State media silently corrects poem in Putin quote after he misrecites lines Russians supposedly ‘absorb with their mother’s milk’
At a meeting with teachers on October 5, Russian President Vladimir Putin misquoted a four-line poem by Fyodor Tyutchev, while stressing that every Russian knows the lines.
“And right away, I’m reminded of what we absorbed at school thanks to people like you — practically with our mothers’ milk, as the saying goes: ‘Russia cannot be understood with the mind, nor measured by a common yardstick: It has a character all its own — you simply have to believe in Russia,’” Putin said.
In Tyutchev’s original, the final line reads, “You can only believe in Russia.”
The state news agency TASS silently corrected Putin’s mistake in its report, replacing his wording with Tyutchev’s original in the quotation.
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