# Posted 12:45 PM by Patrick Belton  

THOUGH IT INSISTS ON explaining Putin's successes with recourse to a pat theory about "Russia's love affair with strong leaders," BBC manages to include today a black joke of the later Soviet period, and we always like those. Here goes:

A black joke of the later Soviet period supposedly quotes a history book of the 21st century: "Who was Adolf Hitler?"
Answer: "A petty dictator who lived in the time of Joseph Stalin."

Interesting, but like usual, you can do better than the BBC just by pilloring random sites from the internet:

A delegation from his native Georgia leaves Stalin's office after an hourly meeting. Stalin realizes that he cannot find his pipe and calls Dhzierhzynsky to find out if anyone from the delegation took his pipe. After 30 minutes Stalin finds the pipe under the table and calls Dhzierhzynsky to let the delegation go. Dhzierhzynsky answers Stalin's call: "I am sorry Comrade, but one half of the delegation already admitted that they took your pipe, and the other half died during questioning."

A person comes to a post office and complains: "These new stamps with Lenin do not stick..." The clerk answers: "Comrade, you probably spit on the wrong side."

A grandson complains to his grandfather after a trip to the Soviet Union: "You told me that there is a lot of gold, silver, food, and beautiful women, but all I found was poverty..." The grandfather asks:" And whom did you go with?" The grandson answers:"I went with a traveling company." "That's why..." The grandfather says after a while: "I went with Marshal Pilsudski, in 1920, during the Polish-Bolshevik War."

On his trip to the Soviet Union, President Kennedy saw many drunks. He asked Breznyev about it. Surprised Breznyev replied "...and there are no drunks in the US, in NYC?" "No" answered Kennedy. "When you come to NYC, you may shoot first three drunks you see." After 6 months, Breznyev came to NYC, and walked out of the Soviet embassy. He shot first three drunks he saw, and came back, and went to sleep. When he waked up next day, he read in the New York Times "A bald, short gangster shot three employees of the Soviet embassy."

In a Soviet pre-school, the teacher describes the Soviet Union to the children: "In the Soviet Union all kids are happy. In the Soviet Union all kids have lots of beautiful toys and live in great apartments..." Suddenly one child starts to cry and scream: "I want to go to the Soviet Union!"

UPDATE:

One of my favorite Soviet Era jokes is this one.  In 2072, a boy asks his father, "Dad, who was Leonid Brezhnev?"  His father answers, "He was a politician who lived at the time of Solzhenitsyn."
Michael

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