Dancing Dust
	Poems by Mollie Caird (1922-2000)
	Russian drinking song
Home Alphabetic index of poems Thematic index of poems Biography Gallery Contact and links	Champagne is the tipple In Kokand and Tashkent, In Leninsk and Bukhara, In Kim and Osh and Pskent; So let us down our bubbly, Let’s drink it as we choose, We’ll quaff it out of samovars Or Bolshoi ballet shoes. Americans sip highballs And scotch upon the rocks, The English gulp their bitter ― And may it rot their socks! Vodka is a bourgeois drink, ‘The boy’ is for the man: Let’s send six million empties Away to Kazakhstan. In Scotland they drink usquebaugh From Orkney to the Trossachs, And tea is for babushkas, And kumiss for the Cossacks; But a magnum is a magnum, And a hundred times more hep Than chasing droves of mangy mares To milk them on the steppe. The lovely road to Samarkand Is golden, so it’s said, But all else that surrounds us here, Except the wine, is Red; So drink to Marx and Engels And Lenin’s rosy ghost In one great glorious orgy Of not-so-sobernost! It was reported that six million empty champagne bottles were swamping the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan.  Plans to ship the bottles to Kazakhstan were vetoed by the Kazakhs. Oxford Times, 4 February 1966