore,” the joke went, according to British writer Jonathan Waterlow. “Stalin was out swimming, but he began to drown. In 1937, Boris Orman was working at a bakery in Russia when he shared a joke over tea with his colleague.
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