Captain Schlepnickof Spady 

CCCP – The True Story

This might be a good place to include a very short biography of my, some might say, possibly imaginary, great Uncle Schlepnickof – or Schlepy for short. I got into this because I had just finished Bruce’s book by Solzhenitsyn titled “Cancer Ward.” I was complaining because it seems that every Russian has about four different names, maybe only one of which his folks gave him at birth, or shortly thereafter. And even with my great facility for languages, none of these names can I pronounce, so I never know who I’m reading about.

My relatives in Russia could only afford two names, and one of those could be only two syllables, which makes it a lot easier to write about them. One exception was a great-uncle (not Schlepy) who because of some trouble with certain of the Czar’s officials had several aliases. Well, now that you mention it, aliases just don’t count at all. (At least I never yet heard one yet that could count past three or four.)

This uncle, Schlepy, served in the Czar’s army. His unit was in charge of transporting the Czar’s cigars from a port on the Black Sea up to wherever the Czar happened to want his cigars. The unit was known as the Czar’s Cigars Cavalry Patrol, or CCCP for short. You might remember seeing those letters on some Russian stamps and space capsules. It was a very famous unit. Anyway, Schlepy was the Captain in charge of this unit and was a favorite of the Czar until he started stealing stogies out of the shipments and replacing them with a cheap kind of weed that some of the happier serfs were using. The Czar got so mellowed out after smoking some of these bogus stogies, that the serfs thought they could make their move, which they did and no more Czar.

That was when Schlepy started using aliases. However, after several years, when the serfs realized what a great service Schlepy had performed for the revolution, he became a great folk hero. He never did get over his entrepreneurial activities, so was always in warm water with the authorities from then on. If it had not been for his great service to the serfs he would not have survived. He used to refer to it as serfvival, when he had had too much vodka. So much for Schlepy.