Where Boys Fear To Tread

Yakov Smirnoff, situated in his castle in the impregnable fortress of Branson, rules the southern regions of Missouri from his principality in the Ozarks with an iron fist, benign though it may be. He often gives presentations and decrees to masses gathered in his hall in Branson, and comments upon the nature of his homeland, the vast and unknown enigma that is Soviet Russia. Often times, while remarking on the unimaginable backwardness of his former homeland denizens of his in the front rows can swear they see the Glorious Leader getting misty-eyed as he delivers his biting commentary on the policies of Soviet Russia.

Rightfully so, for Russia has faced a serious problem that has not truly been experienced or comprehended by those of us outside of its enormous tracts of land. Russia, often decried by pundits and armchair experts as backwards, has a rightful reason for being so as it has been haunted and chased by a specter of unimaginable evil and terror. For centuries, tsar, premiere, and president alike have all stood against the one thing that the colossal empire has had to face again and again and has barely been able to defeat in a cataclysmic war for the very existence of the Slavic monolithic state: Zombies

Yes, most of Russia's massive resources and capital has been invested in controlling and attempting to eradicate a seemingly-unstoppable menace. It is this revelation that suddenly some of the less understood actions of the Cold War suddenly become clear.

Beginning with the early years of the USSR, Lenin was forced to create a top-down, centrally planned role for the citizenry of the Soviet empire, called the NEP. For years believed to be the New Economic Plan in the West, it is now known to stand for the New Eradication Plan. In the aftermath of the Revolution and Civil War, the zombie hordes had found numerous sources of nourishment in both the dead bodies littering the battlefields, and the massing amounts of Whites and Reds tromping through the countryside. In fact, a scene with zombies feeding on both dead bodies in the field and raiding a White camp at night were filmed for Dr. Zhigavo, but were edited out when it was realized that a movie over 4 days long was a tad bit too long for American audiences. It was this NEP that created an initial schism in the Communist party, as the more conservative branches wanted everyone to defend themselves while the liberals argued it was the duty of the state to defend everyone as it was the state's duty as a representative of the people. In the end, the NEP proved itself worthwhile as Zombie levels were lowered to pre-1913 (WWI) levels.

Stalin succeeded Lenin, and with it brought to the table a more radical and constraining policy for destroying zombies. Viewing Trotsky's policy of "exporting the revolution," a nice euphemism for Trotsky's hey-lets-dump-these-undead-jerkoffs-on-the-rest-of-the-world-and-get-ourself-some-rest-from-the-undead-menace ideology as being both too impractical and insane for the Soviet nation at the time, Stalin took it upon himself to declare "Socialized Zombie Killin' In One Nation" as his mantra. Taking it upon himself to lead an anti-zombie revolution from the top down, Stalin began several controversial plans to strengthen the Soviet people against attacks from the roaming undead. The first was collectivization. Taking into account the Jungian archetype of farmers armed to the teeth with firearms and Pabst Blue Ribbon, Stalin forced them to live and work together on farms owned by the state, hoping to turn each farm into a bastion of heavily-armed humanity should the war against zombies suddenly take a turn for the worst. The end result is a policy that starved the entire Soviet Union, as the farmers pooled their PBR and played chicken on massive Soviet tractors at a top speed of three.

The most lasting vestige of the Stalinist anti-zombie platform was the Five Year Plan. Realizing that keeping a bunch of peasants in their ancestral lands and far from the eyes of the benign Soviet anti-zombie organization, the NKVD. Realizing that the only way to keep the Soviet populace out of the zombie-infested wilds was to busy them building factors and metal smelting plants and whatnot, Stalin enacted a plan that, much to his surprise, not only successfully kept the citizenry from the grasp of zombiekind, but also catapulted Soviet Russia into a fully industrialized status that it never lost. The human cost was tremendous, but there was not a single record of a single human involved with the First Five Year Plan falling prey to the undead. No, they only fell to bitter cold, starvation, and gross ineptitude on the jobsite which was acceptable to Stalin, the Politburo, and the people of the USSR. In fact, it was so widely accepted as a victory against the evil dead that it was adopted by nearly every subsequent leader of the USSR.

A policy not adopted by later leaders was the policy of the gulag. Stalin, believing a zombie science only in its infancy, mistakenly believed that the zombie infection of Solanum was a chronic infection rather than an almost instantaneously terminal disease. A result of this misinformation led him to assume that anyone coming into contact with zombies was infected, and slowly becoming a zombie from the inside out (We now know that the virus can only be transmitted via saliva and blood, and instantly attacks the brain). Thousands were shipped to the prison camps of Siberia in a paranoia of a sudden outbreak of zombies in urban centers and new workplaces created by the Five Year Plan, and many took advantage of this to report in personal enemies as possible threats sending untold innocent civilians to a harsh prison life.

