In communist Russia...

Chapter 8 - Mother Russia Gone Red

Stalin took over the Soviet government and started the first Five Year Plan, which ran for ten years in accordance with the revised Russian calendar. The reason the Communists brought out a new out a new calendar was that anybody found using the old czarist calendar could do time.
To keep his fellow Russians on their toes Stalin also modernized the secret police, putting them into long rubber trench coats and repotting the palms in restaurants, hotels, etc. Instead of being shot down in the open square the average Russian now enjoyed the luxury of being shot down in the comfort of his own living room.
The soviet government kept control of the newspapers, but by raising the level of literacy it enabled millions of Russians to read what they were to think. This was a big improvement over the time when most Russians were so ignorant that they had to think for themselves.
The Communist program was sweeping. The men organized the program and the women did the sweeping. This kept the streets of Moscow clean of everything, especially people.
The peasants were organized into huge farms called collectives because whatever the farmers grew the state collected it. Some of the collectives were called kolkhozes and others sovkhozes, and if neither of these appealed to the peasant he had the option of going to one of the old-fashioned forced labor camps (bunkhozes).
Thanks to all this agrarian reform Russia had a famine. This famine differed from earlier, czarist famines in that formerly the poor starved whereas under the new regime everybody starved. The Communists therefore restored a bit of capitalism to the system by allowing the peasants to have a small vegetable plot for their own use. The next year these small plots accounted for 90 percent of total production. This annoyed the Soviet government, which decided to take out the bit of capitalism and try to get the peasants interested in free love instead. But free love never caught on like private beds of vegetables.
Stalin introduced a new electoral system which enabled every Russian to cast a secret ballot on which all the candidates belonged to the Communist party, thereby eliminating a great deal of confusion and making it much easier to determine which party had won the election.
The Communist party won 99.9 percent of the votes in every election, the remaking .1 percent being ballots spoiled by voters who mistook the ballot box for a spittoon. To be on the safe side, Stalin began his famous purges. He was responsible for so many purges that he became known as the Enema of the People.
One reason why Stalin's purges were so successful in getting rid of unsightly opponents to the regime was that the Russian judicial system combined the more efficient elements of British and Napoleonic law; that is, a person was judged to be guilty until he was proved to be guilty.