Funny people, those Russians. The original report reminds me, in an oblique way, of a passage in Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag”. Said passage tells of a time at the peak of one of Stalin’s various terror periods: two Moscow academics, arbitrarily seized and accused of God-knows-what, are in the back of a KGB vehicle, being taken off to the KGB’s most feared torture prison, in the Moscow suburbs. The two guys have got into a passionate argument about details of court dress in the reign of Peter the Great, and are going at each other verbally hammer-and-tongs, about that subject – oblivious at least for the moment, to what shortly awaits them…