If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "
It's more complicated :-D Like in French, most Russian nouns have masculine or feminine gender and IIRC in the original Russian the cook was specifically a female cook. And Lenin, sigh, was a cishet white male.
If https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin is to be believed then it's more complicated still because what Lenin actually said was exactly the opposite.