Paul Goble
Staunton, July 4 – Russian television may provide ever less guidance as to what is going on in Moscow, but Russian anecdotes as was the case in Soviet times are filling the gap. For example, now that divisions are appearing in the top leadership of the country, ordinary Russians say they are wishing for both sides to win a crushing victory, thus eliminating both.
This is one of the new anecdotes assembled by Moscow journalist Tatyana Pushkaryova in her latest collection (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/43337/- ). Among the best of the rest are the following:
· Russians will tell their grandchildren about a time when there were McDonalds and Coca Cola in Russia, when the Internet was real and worldwide, and when they could fly abroad. Their children, of course, will laugh and tell these oldsters that they should “swallow their pills.”
· Faced with the difficulties of coming up with a domestically produced cellphone, Moscow is likely to restore landline phones, something familiar and produced even in Soviet times.
· Moscow knows that it is going to ban flights to cities in Southern Russia for months and months, but it can’t bring itself to say so. Instead, it declares that it is extending the ban only for a week or so. It doesn’t want to tell the people the truth and so feeds it with lies. No one dares change this diet.
· Russian leaders dare not publish their memoirs while they are still alive. Otherwise they will be reclassified as confessions.
· The Kremlin is committed to disproving the well-known adage that anyone who does nothing won’t be making any mistakes.
· What is a Russian midlife crisis? It’s when you want to have a family with five children but can only afford to pay for a single glass of mineral water.
· Putin is dreaming that in the 46th year of his rule, Russia will have become so wealthy that it will begin to buy up the world’s oil supply and pump it back into the Russian land.
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