There's not a bathing suit in Russia & other bare facts
| Language | en |
|---|---|
| First published | 2026-02-01 |
| Rights | Public domain in the USA. |
| Gutenberg ID | #77828 |
Description
"There's not a bathing suit in Russia & other bare facts" by Will Rogers is a humorous travelogue and social satire written in the early 20th century. In it, Rogers records a fast, wisecracking tour of Soviet Russia via Western Europe, pairing slapstick travel scrapes with shrewd, plainspoken jabs at Bolshevism, propaganda, and daily life. Expect aviation escapades, vodka-fueled encounters, and lampoons of exiled aristocrats and American ideologues, all filtered through his affable skepticism. At the start of the book, the narrator skewers the craze for Russia-writing and the flood of “grand dukes” and “princesses” haunting Paris salons, then stakes his novelty: he admits he knows nothing conclusive about Russia. A vodka misadventure with Morris Gest and Balieff, a buoying moment with Mary Garden, and a hard-won visa send him hopscotching Europe by air—past Channel swimmers and Dutch canals—before a surprise landing in Lithuania exposes his shaky grasp of new borders; he soon reaches Russia, noting women in the fields, men’s whiskers, and surprisingly easy customs. Finding no spies tracking him, he roams freely, tries and fails to see Trotsky, sketches Stalin’s backstage power, and chats with American radicals-turned-tourists. He then sizes up shortages and patched-up currency, the retreat from equal-pay dogma, the peasant’s refusal to sell grain at bad terms, and, in Leningrad, tours the Winter Palace and a grisly Revolutionary Museum—observing how propaganda and schooling start “at the cradle.” (This is an automatically generated summary.)