When Yeltsin Met Pinkie

The warm, summer nights were as beautiful in the suburbs outside of Moscow as they were in the center of the sprawling city itself. But some people would argue that you couldn’t actually enjoy the escape of summer unless you escaped Moscow proper, for it was too fast-paced, noisy, and crowded. That’s half of the reason why Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, was staying in his dacha at Barvikha village – to escape for a while.

Yeltsin’s recent years in office hadn’t been easy ones. The economic condition of the Russian Federation was looking worse and worse as the GDP continued to fall. The proposed liberal economic reforms were faltering. The president’s affinity for drinking didn’t make him look any better in the public eye. Duma elections of 1995 saw a majority of seats won by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation as people began to lose faith in Yeltsin and his political allies. By the end of his first term, his approval ratings had plummeted.

The situation was worsened by Yeltsin’s poor state of health. A series of heart attacks between 1994 and mid-1996 left their mark on the weary man. He had been hospitalized twice in 1995 for myocardial ischemia, a serious condition that restricts oxygen flow to the muscles of the heart. But Boris Yeltsin fought his way through the adversity, campaigning to win a second term as president of the Russian Federation

The ’96 presidential election had ended just a week prior, and Yeltsin had managed to scrape together a victory over Gennady Zyuganov, his opponent from the Communist Party. But it had been an uphill battle all the way. Yeltsin again found himself drained from the long fight. So he was now living at Gorki-9, the presidential dacha at the Barvikha Sanatorium, outside of the hustle and bustle of Moscow, taking one day at a time in the wake of the campaign and his devastating health problems, allowing life to settle back down.

But what Boris Yeltsin didn’t know was that his life would soon be turned upside-down again. And this time, there would be ponies.

*   *   *

Location: Горки-9 Presidential Dacha, Barvikha, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation

Date: July 10th, 1996

Time: 12:30 AM

It was a tranquil morning. Every window of the president’s dacha was dark, and Boris Yeltsin was sleeping in his cozy room on the second story. The interior of the house was quiet, save for the ticking of the clocks and Yeltsin’s obnoxious snoring. It seemed that everything was leading into another normal day at Gorki-9.

In the office that separated the president’s bedroom from the rest of the house, the books sat on their shelves, the bottles of liquor rested on the server, and the portrait of Alexander Pushkin that hung on the wall watched over the dark room with a perpetual gaze. The room had seen a number of distinguished guests over the years, but on this particular morning, it was about to receive its first-ever unguligrade visitors.

Following a bright flash studded with little purple twinkles, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, and Twilight Sparkle appeared at the very center of Yeltsin’s office. They looked around, barely able to discern the dark room in which they had just arrived, and it became immediately apparent that they didn’t end up where they had intended to be.

“Hey!” Pinkie exclaimed, head turning this way and that, “this doesn’t look like Manehattan!”

“Where are we, Twilight?” asked Fluttersky, barely able to see her friends in the darkness despite their proximity. Twilight Sparkle put a hoof to her head.

“I have no idea,” she mumbled. “Something went wrong with that spell. I still haven’t quite mastered such long-distance teleportation yet, I guess. Though I thought going for Manehattan wouldn’t be that difficult.” Fluttershy and Pinkie heard her plop down on the floor and groan. “Sorry, girls,” she continued. “I’ll take us back home after I take a few minutes to rest. That took a lot out of me. I have a massive headache.”

At the same time, in the neighboring room, President Yeltsin had been tossing and turning in bed. After waking himself up with a throaty snort, he sleepily opened one eye and peered at his clock, which showed 12:35 AM. He moaned and turned over.

“Why do I keep waking up?” he mumbled. Yeltsin beat his pillow a couple of times and tried to fall asleep again, but gave up after only a minute or two. He sat up in bed, yawned, and scratched his chest. “Damn it…” he grunted.

The president slowly got to his feet and wobbled over to the window, where he opened the blinds and peered outside into the black of night that surrounded Barvikha. Save for a few watchmen, everyone was slumbering. This had been the fourth time he’d woken up since he hit the sack the previous day. He scratched his head and yawned, wishing he could just lay back down and stay asleep. Suddenly, he had an idea.

