Old Marx sat in the library’s gloom,
Constructing a cradle, or perhaps a tomb,
While Engels paid the bills with cotton trade.
They dreamt of a world where the worker is king,
But forgot that the bell of the state has a ring
That deafens the soul when the trap is laid.

Then Trotsky arrived with a fire in his eye,
To preach of the permanent war from on high,
An orator’s tongue on a train made of steel.
But theory is thin when the winter sets in,
And the exile was left with a hole in his skin,
Crushed by the hub of the historical wheel.

Enter Stalin, the clerk with the pockmarked face,
To scrub every "traitor" from memory and space,
With a pipe and a smile and a list for the dead.
The "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" thrives,
As long as you’re counting the ghosts of the lives
Who dared to dream differently inside their head.

Poor Pasternak scribbled of candles and snow,
In a dacha where only the weary winds blow,
Refusing to sing for the collective’s new choir.
He found that a Nobel is heavy as lead,
When the Party is counting the thoughts you have bred,
And lighting its lamps with your manuscript’s fire.

The dialectic is polished, the gulags are full,
They’ve pulled over history a shroud of thick wool,
To hide all the blood on the Manifesto's page.
From the library desk to the pick in the brain,
The paradise promised is nothing but chain,
And the actors are murdered for leaving the stage.