The 'In Soviet Russia' meme, also known as the Russian Reversal, is a comedic trope where the subject and direct object of a sentence are swapped to create a surreal or absurd scenario. Originally popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff in the 1980s as a way to contrast American life with the Soviet Union, the format became an early internet sensation on sites like Slashdot and 4chan. The joke structure follows a simple logic: in a capitalist society, you do something to an object, but in Soviet Russia, the object does that thing to you. Over the decades, it has evolved from political satire into a versatile template used to mock everything from video game logic to social media trends.