“Kasha,” he muttered. “I still have some kasha left over from yesterday. I’ll eat the rest of that, and it’ll put me right back to sleep.” Yeltsin turned from the window and took a step, stubbing his toe on an end table.

“God damn it!” he seethed. “Who the hell put that thing over there?” He carefully stepped the rest of the way across his dark bedroom toward the door to his office. It was time to satisfy the midnight craving for porridge.

On the other side of the door, the ponies were still sitting and talking.

“You know, Twilight, we don’t have to leave so soon,” Pinkie Pie said. “We should do some looking around and see where we ended up! And hey, we might actually be in Manehattan already! What if you just teleported us into somebody’s basement or something?”

“We’re not in Manehattan, Pinkie,” Twilight responded, caressing her horn as she rested on the floor. “I definitely felt something go wrong with that spell as we were coming over here. It shouldn’t have been as exhausting as it was.”

“Girls…” Fluttershy stuttered. “Did either of you just hear something?” The three ponies sat in silence in the dark room, holding their breath as they listened for noise.

They heard a series of thumps – footsteps – getting gradually louder. They weren’t listening to a regular stride. Whoever was walking was moving very slowly, and his path was full of missteps. Then, the three ponies heard the jiggling of a doorknob, and a slow creak.

“What was that? What was that!?” Fluttershy whispered shrilly.

The flick of a switch was heard as the lights of the office came on. Fluttershy hid behind Twilight Sparkle and Pinkie Pie as the three ponies stared up at the figure that appeared in the doorway before them while their eyes slowly adjusted to the light.

The man in the office was squinting in the lamplight as well, putting a hand up to his forehead so he could see. He was a tall, grey-haired, somewhat portly fellow, dressed in pajamas that were covered with little pictures of a rabbit and a wolf, the two lovable characters from a popular Russian children’s cartoon, “Nu, pogodi!” The first president of the Russian Federation, in all his sleepy, lethargic glory, staggered into the office, right past the wide-eyed ponies in the middle of the room, and out the second door that led to the staircase.

Twilight’s eyelid twitched. Fluttershy looked like she was going to jump right out of her skin. Pinkie Pie seemed thoroughly entertained.

“Humans,” Twilight mumbled. “Uh oh. I really messed this one up. I took us out of Equestria entirely… Ugh, how many times is this going to happen?”

“Oh no… Oh no…” Fluttershy squeaked, unable to sit still. “I remember the last time we ended up among the humans… I don’t want to have to go through all this again!” Fluttershy grabbed and shook Twilight by the shoulders. “You gotta take us home, Twilight! Who knows what could happen!”

“Calm down, Fluttershy!” Twilight said, grabbing hold of the hyperventilating pegasus. “We’ll get out of here. I just need some more time to rest and get the magic flowing again. I think we’re okay for now, because that guy didn’t seem to notice us.”

Pinkie Pie, meanwhile, was staring at the doorway through which Yeltsin had passed. She looked around the office, and then said to her two friends,

“That guy looked kinda funny.”

Boris Yeltsin, meanwhile, stumbled down the stairs, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Coming down from the final step, he turned and stubbed his toe again, this time on a chair in the vestibule.

“Augh! Blyad’!” he growled, walking off the pain. “How much does a man need to go through to eat his goddamned kasha?”

He pressed onward into the kitchen, flipped on the lights, and opened the refrigerator. Among the vegetables, bottles, and half-eaten leftovers was a bowl filled with what was left of the previous morning’s kasha. The sleepy president grabbed the bowl and scanned the shelves on the refrigerator door for blueberry jam, but it was nowhere to be found.

“What the hell is this? I’m out of jam?” he grumbled, looking for an appropriate substitute. But there wasn’t anything else on the refrigerator door other than ketchup, tartar sauce, and sour cream. “Mmh. Tartar sauce probably goes pretty well with kasha.”

