There's not a bathing suit in Russia & other bare facts by Will Rogers
"There's not a bathing suit in Russia & other bare facts" by Will Rogers is a humorous travelogue and social satire written in the early 20th century. In it, Rogers records a fast, wisecracking tour of Soviet Russia via Western Europe, pairing slapstick travel scrapes with shrewd, plainspoken jabs at Bolshevism, propaganda, and daily life. Expect aviation escapades, vodka-fueled encounters, and lampoons of exiled aristocrats and American ideologues, all filtered through his
affable skepticism. At the start of the book, the narrator skewers the craze for Russia-writing and the flood of “grand dukes” and “princesses” haunting Paris salons, then stakes his novelty: he admits he knows nothing conclusive about Russia. A vodka misadventure with Morris Gest and Balieff, a buoying moment with Mary Garden, and a hard-won visa send him hopscotching Europe by air—past Channel swimmers and Dutch canals—before a surprise landing in Lithuania exposes his shaky grasp of new borders; he soon reaches Russia, noting women in the fields, men’s whiskers, and surprisingly easy customs. Finding no spies tracking him, he roams freely, tries and fails to see Trotsky, sketches Stalin’s backstage power, and chats with American radicals-turned-tourists. He then sizes up shortages and patched-up currency, the retreat from equal-pay dogma, the peasant’s refusal to sell grain at bad terms, and, in Leningrad, tours the Winter Palace and a grisly Revolutionary Museum—observing how propaganda and schooling start “at the cradle.” (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77828.html.images | 168 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77828.epub3.images | 3.0 MB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77828.epub.images | 3.0 MB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77828.epub.noimages | 185 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77828.kf8.images | 3.9 MB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77828.kindle.images | 3.8 MB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77828.txt.utf-8 | 145 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77828/pg77828-h.zip | 4.1 MB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Rogers, Will, 1879-1935 |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Roth, Herb, 1887-1953 |
| LoC No. | 27012792 |
| Title | There's not a bathing suit in Russia & other bare facts |
| Alternate Title | There's not a bathing suit in Russia and other bare facts |
| Original Publication | New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1927. |
| Credits | Tim Lindell, Steve Mattern, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature |
| Subject | Rogers, Will, 1879-1935 -- Travel -- Russia (Federation) |
| Subject | Russia (Federation) -- Humor |
| Subject | Russia (Federation) -- Description and travel |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77828 |
| Release Date | Feb 1, 2026 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 222 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |