Russian Roulette

PROLOUGE- RED SCARE

It was Moscow, 1979, and people were freezing.

Rostof Hood and his band of Merry Mensheviks were at the top of the charts, with their hit single Steal from the Poor, Give to the State.

Leonold Feodorovitch has just been elected as the director of the Sovjetski Drustvo Earovnik, the Soviet Ministry of Magic. He promised to bring union to all peoples, magical and non. All peoples laughed. Politicians had been promising that for years.

It was the coldest winter in recorded Muscovite history. That's saying a lot. The Muscovites are a people who call 26 degrees below zero brisk. Of course they would use the specific word brisk. The Muscovites speak Russian after all. It would sound more like gibèen.

Gibèen or not, Moscow was freezing. The living were affected with a pre-death rigor mortis, their movements stiff and sluggish as they found themselves trapped in a hell that had indeed frozen over. The lifeblood of the city turned to ice as its citizens simply gave up, laid down in the streets, and died. Their frozen bodies had to be removed with pick axes.

To political revolutionaries this was as blatant a sign as any that Communism was not working, that Marx's land of proletarian utopia had turned into a killing field. Or a bureaucrat's paradise. It all depended on what end of the pecking order you were at. But the political revolutionaries waited. They knew how to be patient.

So things simmered beneath the surface.

tension.anger.pain.hunger.cold.

and yes

love.

There was only one place where Moscow could escape from itself, from all the dying and freezing and despair:

The Russian Roulette.

Capital of Decadence.

Palace of Primal Urges.

And the saving grace of the winter of 1979.

 

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If it wasn't for the Cold War, Sirius would have never set foot in Moscow.

The Cold War wasn't quite cold. It was pretty damn hot considering it got two of the most powerful nations on the face of the earth pumping their entire treasuries into

NUCLEAR WEAPONS!

which they would have to destroy 20 years later on the pleas of tree-hugging-Birkenstock®-wearing environmentalists who existed solely on a diet of soy enchiladas.

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If it wasn't for James, they would have never gotten this god-awful assignment.

The commie-hunts were hitting the wizarding world a decade late and James was not the only one to be bitten by the red bug.

He had begged his father tirelessly for the Russia mission. And James's father, being the Minister of Magic, had caved to his son's demands. That's the way it usually was.

James knew how to win.

----

 

If it wasn't for Anti-Soviet propaganda, none of this story would have ever happened.

Red Scare had swept across wizarding England like a tidal wave. Owls poured into Hogwarts, insisting that the students be instructed in Communist-Repelling Curses. Frantic Hogwarts staff members pumped letters into the Department for Experimental Charms demanding that such curses be invented.

And all was in great mayhem.

Throughout the panic, one man stood tall: Harold L. Potter, Minister of Magic. Harold L. Potter was never Harry or Harvey or Harley or Hal. He wasn't a man who tended well to nicknames. Maybe it was the fact that Harold L. always had an intimidating glint in his eyes. Or perhaps it was the scathing scold forever stuck on the tip of his tongue. Most likely, it was the way that Harold L.'s hair was severely parted right in the middle of his scalp. It was so dead center that many squabbled over whether or not Harold L. used a ruler to part his hair.

He did.

The only man who could ever control Harold L. was his son, James. This did not bode well for the future of a nation. Harold L. was concerned with just that, that the future of his nation bode very well indeed.

In Harold L.'s mind, there were two threats hovering on the horizon, ready to gobble up wizarding England like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. The first (what big eyes you have!), was Lord Voldemort. The second (what big deficits you have!), was Soviet Russia. It seemed obvious to Harold L. that these two were linked together in an absoblutly-enormous-mumbo-jumbo-monolithic-Marxist-Bolshevik-world-wide-Communist-Death-Eater conspiracy.

It seemed obvious to Sirius that Harold L. was as off his rocker as it was possible to be. He could not tell this to James, though.

Harold L. held a rousing patriotic press conference in which he, much to James's chagrin, appeared in nothing but a bowler hat and a draped Union Jack. Despite his hair-raising attire, Harold L. called upon the people of Wizarding England to resist this absoblutly-enormous-mumbo-jumbo-monolithic-Marxist-Bolshevik-world-wide-Communist-Death-Eater threat. He compared it to a second Battle of Britain in which the "Citizens of this free empire must fight better and braver than ever before, and show those dirty Slavic pigs to rue the day they ever set their sights upon Britannia!" (::canned cheers!::)

Sirius thought it was futile to point out that the goal of Communism was absolute freedom and the main aim of the Death Eaters was absolute dictatorship.

His friend Remus Lupin agreed, stating: "That man [Harold L.] needs to reread the Communist Maifesto." Sirius changed the subject. He had never read the Communist Manifesto.

Harold L. proposed that a team of undercover Aurors head to the Soviet Union to unearth solid evidence of the worldwide-Communist-Death-Eater conspiracy. Naturally, James wanted the job. Naturally, Harold L. gave it to him. Naturally, Sirius was dragged along. The Blind leading the Blind.

So much for the Communist Maifesto.

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If it wasn't for this story:

1. A bartender would still be alive.

2. The KGB would have no idea that the Wizarding World even existed.

3. Spunky Slavic Gnomes would not own a great deal of Eastern Siberia.

and

4. Narcissa Vabka would be happily married to Lucius Malfoy.

At least McCarthyism was good for something.

 

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If someone asked you to play Russian Roulette, what would you say?