When Yeltsin Met Pinkie

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

Date: July 10th, 1996

Time: 12:50 AM

Boris Yeltsin blinked again and again, slowly and deliberately. And every single time he opened his eyes, the ponies were still there, sitting in the office. Worse, one of them had just spoken, and Yeltsin started to think that he was losing his mind.

The president again looked at the server full of liquor bottles. Could it have been the drink doing this to him? No, it couldn’t, for Yeltsin remembered that he hadn’t drank during the previous day, for he had spent much of the afternoon recovering from the massive hangover he had from drinking the day before that.

Yeltsin’s gaze returned to the ponies. The pink one was waving at the president again, and the golden one was hiding behind the light purple one. Yeltsin slowly raised his right hand and waved back.

“Privyet,” the president said with wide eyes.

“My name’s Pinkie Pie! What’s your name?” asked the little pink pony with the poofy hair.

It was talking again… It had answered him. Yeltsin had never experienced anything this wild, even during his drunken stupors. He didn’t want to believe that he was seeing three colorful, cute, cuddly ponies that were talking right to him, but there they were, plain as day. Boris Yeltsin peered into the bowl of half-eaten kasha and tartar sauce on the desk.

“Maybe it’s the kasha,” the president mumbled aloud, slowly raising his head. “It must be.” He unsteadily rose to his feet as his desk chair rolled back. With his right hand, he pointed at the three ponies. “You… you’re just my imagination from the leftover kasha.”

“No, silly!” Pinkie Pie laughed, hopping over to Yeltsin. “I’m Pinkie Pie!”

“Pinkie!” Twilight and Fluttershy squeaked in unison. “What’re you doing?”

“Who are you?” Pinkie Pie asked, hopping onto the president’s desk. Yeltsin, mouth agape, stared at the pink pony. She smiled at him, cocking her head to one side. She certainly looked like a pony, but she wasn’t like any of the horses or ponies that Yeltsin had ever seen in his life. And on top of it all, she was talking. Since when did ponies talk?

“Boris Nikolayevich…” the president responded after another few seconds of staring in shock.

“Hah! That’s a funny name!” Pinkie sang as she jumped off the desk and started hopping around Yeltsin and his desk in circles. The president watched her skip along, happy and carefree, as her mane and tail bounced around.

Yeltsin was about to have a mental breakdown. His heart was pounding ferociously, which was dangerous for a man in his condition. With every hop that the little pink pony took, Yeltsin felt himself going farther and farther off the deep end.

“How did you get in here?” Yeltsin stammered. “How did you slip past the guards? What… what are you?”

“You sure ask a lot of questions!” Pinkie said, bouncing along. “It’s like you’ve never seen ponies before!”

Meanwhile, Fluttershy was still cowering behind Twilight at the office’s center.

“What’s she doing?” Fluttershy asked.

“Pinkie’s just being Pinkie… Trying to befriend everyone she sees,” Twilight sighed.

“I have a bad feeling about all this, Twilight. Are you strong enough to get us back to Ponyville yet?” Twilight Sparkle’s horn glowed bright magenta, but in seconds the aura fizzled out.

“Not yet.” Twilight moaned as the two ponies watched their friend Pinkie Pie prance around the desk.

“Well,” Pinkie began, “we’re ponies from a place called Ponyville! Those are my two friends Twilight Sparkle and Fluttershy! Twilight tried to teleport us to a big city called Manehattan, but the spell she used went all kooky and we poofed in here!"

Yeltsin watched the pink ball of sunshine dance around, occasionally glancing at the pegasus and unicorn.

“Manehattan?” Yeltsin asked with a blank expression. “A spell? Ponyville?”

“Yup!” Pinkie sang, stopping in front of the desk and looking right at Yeltsin. “I know everypony in Ponyville! It’s one of the neatest places in Equestria!” Pinkie paused. “Have you never heard of Ponyville before?” Yeltsin vacantly shook his head. “Really? Wow, I’ve met a whole bunch of humans that knew about Ponyville. Sounds like you don’t get out too much, huh?”

“I’ve seen strange things in this country,” Yeltsin mumbled, “But never anything like this. This really takes the cake.”

“Cake!” Pinkie squealed as her eyes lit up. She started dancing around the room again. “I love cake! I work at a bakery in Ponyville called Sugarcube Corner. That’s where Mr. and Mrs. Cake make the most amazing cakes and cookies and pastries in Equestria!” Pinkie Pie suddenly stopped at the left side of Yeltsin’s desk and looked into the bowl of kasha and tartar sauce. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the bowl. “Is it pudding?”

Yeltsin slowly looked down at the bowl.

“Um, no,” he told the little pink pony. “That’s kasha. Kasha and tartar sauce.”

