Putin’s War in Ukraine has Finally Given Russia a Two-Party System, Russians Say, the Party of Peace and the Party of War

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 9 – Despite the increasing repression in Russia, Putin’s war in Ukraine is generating a growing number of anecdotes and jokes not just about the war itself but also about the nature of Russian politics and Russian society that has allowed this crime against humanity to occur.

            Moscow journalist Tatyana Pushkaryova’s latest collection for Publizist.ru makes that clear (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/42631/-). Among the best of her latest offerings are the following:

·       Russians are worried about the future of elections in their country. It turns out that the ballot boxes they have been using in fact are produced abroad and may no longer be available because of sanctions.

·       Bashkir leader Rady Khabirov wants to eliminate the word “tolerance” from the Russian language and replace it with “love for Putin.” Such a proposal only shows how truly inexhaustible servility has become in Russia.

·       Russia’s population is increasingly divided between those who back Putin and those who have a brain.

·       Putin asks Peskov whether he is a traitor because there are “only traitors all around the Kremlin.” Peskov responds by asking “do you think I’m any worse than the others?”

·       Russians who have never seen clean toilets or paved sidewalks are ready to destroy the same elsewhere because since we have to put up with this, they say, everyone else must be made to do the same.

·       The Russian prime minster begs programmers and IT specialists not to emigrate because the Motherland had expanded work opportunities for them. Indeed, the opportunities it has created are “nowhere else to be found: police, prisons, Roskomnadzor, and officials with bottomless pockets.”

·       There are ever more words you can’t use in Russian, including “idiot, fool, moron, thief, dictator, rat, or crook,” because everyone immediately knows just who you are talking about.

·       Blitzkrieg when translated into Russian means “mugging.”

·       A Petersburg man was fined for quoting Putin on the horrors of war because the court said he was discrediting the Russian military by doing so. What the court did not consider is that the man conducting the war is discrediting even more than that.