THE BOOK OF
RUSSKIES
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE BOOK OF THE MOTHERLAND
Stalin patronizes the artsKhrushchev bangs his shoe on the table
Chapter 23
Eventually, of course, Stalin died,
2hBut didn’t get stuffed and put on display,
3Because the new czar,
4Whose name was iKhrushchev,
5Said that Stalin had committed some crimes against the Russian people,
6jSomehow.
7Then Khrushchev went to work fixing everything up again,
8kWhich he did by building a huge number of gigantic new nuclear weapons,
9lAnd inventing a completely new Marxist way of farming that made the comrades even more miserable than they had ever dared to hope,
10mAnd building more huge industrial cities that allowed very large numbers of comrades to be miserable in huge apartment complexes, where four or five families could be miserable together in the same room,
11nAnd if any of them weren’t quite miserable enough, they could still go to Siberia,
12oAlong with practically everybody else.
13pKhrushchev also reformed the government bureaucracy so that the Russkies could rule themselves with gigantic committees that ran everything even more slowly and clumsily and stupidly than before,
14qSo that the whole economy produced almost nothing but nuclear missiles,
15And tractors,
16aAnd tremendous concrete things that didn’t really quite do anything.
✦ · · ✦ · · ✦
Chapter 23 / 26