Jokes with humor

On March 17, the Vologda prosecutor’s office began checking “for extremism” a joke post on Facebook by a local journalist

You had to work in journalism for many years, write a million articles, open a newspaper and radio, create a charitable foundation and remain of no particular interest to anyone. And then one day write a comic text, an anecdote - and become famous throughout Russia. It's about me. And it was like this...

Once I rummaged through the Internet and found out how difficult life is for the Russian-speaking population in Crimea. And that Russia must definitely help compatriots. “Damn it,” I thought, “but we, in the Vologda Oblast, are also all Russian-speaking, and our life is by no means sugary.”

This is how my “appeal” to the President was born. I wrote it about Vologda and for the people of Vologda, as a kind of cry from the heart, because the region is really in a debt hole, and there is no way out, and officials, as usual, save not on themselves, but on us. I thought, as usual, several hundred of my dear Vologda residents would read my post, smile bitterly - and that would be the end of it.

An no. For a week without a break, the phone “gurgled” with updates, the “appeal” was posted and liked, quoted in the press from Finland to Australia. I received a huge number of words of support and approval. In many areas where the situation seems to be similar, their own "appeals" have appeared. In the comments, the regions competed in the degree of their own decline, especially liked: "Do not occupy for Ulyanovsk!"

Time passed, and everything gradually calmed down. Unaccustomed to such overwhelming publicity, I sighed calmly.

Rejoiced early. Everything started all over again. Because the governor of the Vologda Oblast, Oleg Kuvshinnikov, breathed a second life into this story by writing a statement to the prosecutor's office. In order to verify the facts stated in the "appeal". That is, the prosecutor's office should find out (from me!), How things are in the region, and give the governor its opinion. Well anyway...

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Kind people from the regional government have already hinted that the governor does not understand jokes and is supposedly “very determined” to deal with me

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“And what other facts and documents do you have that testify to the collapse of agriculture?” the investigator asks me. Yes, I say, in the Syamzhensky district they tell how the farm went bankrupt. Everyone was described, everyone was fired. While there was food, the former workers fed the animals according to old memory, and then it was all over. The cows arrested by bailiffs are dying of hunger, yelling at the whole district, people in neighboring villages cannot sleep. The local men took a tractor, collected hay somewhere, and took it to the cowshed. So the bailiffs stopped them on the way and the tractor was arrested for debts. Yes, drive yourself ten kilometers from Vologda and go out into the fields. Will you go? “It is possible,” the investigator answered after thinking.

Feeling my responsibility, I described in detail the shortcomings and omissions in various spheres of the national economy in the prosecutor's office. And the investigator conscientiously recorded all this. There was that awkward feeling that happens when, after an anecdote told in a company, someone begins to find out what, in fact, was funny in it.

And almost at the same time, unknown radicals painted the door of my apartment with the inscription "Stop the Maidan!" And the news agency close to the authorities found out about this before me, and even before the policemen, whose information was referred to.

I'm afraid the story doesn't end there. Kind people from the regional government have already hinted that the governor does not understand jokes and is allegedly “very resolutely” determined to crack down on me. No, I'm not Batman, I'm different. And, of course, I'm worried and scared. But if in our country jokes become the subject of prosecutorial checks and criminal prosecution, and the Nazis intimidate people in the interests of the authorities, then, perhaps, soon we will really have to turn to the president with a request to protect the rights of a Russian-speaking journalist in the Vologda Oblast.