To finish this day on a more positive note, I will quote one marvelous book I bought and read recently. It is quite specific, cos it’s a collection of Soviet jokes of 1920s, and some of them require a deeper knowledge of the language and the context. But it might be quite interesting to those who want to know more about what the life in the early Soviet Union looked like.
This joke I am now quoting goes in hand with Alexey Navalny’s buzz phrase “United Russia is the party of thieves”.
I apologize for only a very, very rough translation, I realize it’s quite difficult to render the whole idea of this “letter-and-word” game in a different language.
What is VKP(b) (“All-Soviet Communist Party of Bolsheviks”)? – Thieves, Horse-Thieves, and Prostitutes (Vory, Konokrady, Prostitutki). – But “prostitutes” is not a Russian word. – Look into the brackets: b – blyadi (“whores”).
So, Navalny is in no way original.
English title: M. Melnichenko “Red Laughter”, 2019
Original title (Russian): М. Мельниченко “Красный смех”, 2019
First published in the Levinarium Telegram Channel (now closed and deleted)