PolitiFact: You might have seen a clip of President Joe Biden “shaking hands” with thin air. It never happened. Here’s the truth, as well as how misinformers manufacture and embellish embarrassing presidential moments:

Lenin died in 1924 and Gorbachev was born in 1931. It's not possible that both were on the same train speaking.

Nah Gorby did give a shit, that was his blessing and a curse. For example, the Soviet constitution said that constituent republics had the right to secede. Everyone knew this was a funny joke — everyone except ol' Gorby, the True Believer, and the madman actually let the republics secede.

There are plenty of salient comparisons that can be made to the USSR and the US. Just think of Vaclav Havel's greengrocer. Specifically:

Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings [...] The bill is not long in coming. He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria will evaporate. His children's access to higher education will be threatened. His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him. Most of those who apply these sanctions, however, will not do so from any authentic inner conviction but simply under pressure from conditions, the same conditions that once pressured the greengrocer to display the official slogans.

And then:

the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.

Pretty prescient stuff

oh frick politicians are lying to us

literally soviet