Wanted: Russian poets

This must’ve lost a lot in translation

Juneteenth is a great name for a holiday, because the name itself has to be explained to newcomers, along with an interesting back story. Thanksgiving could be translated pretty easily into any other language, and the Germans better not give us a hard time about fusing words without hyphens. Memorial Day is easily understood. Christmas, too.

But don’t tell the Russian government about brevity being the soul of anything.

The Russian government has declared a new official holiday. And in keeping with the humor coming out of Moscow these days, it’s called … (drumroll) … .

“The Day of Reunification of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Lugansk People’s Republic, the Zaporozhye Region and the Kherson Region with the Russian Federation.”

TDOROTDPRTLPRTZRATKRWTRF, for short.

What happened to May Day? Last week, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin signed a federal law—this is a good read, too—“on amendments to Article 11 of the Federal Law on Russia’s Days of Military Glory and Commemorative Dates.” The U.S. government also has its jargon and word salads—try reading the tax code—but this stuff out of Moscow goes above and beyond the call of apparatchik duties.

So how celebrate TDOROTDPRTLPRTZRATKRWTRF?

Fireworks? Parades? A nice cold bowl of borscht?

We suppose we need to first figure out what TDOROTDP-etc. is celebrating. Since, in the holiday’s official name, we can remember a good deal of what came before the phrase “with the Russian Federation,” we think it has to do with the annexation of several parts of Ukraine. The holiday uses the word “reunification,” but what has happened on the Ukraine-Russia border is as much a reunification as was the German takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939.

Comrade Putin says the official date for festivities will be on September 30th, since that date marks the one-year anniversity of the annexation, er, reunification with those regions. Although the mere residents on the ground in several of them might tell you that they were quite Russian-free on September 30th last year. But what do they know?

So now that the holiday has been explained sufficiently, how celebrate the date each year? Maybe with a reading of medical journals. Or perhaps break loose with a band playing the latest Russian funeral dirge. Which might fit the convoluted name of the holiday, a name as exciting as watching moths climb drapes.

Oh, here it is. According to the Russian press, the new holiday will be celebrated thusly:

“With festivities and various events.” What happened to beautiful Russian poetry?

Maybe it’s just too hard to come up with the holiday spirit when all the body bags are stacking up in the Russian streets.