Rogers, Will
"There's not a bathing suit in Russia & other bare facts" by Will Rogers is a humorous travelogue and social satire written in the late 1920s. The work chronicles a wisecracking journey through Europe into Soviet Russia, where Rogers riffs on politics, propaganda, aviation, and daily life while puncturing pretension on all sides. Expect folksy anecdotes, quick sketches of places and people, and sharp, self-deprecating observations rather than systematic analysis.The opening of this travelogue first mocks the endless, often ill-informed writing about Russia, skewers titled émigrés in Paris, and sets Rogers’s “novelty”: he openly admits he knows nothing and doubts anyone else does, given Russia’s size and mix of peoples. He then pivots to the trip itself—vodka-fueled banter with Morris Gest and Balieff in Paris, a visa hunt in London, and a comic, hopscotching flight across Europe full of gags about Channel swimmers, Dutch canals, and German efficiency. A surprise landing in Lithuania without a visa leads to a small payoff and onward rush to Russia, where aerial first impressions contrast women laboring in fields with men “cultivating whiskers,” and a discreet stop at Smolensk precedes an unexpectedly lax customs arrival in Moscow. Contrary to warnings, he roams unchaperoned, tours the Kremlin, fails to see Trotsky (learning Stalin is ascendant), meets American radicals, and begins his early appraisal: muddled socialist theory, postwar decay, high taxes, stabilized-but-scarce c…
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