NIKITA Khrushchev (NK): Vladimir, please come in and have a seat!  It is so very nice to finally meet you after all these years!

VLADIMIR PUTIN (VP): Thank you, Mr. Premier, it is also good to meet with you.  I have heard so much about you also.

NK: Please, call me Nicky.  No need to be so formal.  After all, I am sitting with the man who finally took down that dreaded old enemy of mine, The United States of America!

VP: Only if you call me Vlad!  I’m afraid I have received far too much credit for that.  They really took themselves off the stage as a world power. My comrades and I just planted the proper seeds, and let them take root.

NK: Come now, you are being modest!  You must tell me how it happened!  We get so little news here, and since Ted Turner arrived, just about all we get is old reruns and CNN, and you know how sketchy that can be.  Was it a nuclear deterrent?  Did they finally concede that the USSR had vastly superior weapons and cowered down?  Did the spread of communism finally take hold and sweep the world’s governments?

VP:  You won’t believe when I tell you.  We actually dissolved the USSR as part of the plan.

NK: Dissolved the USSR?  How could that happen?

VP: Well, we sort of got the idea from American baseball.

NK: Baseball!  You mean the game where they hit a ball and everybody chases after it? Oh, yeah.  We tried that once but it didn’t catch on in the USSR. We kept losing the ball in the snow.  People wouldn’t even come out to watch on 50-ruble cold potato night!

VP: Well, in American baseball, you have good teams and bad teams.  Eventually, the bad team’s supporters get so disgusted with losing, they demand all the team’s management be replaced.  At this point, they will give anybody a chance to run the team, just on the hope of changing things around.

NK: I don’t understand at all.  How did this help to destroy the US government?

VP: After trying to intimidate them with military might, we started looking at a different tactic.  I mean, both sides had enough firepower to destroy the other, but what was the point in that?  If we shot at them, they would shoot back at us and we would all die.  So, we pretended to be dead ourselves.  Without the Soviet Union to be the bad guys, the Americans got softer and softer.  They broke up into small groups and practically went to war with each other.

NK: I see now.  After they became too soft, we re-grouped and swooped in and conquered them with little or no resistance!  What a brilliant plan!

VP: No, we didn’t have to.  The American voters, tired of losing, started voting for anyone who promised change in the way things were going, just like in baseball.  First, they elected a man who was only a community organizer, and followed that with a millionaire with no government experience.  It just kept rolling downhill from there.  We did hire a couple of teenage hackers in Moscow to break into one of their computer systems and told the news media we were trying to change their election results.  That almost broke them apart by itself, but mostly we just left them alone.  After that, we just took over while all the younger citizens were crouching in their safe spaces, arguing over which bathroom to use.  Didn’t have to fire a shot!  Of course, half of their Congress was on our payroll already, which made it a little easier.

NK: Now you’re pulling my leg!  That could never happen in a million years!  But here you are!  Here, let me pour you a nice glass of vodka.

VP: You wouldn’t happen to have a cold pitcher of iced tea, would you?  It seems a little hot in here.

NK: By the way, what the hell is a hacker?