Let Me Tell You . . .

In a nation that has always adored social satire, Mikhail Zhvanetsky, 55, is the undisputed comic laureate of glasnost. Once forced to circulate tapes of his routines underground, today Zhvanetsky plays thousand-seat arenas, appears on national television and counts Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev among his fans. To give readers a flavor of his comedic style, TIME asked Zhvanetsky to write a monologue about his trip to the U.S. last year.

"What really gets to a Soviet in America is not the fancy clothes or mammoth cars. It's the supermarkets. You can go crazy at the start, the middle and the end. There are meat counters 200 to 300 yards long, with sausages as plentiful as raindrops, so many you keep bumping into them. That's the moment when Soviet tourists get weak at the knees and begin to feel queasy, but they refuse offers to be helped out for a breath of fresh air. The fruit-and- vegetable section is personally devastating. Avocados, papayas, kiwis, some kind of citrus thing that gets cut into five-pointed stars, who the hell knows what they all are. We should do something about it, comrades. While they continue to wolf food down like this, good relations between us are impossible.

Take our mandarin oranges. I once stayed in a Soviet hotel with a Japanese figure skater. He wanted to know what kind of fruit was on sale that was small, sour and green and got scooped up into bags. I told him they were mandarin oranges. "They can't be," he said. "I know what a mandarin orange is." What could I say? Maybe they get specially harvested as buds just for our people, so we'll walk around with sour faces.

What we take here for yogurt is not yogurt, cream is not cream, and milk is not milk. Maybe it's just a bad translation, but our cream is their yogurt, our yogurt is their milk, and our milk is their water. I wouldn't say they cook particularly well in America. They don't use any salt or sugar. Contrary to us, they want to live long; they like the way they live. We also want to live long, but it's because we don't like our life and we hope to live on into the next life. It would be nice to think that America has thrown open its doors and is waiting for us all to come over. But that's not the way it is. The Soviet Union has thrown open its doors, and it seems like all America has come here on a visit. So it goes."