They aspired to be a communist country although people think that they were for they had Marxist Leninism which was bad enough and in general many of the Russian people thought that “Gorby” was a bad bastard for allowing the collapse of the Soviet Union. A parallel is that many Victorians think that Andrews has done a good job with the draconian measures he instigated over the past few years and will vote him back into office. Eighty odd years of brainwashing the population of Russia made people dislike Gorbachev. The Marxist Leninism system had some excellent points as in culture, arts, and education if one discounted the photo of Lenin on the inside cover of all textbooks. Their system of pensions for everyone at retirement age is paid on what you did for a crust during your working life so an engineer gets a larger pension than a labourer, is far better than ours because everyone in Russia gets a pension and not just a bunch of people in our system who bludge or rort the system. Don’t sell Russia short for it’s going to take another eighty odd years for them to come to terms with a democracy since the poor bastards have never had a democratic system, and unless you lived and worked there you wouldn’t know what it was like just after perestroika and what the Putin regime as bad as it, has done to drag it into a modern country.

I recall one day in the brisbane Qantas lounge going to the dunny and there was this monstrous dude in a thick suit, almost as thick as his neck just standing there. Quite off putting.
Anyway, who should come out of one of the stalls but Gorby.

I would have thought he would be in the chairman’s lounge, but there you go.