The man in the cassock takes five steps along the road and stops.

„I’ve forgotten to put a kopeck for the burying,“ he says. „Good orthodox friends, can I give you the money?“

„You ought to know best, you go the round of the monasteries. If he died a natural death it would go for the good of his soul; if it’s a suicide it’s a sin.“

—Anton Chekhov, „A Dead Body“, Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003), 26.

This afternoon at a memorial park north of Kaliningrad it occurred to me that I had not ever before in my life seen an official hammer and sickle live, in the flesh. You see it as antifa graffiti, and in movies, and decades-old Soviet memorials, but this was a real, current hammer and sickle. I have never seen this flag before. The way Russians integrate the Soviet past is really interesting.

Some Samidoun posts are appearing again, right after I posted the observation they had appeared and then been censored.