Medvedev’s Warning about Firms Returning to Russia Really about Himself, Russians Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 27 – Dmitry Medvedev says that firms which have left Russian recently will find it difficult to return because there will be Russian ones in their place. His comments, Russians joke, aren’t really about the firms but about himself. He will find it more difficult to return to the Russian presidency than it was to get there the first time.

            But they add, it is completely possible he will succeed, “under certain conditions.” That is perhaps the best Russian anecdote in the latest collection Moscow journalist Tatyana Pushkaryova offers (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/42795/- ). Others of note for their instructiveness if not humor include:

·       Security Council Secretary Nikolay Pastrushev says that Europeans are going to suffer disaster after disaster because of the influx of Ukrainian refugees. What is more interesting is what he doesn’t say: will the Europeans in fact recognize that they are doomed?

·       A Russian official who makes 100 times more than ordinary Russians says that the latter should make contributions to replacing the sunken Moskva cruiser. Wouldn’t it be easier all around if he and his like simply made contributions? Unlike other Russians, they wouldn’t miss them.

·       Russia’s rice harvest this year may be down 40 percent because of water shortages in Krasnodar kray, but the Kremlin isn’t worried. China can be counted on to supply the water, as long as Russian builds a strategic rice water network named “The Strength of the Kuban.”

·       Russia should start renting spaces in its prisons to European countries. That would help both sides: Russia would earn money, and Europe would see its crime rate fall because criminals there certainly fear Russian prisons more than they do prisons in their own countries.

·       Russian scholars are now talking about sending seeds into orbit so that they will survive in the event of a nuclear war. Wouldn’t it be easier, Russians ask, to send into outer space Vladimir Putin, the only person who might cause such a war?

·       Russians have learned that it is far more dangerous to carry a blank sheet of paper into the streets than to carry and drink from a bottle of vodka. The former can get you in trouble for being against Putin’s war in Ukraine; the latter will only do so if you are so drunk you can’t turn on Russian state television.