Moscow Makes ‘Flowerism’ -- the Placing of Flowers at Monuments to Opposition Figures like Navalny – a Crime, Russians Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 25 – The Putin regime keeps adding new paragraphs to the Russian criminal code. The latest of these bans “flowerism,” which Russian say means the placing of flowers on any monument in memory of those who have died while opposing the Kremlin and its policies.

            That is just one of the anecdotes that Moscow journalist Tatyana Pushkaryova offers in her latest collection (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/47870/-). Among the best of the rest are the following:

·       Everything is going “strictly according to plan and that Kyiv will be taken by the end of the month,” the Russian general staff reported on February 731.

·       Jehovah’s Witnesses have been prohibited from visiting apartments but mysterious people are now going around to call on Russians to vote for Putin and to avoid going to Navalny’s funeral.

·       The Kremlin is mulling plans to celebrate the anniversary of the taking of Avdiivka and may even make it into an annual event.

·       Russia has the worst of everything: Italian corruption, American stupidity, and hidden Chinese communism.

·       Six weeks in advance of the presidential elections, it still isn’t clear against whom Putin is battling.

·       Russians used to be sent to prison for telling jokes. Now they are for reposting them. Yet another triumph of the Kremlin’s efforts to bring the Internet to the population.

·       A group of Orthodox Jews from the US has asked Russian commentator Vladimir Solovyev to change his religion from Jewish to anything else. “In the history of Judaism, there has never been any creature like you,” they say, to which Solovyev has replied “what about Judas?”

·       Alyaksandr Lukashenka has said that Russia and Belarus are stronger as two separate countries rather than they would be combined, a remarkable repost to what Putin argues for.

·       Police in Moscow are now distributing pamphlets among those who have put flowers on locations where Navalny’s memory is being celebrate that quote Stalin henchman Lavrenty Beria’s wise observation that “it is better to sit at home than to just sit,” the latter being Russian slang for being in prison.