Pearly Gates : A Tour of Russia’s Hell by Alfred N.Muggins Part 3

7/10/23 / 21/2/24 ,/ 3/3/24

“You are now on the tour of the Hell you created,” said his guide. The strong presence of Rasputin seemed to have reappeared now that Putin was away from the awful presence of Grandfather Stalin. Even fearless Rasputin, it seemed, was scared of that particular monster from Russia’s past, despite being very much dead, and belied his own words. “Come don’t be afraid! After all you are already dead!”

    Babies cried out in the darkness. An apartment disappeared, its debris falling through the floor into the one below. A woman’s head was sliced by shrapnel! She fell instantly, lifeless beneath the collapse of a wall. She had been an infant school teacher at the local school. Her grandfather, a Russian speaker like herself, had driven a tank at the famous Battle of Kursk, in which the German invaders had been soundly defeated by Zhukov’s full frontal tank attacks. Her husband was no longer in his chair. A gaping hole full of smoke had taken his place. This particular apartment had been built during erstwhile Soviet leader Krushchev’s reign, he who had himself been from Ukraine. Which side do you think he would have been on in this war if he had been born two generations later?

    “Can I feel the explosions? asked the President of the Russian Federation. He had never thought that he may one day have to stand in the path of his own toy fleet’s missiles, as they came screeching into the sides of inhabited buildings in Ukrainian cities.

How is it that we are here, or that hell seems so real? This seems real to me, but how can it be here.?

    “Vladimir, it was you who created this, no one else! It was your will that created this conflict. It was you who ordered the armed forces to attack the civilian apartments.”

    “We had to put the fear into the Ukrainian resistance! Our initial tactics of marching our columns into Kiev and Kharkov had failed, so we had to work on the locals’ morale,” admitted the smartly dressed premier.

    He is suddenly caught by a missile fired from the Black Sea Toyship Fleet! The apartment he is visiting is destroyed and he falls with the masonry into the apartments below. A mother screams as Putin’s head falls into her lap, soon to be stifled as she is buried alive in the falling masonry. Vladimir could not help thinking she looked indistinguishable from Russian women as her body was covered and crushed. In the aftermath his body resurrected itself. He was no longer mortal and could not be harmed, except psychologically. Briefly he had felt the pain of severe injury and death. He had felt the fear, the horror, and the pain he had inflicted upon these citizens of the Socialist Republic of Ukraine. It was not nice. Perhaps he could feel guilt? But Vladimir ‘lived on’ in hell. He could still blame the Kulaks, the Nazis, the Ukrainian speakers, the Traitors to Mother Russia, NATO and the Americans, the Poles and the Germans, the soft shopkeeping British Imperialists, the growing Empire of the European Union, the immoral gays, and the greedy businesses who turned away from Mother Russia, towards new markets in the West! He could still blame anyone and everyone except himself!