The "The masses are in the fields, laboring" joke
This joke was in Hedrick Smith’s “The Russians”. It is told as a joke by Russian men to describe how they see Russian women.
A sociologist wants to see how different ethnic groups react to the same situation. He takes two men and one woman from different ethnicities and puts them on islands, dropping each off in separate locations. The ethnic groups he picked were English, Spanish, French and Russian. He returned after six months to see what transpired.
The first island he went to was the French island. He found one man tending a well kept garden by himself. There was a nice, well built hut. He asked the man where the other man and the woman were. The man said, “We got together and decided that the best thing to do, since there were two men and one woman, was to share the woman. So I went off with the woman for six months and had an amazing time. The other guy built this and now I will tend it for six months while he has his turn.”
The sociologist was amazed at this practical solution to the problem. He visited the English island next. He found each person where he had left them. They each had made a modest living space, nowhere nearly as nice as the one on the French island. When he asked each of the English people why they hadn’t joined together with the others, the response he go was “We haven’t yet been properly introduced.”
He went to the Spanish island next and found just the woman alive. She had a hovel and was very sad and depressed. He asked her what happened. She said that the two men had fought a duel over her and killed each other. She had to bury them.
When the sociologist got to the Russian island, he found the two men seated at a table, drinking shots of vodka, making long boring political speeches at each other. He asked where the woman was, and one of the Russian men turned to him with a scornful look and said, “The masses are in the fields, laboring.”
