Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?

[Red Square]

This 1931 Scott Paper ad is a perfect early example of systemic analysis: Bolshevism is what happens when the washroom is unpleasant and the towels feel like sandpaper.

The part that never makes it into the pamphlets is that capitalism has an annoying habit of solving small, real-world problems quickly, cheaply, and without a firing squad. Every worker gets equal access to hygiene - and the revolution dies not with a bang, but with two-ply.

And yet, comrades, do not underestimate the revolutionary potential of a paper towel. Or toilet paper, for that matter. Because sixty years after this ad, the communist country where I lived had neither paper towels nor toilet paper in its washrooms - public or otherwise. And nothing says “communism” like the absence of hygiene products. One might say the USSR collapsed in the washroom.

On the flipside of this decadent bourgeois ad, communist washrooms were breeding capitalists.

[Komissar al-Blogunov]

I have a brother in law whose relatives lived on the other side of the curtain.  When they had opportunity to visit him in the US, they packed up their people's toilet paper since they were told it wasn't available in the West.  Like many Eastern Europeans of the day, they were absolutely gobsmacked by the goods and services available here.  They returned with suitcases of Charmin, and I forgot to ask if it got past customs in the home country.

[Red Square]

Your relatives probably got arrested because they squeezed the Charmin.

[Margaret]

"Did you bring enough Charmin for everybody, comrade?"

"I didn't think so many people would be here!"

Blam, blam.

[Colonel Obyezyana]

They definitely had TP in the GDR in the form of dark beige rolls of paper with the texture of cheap cardboard.

The Soviet Union had plenty of toilet paper but you had to get up early and hit the streets to get it— the first printing of Pravda and Tass sold out quickly.

[jackalopelipsky]

Remember when CoVidism first arrived? What commodity was snatched from grocery store shelves and bigly membership industrial sized shopping emporiums, leaving voids where once plentiful stockage had existed?

That’s right, comrades. Toilet paper! Good ol’ tp!!

The People knew Bolsheviks had taken over national healthcare and sanity and needed to hoard the Charmin’ for their future sanitation.

No double ply softness = Communism

The jackalope rests her case.