World War II and its aftermath brought about a new paradigm to the zombie conflict. After signing a security pact with Nazi Germany, Stalin began to focus his efforts on eradicating the zombie menace within the frontier of his nation. Unbeknownst to Stalin, the Nazi empire had weaponized zombies and enlisted them into elite armed groups that swore fealty to der Fuher alone. Called the Sombie Soderkommandos, or SS, these elite forces wreaked havoc across Europe from 1939 to the cessation of combat in 1945. It was this that made the German attack against the USSR so devastating and successful. The Soviet soldiers, seeing hordes of their greatest enemy wearing the uniform of another nation, were shocked to the point they were destroyed piecemeal by the advancing Wermacht. Following the Soviet destruction of the elite 6th Zombie Army in Stalingrad, The tables had turned and the USSR took its war against zombie-kind to Germany itself.

The Cold War was rife with anti-zombie activities for the USSR and its new-found superpower status. Armed with an atomic bomb they tested against a mammoth group of zombies corralled into a pen in Kazakhstan, the USSR was ready to commence a world-wide crusade against zombies. It was at this crucial moment that Stalin, that heavy-handed benign dictator that ruled the USSR with clarity and grace passed into a zombie-fighting warlord's Valhalla and was replaced with Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev was an oddity in terms of zombo-political ideology. He commenced his reign by immediately decrying Stalin's plans of the secret zombie police and the gulags, but was only able to do so with due to latest information being provided by the isolation of Solanum by Soviet necrologists, proving the gulags were an unnecessary blight on the face of the Party; however, hindsight is always 20/20. Khrushchev embarked on a worldwide PR blitz against zombies, although this was widely interpreted in the West as a savage attack on capitalism by an uneducated Ukrainian farmer with no respect for decorum. Some of his most famous supposed faux pas in the international relations arena were actually zombie related. For instance, when telling then-vice president Richard Nixon "We will bury you," it has gone unnoted by most Western media that he was pointing to a zombie that had infiltrated the press section. When banging a shoe in the UN, he was actually demonstrating to the Filippino ambassador how he had once killed a German zombie during World War II, not responding as an attack against capitalism as reported by Western media. It was his exportation of anti-zombie nuclear warheads to Cuba that finally did Nikita in, as his forced withdrawal of the weapons from the island led to even the most staunch Khrushchev supporters in the Politburo-now-renamed-Presidium to vote him down.

In the years following Khrushchev, the leadership of Brezhnev, Cherenkov, and Andropov were unimaginative and zombie population growth actually began to hinder the economic output and growth of the USSR. In these dark days, even the collectivized farms began to encounter zombies and the farmers were more concerned with increasing their marksmanship on an increasing number of undead and swilling PBR than tilling their land or whatever it is a collectivized farmer actually does. During this time, the USSR began to fall into disrepair and the sort of apocalyptic fatalism ever-present in a Romero film, despite the fact that the zombie population was far from out of control.

Enter Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. A visionary in a time of dismay and stagnation, Gorbachev came to believe that the USSR could be refined by the combination of two ideas: Glasnost and Perestroika. Glasnost is roughly translated into "openness," but is only short for "openness to new ideas for killing the undead scourge that plagues our massive nation." Perestroika translates into "restructuring," in English, and like its counterpart Glasnost is short for something else, namely "restructuring of the way we can kill those buggers." A radical interpretation of these ideas was undertaken in the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl, with incredible anti-zombie effects (Chernobyl and parts of southern Belarus remain zombie free to this day). Unfortunately, the people of the USSR misinterpreted Gorbachev's policy as meaning democratization of the Soviet system and Party and allowance of free market elements inside the Communist haven, and Gorbachev, believing he was seeing a mass-adoption of radical ideas of zombie killing, mistakenly allowed it to proceed until he realized that the USSR had actually been destroyed by his measures taken to save it. In fact, it wasn't until the August Coup that Gorbachev realized how misinterpreted his policies had become. So, on 25 December 1991 at 7:30 pm Moscow time, the USSR was replaced by a plethora of new states, each facing a varying level of zombie population.

Today, Russia is plagued by both a resurgent zombie problem and constant misinterpretation by Western media. Fighting a constant war against a chronic zombie outbreak in Grozny, the world has come to condemn Russian attrition against what it misconstrues as a ethnically diverse people in the south of Russia. This problem has only be excabberated by the subsequent school crisis in Beslan and theater hostage crisis in the heart of Moscow. Recent actions taken against a zombie horde assembling in the main square in Minsk, Belarus was interpreted in the West as a sign of autocracy by Europe's last dictator, and Putin's backing of him as yet another sign of the democracy that Putin doesn't believe in.

Don't for a second be fooled. If anything, the actions of the USSR and seemingly-autocratic leadership of Putin is the only damn thing saving this world from its most fearful plague and threat. Do you think Putin has it easy, facing a threat no one thinks is real and is constantly under attack from the nations of the world for being a dictator-in-presidents clothing? No.

Remember, without the Soviets and Putin, you could be one of them