Staunton, October 7 – At the end of
Soviet times, a joke circulated in Moscow that appears to be having an echo
today. According to the story, Soviet
Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze met President Mikhail Gorbachev at the
airport when the latter was returning from Estonia.
“What have you done?” Shevardnadze
supposedly asks. Gorbachev replies: “Nothing. The Estonians asked for
independence, but said no. Then they asked if they could be independent for a
week and again I said no. But they asked if they could be independent for a
day, and I told them why not? After all, what could they do in a day?”
“Then you haven’t heard?” the Soviet
foreign minister says. “No,” says Gorbachev. “What happened?” “Well,” says
Shevardnadze, “the Estonians used that day of independence you gave them to
declare war on Sweden, and then they surrendered. Now, with Swedish forces at
Narva, what are you going to do?”
Today, the Kavkaz-Uzel.ru portal
reports that the website of the Astrakhan oblast duma featured for three hours
a call by the leaders of that oblast to secede from the Russian Federation and
form an independent Lower-Volga Peoples Republic. The press service of the
regional duma blamed this on a hacker attack (kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/250335/).
Because the declaration was put up
overnight, an official at the regional FSB office responded to an inquiry by
Elena Grebenyuk of Kavkaza-Uzel by saying that he “could not say anything” and
asked her to “phone back during normal working hours.”
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