Communists still don't have a sense of humor!

I'm delighted to read that the Communist Party of St. Petersburg, Russia, is as dour, sour-faced and humorless as ever. They apparently think that James Bond is the real thing! According to the Times, London:

Bond girls often come to a sticky end but Olga Kurylenko will be hoping that the Communists never get hold of her.

Kurylenko, the Ukrainian actress who plays Bond's sidekick in Quantum of Solace, has been condemned by the Communist Party of St Petersburg for aiding “the killer of hundreds of Soviet people and their allies”. Apparently oblivious to Bond's fictional nature, it accused her of assisting “a man who worked for decades under the orders of Thatcher and Reagan to destroy the USSR”.

In an appeal to the actress on its website, the party said: “The Soviet Union educated you, cared for you and brought you up for free but no one suspected that you would commit this act of intellectual and moral betrayal.”

It is not the first time the Communists of St Petersburg — or Leningrad, as they would rather it be called — have taken aim at perfidious Western films. Earlier this year they claimed that the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, set in the Cold War in 1957, was a vehicle for crude anti-Soviet propaganda and lambasted the antics of Harrison Ford and his ruthless Russian nemesis Cate Blanchett, calling them capitalist puppets.

The party declared that Ford had “no future in Russia any more” — a message that apparently failed to reach the country's cinemagoers, who flocked to see the film at a record 808 screens.

The Communists are, however, willing to rehabilitate Kurylenko — if she delivers her co-star, Daniel Craig, into the clutches of Russia's secret services for interrogation. “Let him tell what other plans are being written in the Pentagon and Hollywood to discredit Russia and drive a wedge between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples,” it said.

Sergei Malinkovich, the leader of the city party, told The Times: “Everyone knows that the CIA and MI6 finance James Bond films as a special operation of psychological warfare against us. This Ukrainian girl sleeps with Bond and that means that Ukraine is sleeping with the West.”

. . .

Kurylenko was accused of collaborating with the enemy by starring alongside the British spy while the struggle against Nato was continuing. It told her: “How could you desert your homeland in its moment of need? Do you really want Crimean girls to be raped by cruel and stupid American marines? Where is your patriotism?”

Fears of ideological contamination apparently did not prevent Mr Malinkovich, 34, from claiming that he had already seen Quantum of Solace, even though it does not open in Russian cinemas until next week. “I watched a pirate DVD,” he explained.

It is to laugh . . .

Peter