This is a column by Mark Murphy, a Savannah physician and author. He is a regular contributor to the Savannah Morning News.
Mother Russia peered out from her turreted home in Moscow, her slate grey eyes narrowed into slits.
“Vladimir? Vladimir? Where is that boy?”
A buxom woman, she was dressed in plain a peasant dress once again, like in the old days of the USSR. She’d clothed herself that way for weeks, ever since all the fancy clothiers and designers from New York and Paris had closed their shops and gone home.
“Are you talking to me?” said a muffled voice from inside a red granite mausoleum in Red Square.
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“No, not you, Mr. Lenin,” Mother Russia said. “I’m talking about the other one, the one who is still living – at least for now. Putin.”
“Putin is in Ukraine, playing Hitler again. I knew Hitler all too well and that Putin is a Hitler wannabe,” Stalin said, with an air of disgust. He twirled what was left of his once-bushy mustache.
Lenin nodded slowly. Nodding slowly was a matter of necessity, for if the old Bolshevik nodded too quickly, his carefully preserved head tended to fall right off his shoulders. This was a decidedly undignified look.
“Who would want to be Hitler?” Mother Russia said.
“Putin,” said Lenin and Stalin in unison.
“Why is he bothering the Ukrainians? Aren’t they our friends?” Mother Russia asked.
“Not anymore,” Lenin said, a permanent scowl creasing his embalmed face.
Learning the same lesson as Hitler
Eventually, it came to pass, after many months (or perhaps years; when you are a thousand years old, it is hard to tell the difference) that Mother Russia‘s prodigal son came stumbling back home again. Putin was now bruised and battered, his pockets turned out and empty. He’d been beaten to a pulp by all of Ukraine’s new friends from NATO, and he looked despondent.
(He was not the only one suffering, of course. Mother Russia was thin, her clothes tattered, and even poor old Lenin had fallen into an embarrassing state of disrepair).
“So, look who’s back: Our wayward adventurer! So, little Vlad, did you enjoy your Black Sea vacation?” said Lenin, a hint of sarcasm in his voice.
“I don’t know what happened,” Putin said. His lower lip poked out like a petulant child’s. “We were just trying to get back what was ours. Russia needed space to live in. Why is that so hard for everyone to understand?”
Stalin and Lenin glanced at one another and nodded.
“Hitler,” they said in unison, just before Lenin’s head fell off again.
“It wasn’t yours to take, Vladimir,” Mother Russia said. “Ukraine belonged to the Ukrainians. It never belonged to Russia. Kyiv is even older than Moscow. You tried to take their country from them, tried to steal their sovereignty and your incalculable greed has now destroyed us. We are pariahs, excommunicated from the world, plunged back into the totalitarian hell that those two idiots gave us.”
“I’m fine,” chirped Lenin’s disarticulated head, now lying sideways on the floor.
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Stalin harrumphed to himself but was otherwise silent.
Hubris gets the best of autocrats
Putin was hunched over, shirtless as usual. His bald head had sprouted a couple of tiny antennae.
“What is this? What is happening to me?” he cried.
“Ask Franz Kafka,” Stalin said.
Putin’s eyes were even more beady than usual now. He had grown a pair of tiny wings, his rounded torso was supported by six spindly legs, and his chitinous mouthparts clicked softly as he spoke.
“But I did it all for you!” Putin said, his voice an insectile whine.
“No, you didn’t, Vladimir. You did it all for yourself,” Mother Russia said disapprovingly.
And the scrabbling cockroach that was once Vladimir Putin gazed up at Mother Russia, in all her threadbare glory, and he realized, too late, the sheer magnitude of his error.
“Hubris,” Mother Russia said, shaking her head sadly. “It’s been the death of would-be tyrants for centuries.”
And with that, Mother Russia crushed the squirming cockroach they once called Vladimir Putin under her massive mud-caked boot, ending his strange, misbegotten European odyssey once and for all.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: A Russian fairy tale of Russia’s response to Putin’s Ukraine invasion
