quotd - Jokes of a Sudden Amateur Sovietologist

"The five major figures of Soviet history were on a train together when it suddenly halted in a remote region where the tracks had abruptly stopped. What to do? Lenin was the first to speak, and in his revolutionary enthusiasm he issued a call for a voluntary day of work for local folk to extend the tracks. Stalin objected and ordered the leaders of the railroad ministry shot and the train engineer exiled to Siberia. The always exuberant and impulsively reformist Khrushchev had yet another idea: tear up the tracks behind the train and lay them in front and thus proceed to their destination. Brezhnev's contribution was to order the shades drawn while all the travelers rocked back and forth pretending to move ahead. Finally it was Gorbachev's turn. The architech of the glasnost had the windows thrown wide open and asked everyone to stick their heads out of the train and shout loudly, 'There are no tracks! There are no tracks!'"

--A widely told Soviet joke about the USSR's five main political figures