Humming the song Million Scarlet Roses as he went along, Boris Yeltsin put the bowl on his countertop, grabbed and opened the tartar sauce, and started pouring it on the cold porridge. He of course was doing most of the work with his right hand, for he had lost the thumb and index finger of his left in his younger days. He fished around in a drawer, took out a soup spoon, stuck it in the kasha, and started to eat.

“Hey,” he said, almost incomprehensibly, with his mouth full of porridge and tartar sauce, “this is actually really good. And to think, I’ve been putting jam on it like a moron for the last twenty years.”

Pleased with his new concoction, President Yeltsin carried the bowl to the door, eating as he went, flipped the light switch, and staggered back toward the staircase. Ascending one step at a time, he made his way back up the stairs.

In the office on the second floor, Pinkie Pie had been hopping around, looking at the portraits on the walls, the books on the shelves, the furniture, and the things strewn about Yeltsin’s desk and end tables.

“This place looks neat! Where do you think we are in the human world, Twilight?” Pinkie Pie asked. Twilight looked around at the décor and the furniture. Twilight Sparkle shook her head.

“I’m not sure, Pinkie, and I don’t think we should stick around any longer than we have to,” Twilight answered, holding her forehead again. “But I still feel way too lightheaded to take us back yet.”

“But what are we going to do while we wait?” Fluttershy asked, staring at the doorway where Yeltsin had left earlier. “We can’t just sit around here like this… What if that guy in the pajamas comes back?”

“Well, he didn’t notice us the first time,” Twilight said with an optimistic smile. That answer wasn’t good enough for Fluttershy.

“Girls, we need to get out of here!” Fluttershy panicked. “We’re sitting ducks!”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to just start moving around, Fluttershy,” Twilight reasoned. “We don’t know who else is walking around in any of these other rooms. What happens if we run into somebody that’s a little more observant than the guy we saw before? Besides, I shouldn’t need that much more time. We’ll be back in Equestria before you know it!”

Fluttershy still wasn’t convinced and was about to say something more, but froze along with Twilight and Pinkie before she could utter a single word. Through the doorway to the rest of the house, the ponies could hear someone singing a song, and it was getting louder. Once again, Boris Yeltsin entered his office, still mumbling the words to Million Scarlet Roses, off-key, occasionally stopping to eat another spoonful of tartar-sauce-smothered-kasha. He again walked right past the three colorful ponies at the center of the room, but this time to his desk, on which he placed the bowl. The president reached over and grabbed the previous day’s newspaper that was sitting on the table by the window, and then then let himself fall into his desk chair. Twilight, Pinkie, and Fluttershy stood their ground at the center of the office, unsure if they should try to sneak away or just remain still to avoid attracting the man’s attention.

Yeltsin spread the paper out on his desk and began reading through the front page articles, eating spoonful after spoonful of his disturbing choice of midnight snack.

“Four-alarm fire at Arbatskoye… Recalling forty-thousand Volga automobiles due to lack of brake pedal… Leading cause of death in pensioners now believed to be bathtubs…” Yeltsin said aloud as he read the headlines. “Same old bullshit.” He was about to spoon another glob of the kasha into his mouth, but he stopped, letting the spoon hang in the air. Something just didn’t seem quite right. He carefully lowered the spoon back into the bowl and slowly looked up from the newspaper to the center of his study.

There were three little ponies standing in the middle of the office – one light gold, one pink, and one light purple – staring back at the Russian president. They couldn’t have been very much more than three feet tall. He didn’t know how long they had been there, and he didn’t know how he could have missed them earlier. They were watching him with nervous expressions. Well, two of them looked nervous. The pink one with the poofy mane and tail had a gigantic smile plastered on her face.

Yeltsin’s mouth was agape. He rubbed his eyes and looked again, but the ponies were still there.

“Hiya!” Pinkie Pie called to the shocked Russian president, waving to him excitedly. Twilight put her hoof to her face and shook her head.

Boris Yeltsin stared speechlessly at the colorful animals before him for a few seconds more. He then slowly turned to look at the many bottles of liquor on the server by the wall at his left. Then his gaze returned to the ponies. The pink one waved again. He mumbled aloud,

“I need to lay off the Svedka. I’m seein’ shit.”