Risk! By A.N.Muggins

I once met a lady from Bratsk, at a bus stop in Sheffield,

I’d never heard of the place before, even though I reckoned myself to be a bit of an expert on geography by comparison to most.

When she said it was in Siberia I nodded and understood.

It’s not too far from Irkutsk, which is near the shores of the Great Lake Baikal,

(although in Siberia that is still a long way!)

She was studying or was it even teaching? At the University here.

She spoke very good English, naturally with a Russian accent!

I was impressed to meet someone, my first from such an alien place!

But it wasn’t alien at all was it?

We could communicate easily, as if we had never been on the wrong side, of history, or politics, or culture. Amazing!

The world gets smaller, and its people get closer, in the end we all meet in the great mixing of culture and experience!

There’s a lot of places I’ve never heard of in Siberia,

although I have heard of some of them.

Who’s not heard of Omsk, and Tomsk (university town of great learning)?

 

I have played the board game of Risk to conquer Siberia’s famous city of Irkutsk,

a whole region is given to its name.

The ice bound region of Yakutsk has quite a ring to it,

and Kamchatka, the gateway to cross into Alaska and the Americas.

The world is your oyster when you play the game of Risk.

 

Of course you never know who you will cross swords with in your struggle for world

domination.

You know in the back of your mind that even when you have stabbed each other in the back a few times, so to speak, and ganged up on each other so no one becomes top dog,

then you will all be able to shake hands again when the morning comes, like gentlemen.

And here ladies I think I have a confession. I do not think I have ever played the game of Risk with a lady, not even my wife.

I had plenty of male friends, back in the day, who were keen to play the game of Risk! And they say that its men who want to rule the world!

Well that probably isn’t quite true.

I have seen more than enough women with ambitions.

 

I never played the game with the likes of Putin, that steadfast roller of dice.

He doesn’t mind if he loses a few throws, he’s coming back for more.

The likes of him are not content with a board game.

He wants to see the real tanks driving up main street and avenue,

and the refugee lines fleeing for foreign safety,

the buildings blown apart,

and the screams of pain in the old ladies who fall in the mud,

the cries of families torn asunder,

the wailing of deserted people and animals.

A few losses in the roll of the dice are nothing to a man of his self importance,

on a mission to restore and expand Mother Russia to its historical place in the world, its traditional dominance in the east and the west.

Vladimir Putin, the new Emperor, the man from St. Petersburg,

he plays the game for real.

And no one can choose to leave the game and go to bed when the dice is rolled.

41 million people are directly involved!

They can’t escape, except to fly by night and day to another country in Europe!

The men must go to war, to save their homes and their democracy.

 

There’s a new bully on the fought over battlegrounds between Russia and Poland and the west.

Bullies and conquerors come from East and West to try their hand at conquest in this wide territory.

Germans or Poles from the west,

even the French under Napoleon tried their hand (What’s a little Corsican doing before Moscow?),

Vikings from the North, Turks from the South, and Russians from the East! Unless it was the Golden Horde of Mongolia, or the Huns?