'There are going to be fewer but better Russians'

Ninotchka is one of my favorite movies of all time. It perfectly illustrates the dichotomy between capitalism and communism. Greta Garbo plays Ninotchka and this is the movie that was advertised, “Garbo laughs!” She has my favorite line at 8:38 in the clip above: “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.”

Fun fact: Ninotchka came out in 1939 when my father, Hubert P. Yockey, was 23. In his second book, Information Theory and Molecular Biology (1992, Cambridge University Press — see my Amazon widget on the right), he gave a problem featuring Buljanoff, Iranonoff and Kopalski — three of the characters from Ninotchka — without having seen the movie after its original run. Here is the end of the movie — it includes a scene with Bela Lugosi! — with the scene that must have fixed their names in his mind: