Peter Krupa

This morning, Slate.com’s always-delightful Jack Shafer skewers a Russian government advertising supplement that appeared in the Washington Post:

Back in the 1990s, Regardie’s magazine attempted to parody the foreign-nation advertising supplements that occasionally run in the Post,albeit to little success, because you can’t parody state propaganda. The only way to slog through the stilted, typo-marred copy of “Russia: Behind the Headlines” is to impose a Boris Badenov-style Russian accent on the stories and edit out the articles the and a as you read along. Sentences such as “Russia’s Central Bank has declared the necessity of a symbol for the ruble, one that would eventually be in league with the $ dollar and € euro signs on the world market” suddenly become bearable. Sentences such as “President Putin promised to create the National Russian Language Foundation, which would promote Russian language and culture all over the world” become delightful.