Hey, Remember That Soviet Propaganda Poem About an American Businessman Who Goes to Russia?
BY JANUARY 17, 2017Come, let us take a break from Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissing the idea that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump would even need prostitutes in Moscow (“although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world,” he added with a burst of nationalist pride).
Let us have a moment of respite from Putin’s predictions that American protesters in Washington are planning “a Maidan” — the 2014 protests that ended in the ousting of Kremlin friend Viktor Yanukovych from office. Let us, for a moment, not concern ourselves with Putin saying those seeking to “de-legitimize” Trump are “worse than prostitutes.”
Let us think of something completely unrelated: a racist American businessman who stays in a hotel in Russia.
Mister Twister is a Soviet propaganda poem, in which the titular character is a former government official and businessman. He is very rich and very racist. He wants to travel the world. His daughter demands to go to Leningrad, and whatever Twister’s daughter — Susan, not Ivanka — wants, Twister’s daughter gets, so off to Leningrad they go, with his wife, a monkey, and 24 suitcases.
The Twister family travels on a ship far nicer than the “second class ships” on which Americans of color are made to sail, because (spoiler) the whole point of this poem is that Americans are greedy and racist.
And boy does it show when they get to their hotel, the Angleterre. Twister is smoking a cigar — a golden cigar, mind you — and speaks English to the concierge, who shows them to their rooms. But, alas, their room is next to a black man’s — and so Twister, who is openly racist, leaves the hotel to find a room elsewhere.
But wait! The concierge is well connected, with important friends in high places — namely, other concierges at other fancy hotels, whom he calls, insisting that they do not admit this rich, racist American family. The other Russian concierges are all too happy to oblige.
And so the Twisters end up back at the Angleterre, where the original concierge, who apparently lives in a universe where bad behavior has consequences, makes the family stay in a room surrounded by people of many different races.
Mister Twister may not be in the Russian literary canon, and it may not even be as widely recalled as some propaganda pieces these days. But the poem’s core lesson still lives: If that dodgy intel dossier is to be believed, some Russians continue to be unduly fascinated with what rich American businessmen get up to in their hotel rooms.
Photo credit: NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images