“Hmm. Kasha? I never ate kasha before. Can I try some? Can I? Please?” Pinkie Pie asked, hopping up and down. Yeltsin nodded weakly, and watched as Pinkie Pie started eating right out of the bowl, knocking the spoon onto the desk.

When Yeltsin heard the clank of the spoon on the wood, he started trembling. At first, it was just his right hand, but it soon spread through his entire body as his chest heaved and his eyes grew wide. Now, the pony had touched and moved the bowl, and caused the spoon to make an audible noise as it hit the desk. And it was at that point that Boris Yeltsin knew that the ponies weren’t figments of his imagination from liquor or spoiled kasha. They were as real and tangible as any other object in that office.

“Eww,” Pinkie Pie complained, scrunching her nose in discontent. “I thought it was going to taste like pudding. This stuff is gross!” Pinkie pushed the bowl away and looked up to find a sweating, trembling Yeltsin with a wild look in his eyes. The man was on the verge of a mental breakdown.

“Hey, Mr. Boris, you don’t look so good,” Pinkie Pie said to the president.

Yeltsin started giggling. The giggling gradually grew into hearty, boisterous laughter, and the laughter eventually became shrieks and shouts as the president ran out from behind his desk and thundered unsteadily towards the door to his bedroom, hands flailing about, going as fast as his flaccid girth would permit. Twilight jumped out of the way as Fluttershy yelped and flew up to the ceiling, both clearing the path of the crazed, pajama-wearing Russian president before he plowed them down. Yeltsin threw open the door to his bedroom, sprinted inside, and slammed the door shut behind him. The three ponies waited in silence for a few seconds, trying to take in everything that had just transpired.

“What made him do that?” asked Fluttershy, gliding down and landing on the floor next to Twilight. Pinkie looked at the bowl of kasha on the desk, then said,

“Hmm. Maybe it’s because I ate too much of his not-pudding.”

Meanwhile, in the bedroom, Yeltsin had already flipped on the lights and dragged a chest of drawers in front of the door. He was hauling over an end-table to supplement it. He then added another end-table, his nightstand, and two chairs to complete the barricade. The Russian president’s chest was heaving as he foamed at the mouth, eyes wildly darting this way and that.

“My gun… where did I put my gun?” Yeltsin yanked open the drawer of the nightstand he had used in the door barricade and reached inside. “Aha!” he cried, grabbing what he thought was the Makarov he kept in his bedroom for safety. But when he pulled his hand back out of the drawer, he found himself holding a stale banana.

“Shit, I must have put the gun in the refrigerator by mistake!” he seethed, throwing the banana to the floor. He began pacing, back and forth, as the floorboards creaked beneath his feet.

“Blyad’,” he hissed. “Blyad’, blyad’, BLYAD’! Is there no relent in this world? I had the year from hell, and now this bullshit!” He ran his hands through his hair, pacing more furiously now than before. “Little ponies. Little talking ponies. And they’re not my imagination. I heard them talk! I saw them touch the kasha! And I thought Perestroika was bad back in the day. If only I’d have seen this coming. But who in his right mind could have expected colorful little talking ponies to just appear one day in his dacha?”

He turned again, and looked at his phone and intercom by the bed. “I’ll call the patrols. The militsiya and the watchmen will take care of them,” he mumbled, taking the first few strides to the phone. But as soon as the idea came to him, he stopped. “But what if I am imagining it all? What happens when I call the guards and tell them that I want them to come up here and get rid of the ponies, and it really is all in my mind? I’d be ruined.” He turned again and started to pace.

He saw the ponies touch and move things in the office. He heard them talk. They answered him. But at the same time, it still seemed impossible, and he couldn’t write off the possibility that it was somehow all in his mind.

“Perhaps this is some kind of joke,” he went on aloud. “Maybe someone set up some elaborate joke. Maybe the ponies are just actors in expertly-designed costumes. Or maybe they’re animatronic. But who would have gone through the trouble of staging such an outlandish setup?”

Back in the office, the three ponies were still trying to decide what their next move would be. Twilight was still lightheaded and without sufficient magical energy to take the three ponies back to Ponyville.

“We have to get out of here, Twilight!” Fluttershy panicked. “That Boris guy is crazy, and he’s probably going to go from bad to worse!”

“Where are we going to go, Fluttershy?” Twilight rebutted. “Remember what he asked Pinkie? About how we got in past the guards? There are other people around here somewhere, and they’re apparently guarding this guy, who must be a VIP or something. It’s probably best that we just stay put. Whatever Pinkie did to scare that guy off… well, it bought us some more time alone in here.”

“Next time, Twilight, unless you know you’ve mastered the long-distance teleport spells… can we just take the train?”

