Not only would it be difficult to eat muscle tissue without cooking (as already indicated) but you probably wouldn’t want to eat any part of the human body without thorough cooking owing to the likelyhood of transmissiable pathogens. This may not be an issue if you’re starving to death (which, I hope, is the most likely circumstance for cannibalism) but if you’re going to dine on someone’s liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti, you should make sure that the liver is well-cooked and shows no signs of abnormal pathology.
There’s a serious amount of weirdness coming out of Russia and some of the other former Soviet Republics these days–even weirder than the stuff that was coming out during the Reagan years–and most of it (including this particular tale) is probably crap, but you also have to acknowledge that at this point Russia is essentially a Third World country, dependent upon Western castoff and largess to keep functioning. Think of a subSaharan African nation with a nuclear stockpile and a legacy population of technical people. Neal Stephenson never dreamed of a situation so volatile.
Stranger