There’s a wonderful Monty Python sketch where two office workers are busy at their work, facing each other across their desks. In the short background is a wide window. Other office workers on higher floors are killing themselves (due to a depression?) and the two workers in the skit are taking bets as to whom will jump from their window next.
Parkinson will be next. No he won’t. A fiver? Come on, Parky – Don’t do it, Parky! The comedy continues.
But that was in the 60s and it was a comedy skit. The Russians have never been known for their comedy. Sure, there’s a couple jokes in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but they are lame and no one outside Russian can understand them anyway. They mostly only have incidental comedy.
Lukoil Ravil Maganov, the Big Kahuna of Russian oil, fell out of a window. He said openly that he wanted a quick resolution to the Ukraine invasion. Putin thinks invading Ukraine is a joke. He doesn’t want to resolve anything he started.
Putin may hold several American secrets, sold, loaned or rented to him by Donald Jerkwad Trump. Several other high-profile Russians have died in strange ways – one by toad poison given to him by a shaman … ?
Back to Dostoevsky. Russia is in a perpetual Dostoevsky novel. Dark, ugly, death at every corner, nobody smiles or tells a joke, they all eat black bread and drink from samovars and quote nihilistic philosophy at each other. This is the country that defined meaninglessness as a philosophy.
Where Gorbachev was closer to a hero in an American novel, Putin is very much a Russian character, or caricature is a better fit.
The good news: like Trump, Putin will lose all his top people, not because he’s addicted to the phrase “You’re fired”, but because they’ll all die. (Why do you think Putin and that anus from Saudi Arabia, Salmon Bin Bing Bong, high-fived each other.
Murderers always stick together … until one dies and there’s a last man standing.
