RED MARBLES(in the it Happens series)

It happens.

We had a game on May Day watching the big shots of those who survived the year to be on the

Politboro. We had different marbles we saved up to gamble. We could cheat if we asked our

parents if the Prague papers  (usually more accurate than Moscow's press) hinted at a change of

politics and who was in charge.

I'm sure this game of the children in the populace could also be played in National Socialist

Germany, in ancient Rome or among the emperors or Egypt if allowed.

I was down to three red marbles when we saw a new leader and he was not very known

though it was whispered he helped starve the Ukrainians in a nonexistent famine in the 1930's

that he has a peasant mentality himself even though someone claimed that he wrote his thesis

on Lysenko's wisdom about his agrarian wisdom on the burden of the Kulaks in the woodshed.

I bet my marbles that he would last a few years, that he would visit America, that he would

turn against Stalin's memory and Igor had to give me his marbles. May Day was a chance

for Russia to show off its larger rockets in a Freudian sense and to blow off steam. But for

us children life was only one game to play, to see who was on top.