Trump and Putin had their meeting in Helsinki, followed by a circus-like press conference. They looked and sounded like tiny excretive, enduring parts of Stalin’s enormous body, the huge towering figure that hanged a while over global labor and clouds as grasped by Vadim, the alter ego of Leonov in the latter’s last novel The pyramid (1994). Vadim has a glimpse of a meeting held by the providers of “forced happiness:”
[He] was able to peer, despite the egregious difference in height, into a railwaylike building, where a staff meeting was taking place, and the speaker appeared to be lopping off truths with his hand each time a new one arose. (Slezkine, The house of government: a saga of the Russian revolution, 950)
The pyramidal house of socialism has been abandoned. Now Dymkov the circus magician and Shatanitzky the behind-the-scene operator can work together while tossing soccer balls to each other. The House of Government can soon reclaim its old name, the Swamp, a place where you can romp, plan more towers and pipe gas to your kishkes’ content.