Kremlin Controls Priests More than It Does Teachers So Polling Places will Be in Churches Rather than Schools, Russians Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 9 – Russia now has more churches and mosques than it does schools and so the Kremlin has decided to relocate polling places to the religious facilities, Russians report; but the real reason lies not in the numbers but in the fact that Moscow controls priests and mullahs far more effectively than it controls teachers.

            That is just one of the anecdotes in the latest collection assembled by Moscow journalist Tatyana Pushkaryova (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/47763/-). Among the best of the rest are the following:

·       Russian officials are closing sex clubs and cancelling sex parties, but some “renegades” are still having sex in the privacy of their homes. Moscow will soon put a stop to that.

·       To combat the influence of LGBT people, Moscow now has canned all colors of the rainbow and will insist that everything be in one of 100 shades of gray.

·       Asked to explain why he’d invaded Ukraine, Putin said that to understand one must go back four billion years to a time when the earth was cooling.

·       He then said he could talk about inflation and deficits only by starting with what happened under Rurik.

·       If the West really wanted to hurt the Kremlin, it would have sent a real journalist to talk to Nadezhdin. But instead, it sent Tucker Carlson to speak with Putin.

·       Putin has been compelled to go to North Korea not out of current geopolitical calculations but because the Pechenegs attacked Russians centuries ago.

·       Russia Today head Margarita Simonyan initially said that trillions of people had watched Putin’s interview with Carlson, but the Kremlin asked her not to embarrass Putin and so she backed down to only one billion.

·       Leo Tolstoy was a genius who could look far into the future, but he generally avoided doing so because of the risks involved. Once, however, he looked 100 years in advance and so his great-great-great grandson in the Duma and considered what the latter said. As a result, the Russian novelist in depression left his house, went to Astapovo station, and died there of grief.