MOSCOW

NEWS OF PRESIDENT President Vladimir Putin suffering a Death of Stalin incident has caused coronary experts around the world to insist that a heart attack in the case of the Russian leader is a physical impossibility as he clearly doesn’t have one.

“It may have been indigestion,” said John, an Irish doctor who specializes in by-pass surgery. “But a heart attack? No. It’s quite clear that the Good Lord performed his own by-pass there. Spleen? Maybe.”

” You simply cannot afford a heart when you’re leading Russia,” argues Leo Pushkin, a politics lecturer who spent ten years in a Siberian Gulag in the 1970s, as a guard. “That was Gorbachev’s failure. Indeed, that was Yeltsin’s failure, too. Every time Russia gets a leader with a heart, or even the semblance of a heart, things go badly. Ask Nicholas Romanov. Ivan Grozny, he set the gold standard for ruling in Russia. It still applies. Even rumors of a heart are enough to ruin a Kremlin boss. Putin had better stamp this out, and quickly.”