No One Yet Knows who Putin’s Opponents will Be in Presidential Elections, But Everyone Already Knows He’ll Win, Russians Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 24 – Some Russians are sure that their country is the most democratic country in the world. After all, four months  before the presidential election, no one know who will run in opposition to Putin but everyone knows that he will come out the winner regardless of who does.

            That is just one of the new anecdotes Moscow journalist Tatyana Pushkaryova has collected and posted online (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/47207/-). Among the best of the rest are the following:

·       Russian officials are saying now that there is no need for total mobilization just as they said before the last presidential election that there was no need for raising the retirement age. But miraculously, just after that vote, the need arose.

·       Russia’s new ideology is kowtowing to China but is now trying to figure out how to express that in a less offensive way.

·       Some in the Kremlin want to change the constitution again so that they won’t have to change anything else.

·       Real war widows are now cursing those women who do not want to join their ranks and are demanding that their husbands, fathers, and sons be returned home while they are still alive.

·       When Russians say they have two pieces of news, other Russians ask to be told the good news first, prompting the question “who said there was any good news?”

·       The Kremlin has made reporting about the sending of cannibals, serial rapists and murderers to fight in Ukraine an act discrediting the Russian army. What it hasn’t done is to make the dispatch of such criminals an act of discrediting the Russian army, although it clearly is.