When Moscow Runs Out of Carrots, Duma Suggests It Can Use that Term for Pauses Between Sticks, Russians Say

Paul Goble

                Staunton, Dec. 4 – Moscow has always used a combination of carrots and sticks to force Russians to do what it wants them to do, but a problem has arisen: what can the regime do if it doesn’t have any more carrots? The Duma has come up with a solution:  pauses between blows with the sticks will henceforth be counted as carrots.

                This is one of the anecdotes in the latest collection offered by Moscow journalist Tatyana Pushkaryova (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/47268/-). Among the best of the rest are the following:

     ·       The police are raiding Moscow’s gay clubs but they won’t raid the Duma because there aren’t any enemy gays there, only “native faggots.”

·       The Dozhd television channel has been labelled a foreign agent for the second time, sort of like getting a second hero of Russia award.

·       Moscow has labelled LGBTs an extremist movement but refuses to do the same regarding the Taliban and Hamas, despite the fact that the latter two in contrast to the former cut off the heads of their opponents.

·       Beginning next year, Russians will be examined at work to find out whether their reproductive organs are working properly. Those whose organs are in good shape but who don’t have children will be inseminated.

·       Moscow editors complained when a journalist wrote that “half of all officials are thieves.” He parried their objections by replacing those words with these: “half of all officials are not thieves.”

·       Those women taking part in protests demanding the return of their men from the fighting in Ukraine clearly miss all those human rights defenders who have been labelled foreign agents, imprisoned or forced to emigrate.

·       Putin’s daughter now has more money than any of Gazprom’s “daughter” companies.