cites a 1926 private collection, which renders the joke in a more gruesome form, where the Hare is scared of the rumor that all camels are taken hostages by Cheka and shot (a reference to the Red Terror). Later Melnichenko in his book Coветский анекдот. Указатель сюжетов reports an earlier version, a record of a censored sketch of the comic duo Bim Bom. A similar parable was told by a 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi Jalal ad-Din Rumi, in which a person was scared to be taken for a donkey and skinned. Ben Lewis in his "Hammer & Tickle" cites a yet another version: a flock of sheep seek refuge in Finland because Beria ordered an arrest of all elephants (an allusion to the sweeping national operations of the NKVD) and they have no chance to explain the difference to Beria. Lewis traces it to "a Persian poet in 12th-century Arabia, where it involves a fox running away from a royal ordinance that in theory applies only to donkeys." Golden Fish Aside from mammals, a rather common non-human is the "Golden Fish", who asks the catcher to release her in exchange for three wishes. The first Russian instance of this appeared in Alexander Pushkin's The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish. In jokes, the Fisherman may be replaced by a representative of a nationality or ethnicity, and the third wish usually makes the punch line of the joke. An American, a Frenchman and a Russian are alone on an uninhabited island. They catch fish for food and suddenly catch a Golden Fish, who promises to fulfill two wishes for each in trade for her own freedom:The American: "A million dollars and to go back home!"The Frenchman: "Three beautiful women and to go back home!"The Russian: "Tsk, and we were getting along so well. Three crates of vodka and the two fellas back!" Side Note: This joke is a play on the fact that in Russia it is believed that three is the optimal number of people for drinking. This in turn goes back to when in the Soviet Union a bottle of vodka cost 2.87 roubles, 3 roubles being a convenient price for three men to buy a bottle and have 13 kopecks left for a snack. The classic for the latter was a rectangular pack of soft processed cheese "Druzhba" (Friendship), with that exact price. Therefore, a natural