There’s a game I play with Zoe with a Matrioshka doll set painted with the likenesses of Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev. She’s fascinated with them, as she is with a more traditional Matrioshka we have, both gifts from my globetrotting aunt. One night recently , as she sat on my lap at my desk and she was fumbling with them, I took the second largest, painted like Leonoid Brezhnev, and said in a very bad imitation of a heavy Russian accent, “comrade Brezhnev geeve you keeses,” and pressed the head of Brezhnev up against her cheek, making kissing noises. She thought it was hysterical. I never thought Leonoid could be so funny. But I notice that the artist who made the toys conveniently skipped over Andropov and a few other, more unsavory Soviet heads of state in between Brezhnev and Gorbachev. I guess you could never make Andropov cuddly. Somehow, I doubt Putin will ever be made into a Matrioshka doll. Yeltsin, on the other hand, will undoubtedly be a Matrioshka–that conceals a vodka flask.