Once upon a time, back when Shmuglov—a shining city on a hill—was visible from afar, three stern Minsk Chekists were sitting in their west-facing office, squinting at the city's glare that struck right into their overworked eyes. Finally, exhausted by their irreconcilable struggle against the counter-revolutionaries and a parching proletarian thirst, they decided that class hatred could easily wait until morning. Disguising themselves as shmuglyars (smugglers), they crossed the cordon, covering their tracks like foxes with their tails, and headed to Rakov—simply to drink some good, cold capitalist beer.
Just like the previous times, Operation "Tipsy Foxtrot" went off without a hitch. However, on the way back, somewhere in the damp thickets of the neutral zone, weighed down by beer and mellowed in spirit, the Chekists stumbled upon a lone pig. According to their later sworn testimonies, the pig looked at them with profound class anguish in its eyes. To leave the animal to suffer from the exploitation of the pans (landlords) and potentially starve to death in decaying capitalism was ideologically incorrect. A strategic decision was made on the spot: to secretly herd the pig across into the Land of the Soviets and enlist it in the building of a bright future.
The problem was that the pig lacked political consciousness and flatly refused to observe light and noise discipline. Its frantic squealing, sounding more like an air-raid siren, alerted the Polish Defenzywa. Surrounded on all sides by border guards, the Chekists made a run for it, only to get tangled in the barbed wire strung up by their own comrades. They were caught red-handed and almost shot right there in the forest for attempting to escape, aggravated by the illegal trafficking of bacon.
A colossal international scandal was brewing like a subcutaneous whitlow. Official Minsk would have disowned them in a heartbeat, so deeply classified shadow channels had to be activated. The hapless beer lovers had to be rescued through the legendary Autonomous Off-Register Veterinary Laboratory—that very same secret Research Institute of ABP (Animal By-Products), masterfully directed by the eldest of the Hairy brothers, Akimych. Only the ABP, possessing absolute autonomy from all official registers and holding incredible leverage, could pull off such a clandestine diplomatic gambit.
In the end, after complex negotiations, the Poles returned the Chekists. But the stray pig (after the authorities received a formal report of its hijacking) was handed over to the aggrieved Pan Zablotsky.