Thursday, January the 20th, 2005

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Bilingual Comintern Mocker

Back in the days of Stalin, it was a brave soul who mocked the Comintern. Uncle Joe and his myrmidons tended to get attacks of the vapours when ridiculed. Svetlana B was not particularly brave, however. For one thing, she mocked the Comintern from the comparative safety of a radio shack hidden in a village in the English fens, which she pronounced “fence”. Her regular nightly broadcasts were inaudible outside the shack itself, because none of her equipment was plugged in to any kind of power source. Remember that we are talking here of fenland in the 1930s. You would be lucky to get hot water out of a spigot, let alone mock the Comintern and be heard by dissident ham radio enthusiasts in Vladivostok, Nizhniy Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Perm, or Omsk. Nevertheless, Svetlana B took no chances, and her fierce mockeries of the Comintern were delivered in two languages unfamiliar to Stalin's brutes. She talked in Gã, a variant of Nkrã, spoken in the coastal towns of Eastern Ghana and the subject of a fascinating Grammar by C Protten published in Danish in 1764, and then repeated herself in Avestan, the sacred language of Zoroastrianism. Small Zoroastrian communities still exist in the Iranian towns of Yazd and Kerman, but these were strategically unimportant to the Soviet Empire. Even if her words had been transmitted, however, more often than not they would have been drowned out by the roaring icy gales sweeping across the flat and forbidding fens. Sometimes the radio shack was so cold that Svetlana B took her samovar with her to brew up some steaming mugs of tea. No one had ever told her that it was an ornamental samovar. Svetlana B's husband had a Stalinist hat, a Stalinist moustache, and a heavily pock-marked face just like Stalin. His appearance was the subject of much taunting by school-age fenland rascals, but that is another story, one that will keep, for there is much else to tell about Svetlana B, and her bilingual Comintern mockery, and her samovar, and the fens, particularly the fens, the cold flat spooky wet black fens, and the nocturnal animals which creep there, and the phantoms that shimmer in the mist. I will tell you more on another night, children, for now it is time for your bedtime snack of fish-heads and hot cocoa.