Slavery & Suffering

A traditional, hand-crafted set of matroshki depicting Russian leaders of the 20th century (with the notable exceptions of Tsar Nicholas II, Alexander Kerensky, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, none of whom were deemed acceptable by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for release as official Soviet action figures).

We've had a few arguments this afternoon about the relative sizes of the dolls; I initially suggested that Lenin should perhaps have been the largest, followed by a gradual decline in his successors. But then, you could also say that the October Revolution began a gradual ascent to the glasnost and demokratizatsiya of Gorbachev (who, incidentally, is still an interesting figure today: strongly pacifistic, pro-environmental, and calling for a perestroika of the international banking system) before he was replaced by the guiding hand of Yeltsin in troubled times.

What's most worrying to me about this order is that to follow things both logically and chronologically, Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev would have to be absolute monsters. Which isn't far off the truth, in all honesty, but is still more realism than I really want in any set of matroshki.

All the same, they're lovely figurines. Although if they were to hear the latest news from the Motherland, I dare say it would cause all of them to topple, with Yeltsin being the first to go. That, comrades, is what I call the domino effect.