Dolls

In the background, the eponymous Sidney, having 40 winks.

Good old Russia, or whatever they call themselves this week. I’ve now got the excuse to buy another of the dolls for which they are famous. I like dolls, not in the Barbie style of things, Russian Dolls [and not the "big boned" type you find on the internet, who want a husband and a passport].
A couple of years ago, I picked this one up at a junk fair. I spotted it from a distance and was quite surprised to see a price tag of £5 on it.

It’s a big one, the outer “man” being about a foot tall. For a fiver, I thought, it must be missing some of its inner “men”. It wasn’t.

Ranging down, there’s Vladimir Putin, Boris Yeltsin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Leonid Brezhnev Nikita Khrushchev, Joseph Stalin Vladimir Lenin and then the last three are just three little female characters. Missing from the line-up are Georgy Malenkov, Yuri Andropov and Constantin Chernenko.
Of course, now that they’ve got a new president, Dimitry Medvedev, I’ll have to be on the hunt for an updated model.