By Blake S. Neff
Directions:
1 part vodka
2 parts blood from capitalist oppressors
Drink in a celebratory fashion straight from the bottle.
As it turns out, great wealth is immensely helpful to the prospective proletarian revolutionary. While my American fellow travelers could only lounge about in a New Haven coffeehouse and read of the events in Russia in their bourgeois newspapers, I discovered that a few thousand dollars could net passage on a ship to Petrograd surprisingly easily. Traveling in steerage was a far cry from snuggling in a first-class cabin while reading Das Kapital for the third time, but I made do quite well, I think.
Unfortunately, by the time I found my way over to Palace Square I had already missed the best parts of the show. Kerensky and his fellow bourgeois swine had been driven out of the Winter Palace two days before my arrival and I showed up only to find the tsar’s domicile being looted of its treasures by soldiers who no doubt planned to turn them over to the Soviets for eventual redistribution to the people.
Disappointed that I had not been able to prove my revolutionary credentials, I decided to make the best of the situation by partaking in some celebratory drink. I was unfortunately thousands of miles away from father’s 4,000-bottle home wine cellar, but I found the next best thing when I happened across a Red Guard making off with 4 bottles of vodka from the tsar’s personal stocks. Bizarrely, though, when I requested that he spare some for a fellow friend of the workers, he demanded two rubles in return for a piece of “his” share. Seeing that this Guard was nothing more than a capitalist spy, I swiftly shot him down with my revolver and requisitioned for the People the goods taken by his counter-revolutionary treachery.
Ordinarily I would never have vodka straight for such a momentous occasion, but I was quite surprised to learn from the local quartermaster that the militia did not possess any lime juice with which I might produce a gimlet. So it goes, though. We must all suffer for the Revolution.
About a week later I resolved to return to America, having found Russian Communists a rather smelly and poorly-dressed lot.
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