In 2022, I took a class called Stalin’s Russia, where our professor had us study Josef Stalin’s life, time as General Secretary of the USSR, and the parallels between him and Vladimir Putin. It’s easily one of the best, most enjoyable electives I ever took, and if I get an opportunity, I’d love to do grad studies in Soviet history.
I was originally going to write my final paper on the role of food and famines in the USSR, but after realizing that writing about the Holodomor (an engineered famine in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, resulting in up to 3 million deaths from starvation) made me simultaneously too depressed to function and so angry that I wanted to invent time-travel entirely to heave Papa Joe into the Volga thirty seconds before a deep freeze, I pivoted to jokes in the Soviet Union. Let me share one of my favorites now:
A newsstand employee in Moscow noticed that one customer would stop by every day, scan the front page of the papers, and then walk away. One day, he asked what the customer was looking for.
“An obituary,” said the customer.
“But comrade,” the newsstand employee said, “obituaries are in the back.”
Replied the customer: “Not the one I’m looking for.”
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