Yeltsin was still turning over in his head the possibility that the ponies were some elaborate setup.

“It’s a reasonable explanation,” Yeltsin argued to himself. “Somebody is setting me up. But who? And why ponies?” He stroked his chin as he turned on his heels and stormed over to the other side of the room. As he approached the west wall of the bedroom, his eyes fell on the dartboard hanging on the wall. Well, he was paying more attention to the photograph that was taped over the face of the dartboard. It had two darts, a knife, and a small hatchet sticking out of it. The photo was a head-and-shoulders shot of Yeltsin’s political rival from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. And as Yeltsin stared at the face in the photograph, he suddenly put together what was going on in his dacha that morning.

“Of course… Zyuganov,” Yeltsin hissed through gritted teeth. “This is the work of Gennady Zyuganov!” He balled his hands into fists of rage as he stared at the photograph on the dartboard. It suddenly all made sense to the hysterical Russian president. And as the stolid face of Gennady Zyuganov glared back at him from the wall, Yeltsin couldn’t believe that he hadn’t figured it out sooner. He began to pace again.

“That’s it… it all makes perfect sense to me now!” Yeltsin announced to the empty room, emphasizing his words by holding up the index finger of his right hand as if he were giving some grand speech. “Zyuganov and the communists are naturally upset about our campaign’s success. They couldn’t believe that I worked my way back up from nothing and won the election.” A smile came to Yeltsin’s beaming face.

“Zyuganov thought he would just waltz on in and steal the presidency, but he lost. Again. So he put together this elaborate scheme,” Yeltsin went on, moving about the room as his lecture continued. “He set all of this up to take advantage of my poor health… to make me believe I had lost my mind. He’s trying to drive me completely insane so that I’ll be booted out of office before I begin my next term…”

Yeltsin was angry, but at the same time was getting more and more excited by the minute. He had figured out Zyuganov’s clever subterfuge, and was going to strike it down.

“And the pensioners!” the president continued with a psychotic gleam in his eyes. “I bet those lousy pensioners are in on this, too… The pensioners that are loyal to Zyuganov and the communists…” Yeltsin turned to look at the barricade he had thrown together at the bedroom door. “Those little ponies out there… are simply actors in costumes, working on behalf of the pensioners. Or maybe… maybe the actors themselves are the pensioners!”

With new-found strength, Yeltsin stormed over to the barricade and threw the two chairs aside.

“Zyuganov, you lousy bastard… Thought you could fool Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, huh?”

Boris Yeltsin then took the end tables and shoved them away.

“But I saw right through the clever scheme. It is the pensioners! The pensioners, loyal to Zyuganov and the communists…”

The nightstand was kicked aside, and the chest of drawers was tipped over, clearing the doorframe.

“You think you can restore the Soviet Union, Zyuganov? You think you can take me down and again empower the Party? Not on my watch, dirty dog.”

Yeltsin threw open the door to the office, again scaring Fluttershy, who once more hid behind Twilight.

“Hi again!” Pinkie Pie sang, waving pleasantly at the seething politician.

“Now I understand EVERYTHING!” Boris Yeltsin roared. “You three are working for the Party!”

Twilight and Fluttershy were now holding onto one another, trembling beneath Yeltsin’s booming voice. Pinkie Pie practically exploded with excitement.

“YES!” Pinkie cried, “I do, I do, I DO! I take the party with me wherever I go!”

The situation was even better than Yeltsin could have hoped. The foolish actor in the pink pony costume had openly admitted her affiliation to the Party!

“AHA!” Yeltsin bellowed. “So I was right, servants of Zyuganov! I’ve put together your clever scheme. What do you have to say for yourselves?”

“I say,” Pinkie squealed with delight, “it’s time to fire up the PARTY CANNON!”

Within the blink of an eye, the pink pony whipped out a little blue cannon with a floral design on the wheels. She was glowing with excitement as she grinned and aimed the cannon right at an awestruck Boris Yeltsin. The president felt his heart skip a beat.

“Pinkie! Stop!” Fluttershy shrieked. “You’ll only make him angrier!”

“Wh- where the hell did that thing come from!?” Yeltsin cried.

“I always take my party cannon with me!” Pinkie Pie announced with pride. The Russian president, frozen on the spot upon which he was standing, stared into the aperture of the cannon and shook his head.

“So this is how it ends,” he mumbled solemnly, trying to accept his bizarre fate. “They all said the drink would kill me, and I told them they were wrong. And in the end I was right. But to think... to fall at the feet of a… communist pensioner in a pony costume… There is no justice in this world.”

“FIRE!” Pinkie screamed.

“Pinkie! NO!” Twilight and Fluttershy beseeched. But it was too late. The cannon had already fired.