Comrade Scientists, PhD’s and candidates.
You’ve messed it up, your x’s and your naughts.
You sit there and logarithm your antidotes
While the potato crop just quietly rots.

From compost and dry mould you try extracting
A magic balsam, like some square root.
Maybe it’s amusing, and maybe it’s attractive,
But it’s the potato root that’s rotting underfoot.

By bus to Skhodnya station, don’t be late!
And there just leg it and be snappy,
When the honored spud is on your plate,
A pinch of salt and you’ll be happy.

You show your patriotism here, dig’em tubers,
Then bang, world fame will explode like ammonal.
Instead, your whole gang are out slicing tumors,
And also legs of dogs - and that is criminal!

Comrade Scientists, enough of all your probings,
Quit your experiments, hydrite and antihydrite.
Get in the trucks and drive down to Tambov province.
Your gamma-rays can wait before you set’em right.

To Tambov we are driving, don’t be late!
And there just leg it and be snappy,
When the honored spud is on your plate,
A pinch of salt and you’ll be happy.

Bring your families along, your brothers and your sons,
We’ll put them up in comfort and later you’ll exclaim:
To hell with those blue-genes, those other chromosomes,
We’ve had a hard day’s work, and now it’s time to play.

Drive over, Comrade Scientists, Einsteins prized and rare,
Inestimable Newtons, together we’ll be one.
"Cos our earthly suffering, it fills a common grave:
The earth she jus’ don’t care, it’s phosphates or it’s dung.

By bus to Skhodnya station, don’t be late!
And there just leg it and be snappy,
When the honored spud is on your plate,
A pinch of salt and you’ll be happy.

Head over, my sweet ones, in ranks without hiatus,
Although you’re major scholars and never wear a cross,
You’re wilting there behind your apparatus,
But here the air is clear, like medicine, dross.

Comrade Scientists, relax, if something breaks or bubbles
Or goes wrong, like, say some bezerk phenomenon.
In a flash we’ll be there with our pitchforks and our shovels,
A few day’s deliberation, and it’ll again be running.

To Tambov we are driving, don’t be late!
And there just leg it and be snappy,
When the honored spud is on your plate,
A pinch of salt and you’ll be happy.