Reminds me of the "comrade major" tea joke joke. Stolen from the Internet:
Three friends are in a hotel room in Soviet Russia. The first two men open a bottle of vodka, while the third is tired and goes straight to bed. He is unable to sleep however, as his increasingly drunk friends tell political jokes loudly.
After a while, the tired man gets frustrated and walks downstairs for a smoke. He stops in the lounge and asks the receptionist to bring tea to their room in five minutes.
The man walks back into the room, joins the table, leans towards a power outlet and speaks into it:
“Comrade major, we want some tea to room 62 please.”
His friends laugh on the joke, until there is a knock on the door. The receptionist brings a teapot. His friends fall silent and pale, horrified of what they just witnessed. The party is dead, and the man goes to sleep.
After a good night’s rest, the man wakes up, and notices his friends are gone. Surprised, he walks downstairs and asks the receptionist where they went.
The nervous receptionist whispers that KGB came and took them before dawn.
The man is horrified. He wonders why he was spared.
The receptionist responds:
“Well, comrade major did quite like your tea joke.”
The part where he insists he swap places with Molotov is hilarious. Solemnly moves behind him, but molotov just doesnt move. And picking out portraits, he says "I want that one... destroyed."
Crazy story about Joey Stalin. While working underground for the Bolsheviks, he was arrested and sent to the gulags repeatedly. He escaped from the Tsarist-era Gulags four different times before the Russian government fell in 1917.
Going from career criminal to the Soviet Era head of the police was one hell of a heel turn.
He was a prolific burglar, terrorist, extortionist and even pirate whose acts of expropriation supported both the ongoing operations in Russia and vacations of the likes of Lenin. A bloody bastard himself, he was very, intoxicatingly dedicated. And this trait goes through all of his life.
These weren't Gulags, not even by the dates - as they got organized under Stalin - but by the principle. It was a send-over to some remote region, just like Gulags, but that wasn't like a project of building BAM or factories most of the time, or even working. It was a pretty liberal (compared to a prison cell) containment but in a place that you can't easily leave, usually close to some settlement in the middle of nowhere. There are gossips about young Koba fucking around in them or living autonomously even from the guards. It was probably more of a hard sentence before, but by the 1910s no one gave a fuck. It was, though, compensated by him getting sent to the most brutal of these in the end, yet, he managed to live on his own terms there and prepare for escape as best as he could.
Gulags, or working concentration camps, were way more brutal. No gas chambers, just a rolled back strictness of the regime and inhumane conditions, demands, and a better control over transportation, ID checks, meaning even Stalin could've had troubles getting into St. Petersburg like he did since every bedbug is counted and has papers, unlike an escaping georgian with a long history of violence.
An old person is carrying a placard that says Thank You comrade Stalin for a wonderful childhood. A party member takes him aside and asks him how that is possible because Stalin wasn't born when he would have been young. The old person replied, "That's exactly why I am grateful".