[Sometimes I write witty articles about Russia for the biggest daily paper in my hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden. I thought I’d share a translation of my latest one with you.]

In the middle of a hot June night I woke up from my innocent Swedish sleep to see the Ural Mountains on fire. Inhuman screaming came from all around and mixed with shots and blasts and high-pitched beeps from cars honking their horns relentlessly below my window. The air, usually heavy with radiation in this neck of the woods, was loaded thick with patriotism and it didn’t take me long to realize that the reason wasn’t war, but soccer. The Russians had beaten the Swedes. Soon after this my Russian friends and acquaintances started harassing my cell phone with patronizing sms’s and condescending excuses, all of which I saw through immediately. Would the country that placed its flag on the bottom of Antarctica ever be able to fool me? After four years here I know their intentions, I if anyone am aware of their plans, and its high time for the rest of you to grasp what’s about to happen:

Russia is going to take over the world.

And they’ve already made some serious progress. During the spring Russians have won everything there is to win. When Dima Bilan finally brought home Eurovision to Red Square with a little help from a figure skater and a violinist it was a historical moment. Even the new president called up the pop singer and girl idol to congratulate. But that victory, together with hockey and soccer, is only the beginning, only one tiny spit of saliva in Lake Baikal. Soon the world will know for sure the way the bliny [Russian buckwheat pancake] crumbles! While the US of A is going down economically and Europe is busy with internal issues, not even China can stand in their way anymore. As a matter of fact, the Chinese are looked upon as both a stimulating ingredient and indispensable work force when they migrate to East Siberia and become nothing but yet another exotic populace in this already multi-cultural region. Slogans like «Россия для русских!» [“Russia for Russians!”] can still be found painted onto concrete walls in the suburbs, but this’ll disappear as soon as more and more Russians begin to understand that without immigrants there’ll be no one left to mop the floors in an exceptionally erudite society. Who’s going to pump their oil on the tundra when every other citizen is a «кандидат наук» [has a PhD] in Economics and Jurisprudence, if not guest workers from Tadzhikistan? They haven’t quite yet got rid of their native idiosyncrasy, their world-renown xenophobia, though it is obviously ‘acceptance’ if not yet ‘integration’ that’s on the political agenda.

For me, personally, if the formerly so strict intolerance toward foreigners come untied it can only mean good news – perhaps I’ll be able to make my dream come true and become a professor of Russian Literature in Russia one day without some homo soveticus sniveling: “Could a foreigner ever know our Dostoevsky better than we do?”

Everything breathes change. Anticipation is in the air all over the country. But wouldn’t anyone of us be bursting with anticipation if their paycheck had doubled or even tripled during the past year? Everyone is bubbling with gigantic hopes of a brilliantly bright future, on the schedules in all schools ‘love for the fatherland’ is written in thick letters and every little inch of society is raging with the one true philosophy: out with the old and in with the new. Once upon a time the world laughed at the country which believed blindly in its utopia, stood in line for five hours for a pound of oranges and couldn’t make toilet paper but was more than glad to send dogs into outer space.

But «хорошо смеётся тот, который смеётся последным!» [“the one who laughs last laughs the best!”]

Twenty years ago nobody here had ever tasted a banana, four families were forced to share a bathroom, ten families a kitchen, and no one had been further west than Minsk. This Soviet reality is now but a memory; only it’s everlasting aspiration for ideal lives on. Today that ideal spells money, money and a little bit more money. In the Soviet Union everyone had money but there was nothing to buy, during the 90’s the market flooded with products as the pursed echoed empty, but now paradise has finally reached the Earth. Russians love money and they’re not ashamed to show it. Everything has to be luxury and the working class’s former home country which still lacks a middle class would rather prefer to skip that step and go straight to upper class. Here more luxury apartment than anywhere else are being built and the number of countries that allow Russians tourists to enter without a visa grow from one day to the next. On that little piece of land outside of town they no longer grow potatoes to keep the hunger away during long winters, now it’s all about exotic flowers. Unless they don’t just build a extravagant villa on it with a lavish pool on the roof instead.

The prognosis for the future is bright and clear with hint of red tint. Those military tanks that paraded over Red Square on Victory Day in May were not a martial show-off; they were a simple stretch exercise. Learn how to read Cyrillic now before it is too late. Most people back home didn’t understand me when I headed deep into the promised land of the taiga and refused to return to Scandinavia’s serene woods, but with time you’ll all get it – when the Russians come you better know how to hold a Kalashnikov.

[Да, да, да…. I know, I said I was going to talk about «глаголы движения» [verbs of motion], but I just couldn’t hold it back. Sometimes I get this enormous urge to be witty, and I can’t stop myself, not even if it’s not really witty at all but rather unpleasant or just bluntly off the mark. Next time it’s going to be all about verbs! Promise!]