Kirby Super Star for the SNES is the best-known Kirby game, and uniquely divides itself into multiple smaller adventures (plus several minigames) rather than one large one. These adventures are allegedly unconnected, but in fact come together to present a Marxist (likely Trotskyist, more specifically) critique of the early history of the Soviet Union, from the October Revolution to the end of World War II, adopting an attitude that is celebratory of the Russian Revolution while more mixed (and ultimately harshly critical) of the USSR’s policies. I will analyze the sub-games in the order that they are unlocked in the game, as this is how they connect in chronological order as an allegory for the Soviet Union.

**SPRING BREEZE**

Spring Breeze, a remake of Kirby’s Dream Land for the Game Boy, is the first and easiest of the sub-games, intended principally to teach the game’s mechanics to the player. Similarly, the story behind this sub-game covers both basic Marxist theory and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. Dream Land, a peaceful agrarian nation on the planet of Pop Star, is terrorized by its self-proclaimed ruler, King Dedede. In the opening cutscene, Dedede’s henchmen seize the food produced by Dream Land’s residents.

This, of course, represents Marx’s version of the labor theory of value within the capitalist system–the proletariat produces all wealth, but the surplus value is seized by the bourgeois. While Marx’s analysis applied specifically to industrial capitalism, the choice to make Dream Land a more primitive, quasi-feudal agrarian society was deliberate–while Marx expected the first communist revolution to come in an industrialized country like Britain, Germany, or America, it actually came in Russia, the most backwards of the major European powers at the time of the Russian Revolution. Dedede’s exploitation of Dream Land also represents the strains placed on the Russian populace during World War I, which led directly to the Russian Revolution.

While the Tsar abdicated in the February Revolution to allow the formation of a liberal government, said government both continued the war against Germany and, despite socialist presence in the government, continued Russian capitalism. Therefore, after months of agitation by the Bolsheviks, the vanguard (represented by Kirby himself, a humble Dream Lander moved to fight against the oppressive regime) seized the capital city of Petrograd and established the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), and made peace with Germany to fight the anti-communist White Army which had just been formed. The Russian Civil War is given its own sub-game in…

**GOURMET RACE**

This sub-game takes the form of a race between Kirby and King Dedede, measuring both who can first reach the finish line of an obstacle course and who can eat the most food scattered throughout the course. The Russian Civil War was not without foreign intervention–the Entente (particularly Britain, France, America, and Japan) sent both aid and troops to fight the Red Army, represented here by the food.

However, the Red Army had already seized many of the most productive industrial and agricultural regions of Russia, and combined with internal divisions within the White Army’s ranks and the Red Army having much of the former Russian army on its side (as the Bolsheviks had previously promised an end to the war with Germany), they won handily (this is another relatively easy mode, as Kirby runs faster than Dedede), and the Soviet Union was formed from the ruins of the former Russian Empire. Back to Spring Breeze for a moment–the ending cutscene shows Kirby expropriating the stolen food back to the masses. The allegory here should be obvious.

**DYNA BLADE**

The initial leader of the revolution, Vladimir Lenin, died soon after the end of the Russian Civil War. Stalin succeeded him while killing or exiling his potential rivals, and the new General Secretary set out to ramp up the Soviet Union’s industrial and agricultural production. Stalin’s policies led to massive economic growth, but often had horrible side effects–the most infamous being the Holodomor, an artificial famine in Ukraine meant to punish those farmers who did not cooperate with the agricultural collectivization initiatives.

Dyna Blade is an allegory for the general difficulties in collectivization–rather than a blight, drought, or bureaucratic meddling leading to famine, the nascent workers’ state of Dream Land is plagued by a giant eagle named Dyna Blade eating all their crops. Kirby chases down and eventually defeats Dyna Blade in a fight, only to learn that she had been feeding her chicks. Kirby pushes her nest to Whispy Woods, who feeds them with his apples, thus solving the agricultural crisis.

