Those Seeking ‘Russia’s Special Path’ on Yandex.Maps Told ‘that Road Not Yet Built,’ Muscovites Report

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 3 – Now that Yandex has a maps function, Russians are querying the online service as where “Russia’s special path” can be found. Unfortunately, the best Yandex can offer in reply, Muscovites joke with all too obvious bitterness, is that that road “has not yet been constructed.”

            This is just one of the anecdotes now circulating in Moscow that have been assembled by Moscow journalist Tatyana Pushkaryova (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/44816/-). Among the best of the rest in her latest compilation are the following:

·       Russian television mistakenly showed its viewers in the Far East Putin’s New Years greeting from 2036.

·       Ilon Mask is a pike. He lost 200 billion in 2022; but Russia lost a trillion because of Putin’s war in Ukraine, the sanctions the West imposed, and the economic crisis that has followed.

·       Russia is like the old woman in Pushkin’s tale about the fisherman and the fish who kept asking for more only in the end to lose everything.

·       Putin’s New Years message was important: it told Russians what they’d have to die for in 2023.

·       Aleksandr Prokhanov says Stalin is coming back in Putin and the current Kremlin leader may even grow a moustache. But of course, Hitler also had a moustache.

·       Everything in the world can be replaced, except for Putin.

·       Polls in Russia are simply the way the secret desires of those in power are legitimized.