Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Back in the USSR, 1927, food was scarce –

a poor harvest, but Stalin, was convinced

those damned peasants – the scourge

of any decent society, were making pigs

of themselves hoarding grain – letting

the populate starve to thus increase its price.

Star-struck, young Communists, still

wet behind the ears, considered it

their moral duty to steal food at source;

what did it matter the families from which

they pillaged would die? It was, after all,

for the greater good, The Great Turn,

as it was so called.

The farmers either handed it over

or were labelled kulaks; enemies

of the state, no less, and suffered

at their hands.  Stalin then decreed

all kulaks should die, and who

were the Muscovites to argue?

We must break the back of this peasantry

he corresponded to Molotov.  Hard to say

which were the luckier; the hundred and fifty

thousand or so, sent to Siberia’s Cannibal Island...

or those left languishing in jail at Stalin’s pleasure.

Throughout the Ukraine, north Caucasus

and the Volga, famine remained rife –

and even the Politburo challenged him,

for once in his life, to tell the truth and that

its leader should consider, perhaps,

becoming an author, then the fables

he wrote might be famous one day.

No one knows exactly how many perished.

In the Ukraine alone, somewhere between

four and five million, and yet, over dinner,

he’d said to Churchill it had been nothing less,

nothing more, than a terrible struggle –

but necessary; the fly on the wall,

begging to differ.