**THE GREAT CAVE OFFENSIVE**

At the same time, the Soviet Union was experiencing significant industrial reform–Stalin expressed great desire to industrialize as rapidly as possible, no matter the cost. The Great Cave Offensive is representative of the Soviet Union’s resource extraction in Siberia.

While most of the Soviet Union’s land area was in Asia, most of its population was located west of the Ural Mountains. Siberia, which had first been colonized by the Russian Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries, was known to be a cornucopia of raw materials–wood from the massive forests, coal, iron, oil, diamonds, and many other metals used in industry–but its inhospitable nature made acquiring these resources a great challenge. The Soviet Union invested many resources and manpower into extracting Siberia’s wealth.

Our spherical comrade, Kirby, represents a miner venturing deep underground to extract resources from the Siberian earth. There is significant imagery in support of this–the levels within GCO are divided by minecart segments, and Kirby returns to the surface using elevators. The game mode itself revolves around collecting sixty treasures, representing the resources that Kirby has been hired to extract. The game may frame this as an Indiana Jones-esque archaeologists’ dig, but we know better.

**META KNIGHT’S REVENGE**

The People’s Republic of Dream Land is about to face a new crisis, this time from the outside. The ancient warrior Meta Knight, tired of Dream Land’s “lazy lifestyle”, sets out to conquer and presumably exploit the workers’ and farmers’ state, launching an invasion spearheaded by his massive flying battleship, the Halberd.

The imagery here is clear. Meta Knight and his army represent Nazi Germany, which was both rabidly anti-communist and saw the Slavs as an inferior race, to be either killed or enslaved to make room for German settlers in Ukraine and western Russia. The racial aspect of Nazism is ignored here (Kirby Super Star is, after all, intended to be suitable for young children), as Meta Knight’s army contains many different species. That the invasion is primarily from the Halberd represents Germany’s emphasis on air superiority in the *blitzkrieg* strategy, which had already brought Poland, France, Norway, and many other European nations to their knees. Once again, Kirby (detail I failed to mention before: he’s pink with red feet, representing a more infantile form of the crimson flag of the Soviet Union) sets out to destroy the invader. He is at first knocked off the Halberd, representing the early Nazi victories in Operation Barbarossa, but gets back on the ship, slowly dismantling the Halberd before defeating Meta Knight in his chamber.

**MILKY WAY WISHES**

The previous five sub-games have taken a rather rosy view of the Soviet Union, but Milky Way Wishes gives us a much more critical tone. In this sub-game, the sun and moon are fighting, and a jester named Marx tells Kirby to seek out NOVA, a giant space clock that can grant any wish. Kirby, on his quest to reach NOVA, unwittingly clears a path for Marx, who had in fact engineered the fight between the sun and moon and then used Kirby to get to NOVA. He wishes for massive power, but Kirby manages to destroy him in the final boss fight of the entire game.

Marx, of course, is a reference to Karl Marx, the political theorist whose theories were used as the basis of the Russian Revolution. So why is Comrade Kirby fighting against him? This is why Kirby Super Star is a Marxist, and specifically *Trotskyist*, critique of the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky, who led the Red Army in the Russian Civil War, was exiled by Stalin in his effort to consolidate power, and while still considering himself a supporter of the Soviet Union, was harshly critical of many elements of Stalinism from his new home in Mexico City, attacking the gulags, the purges, Stalin’s cult of personality, the effects of agricultural collectivization, and most of all the transfer of power from the soviets (regional workers’ councils) to the bureaucracy. In his mind, Stalin had betrayed the ideals of the revolution, and by extension the theories of Karl Marx. Rather than opposing Stalinism, the naïve Kirby forgets about Trotsky when his role in the Russian Civil War is covered up and goes along with the abandoning of Marx’s legacy. While the worst brutalities of the Soviet Union died with Stalin, the bureaucratic stagnation remained until the Soviet Union’s ultimate fall in 1991.