MOSCOW, May 27 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin, after a weekend of wisecracking with U.S. President George W. Bush, showed his new-found talent for witty one-liners again on Monday -- this time taking a shot at Russia's communist past.
"I see on the list the name of one Mr. Engels from Germany," he said, opening a Kremlin congress of European audit institutions. "Thank God he came without Marx," Putin chuckled, prompting laughter among delegates.
The writings of communism's fathers Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx provided the theoretical basis for the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that ushered in seven decades of communist rule in the Soviet Union.