Derb: You knew I’d take the bait. The story (from June of last year) that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is Armenian appears to be a hoax. The original seems to be a blog posting at a Dutch paper.

But if true, he wouldn’t be the first: Anastas Mikoyan (brother of the MiG aircraft designer Artem Mikoyan) was president of the USSR in the 1960s. He was a slippery SOB who served under — and managed not to be killed by — Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. Maybe part of the price of that ability to survive was that his hometown of Sanahin in northern Armenia hated his guts — there is (or was, anyway) a Mikoyan museum there, almost exclusively about his brother the MiG guy, with a picture somewhere saying, “Oh, yeah, and his brother Anastas was president.”