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 Checkhov, „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.

I have never had this happen before on X, and find it really interesting: this morning posts from Samidoun started reappearing on my X feed – Samidoun remember has been declared an illegal organization in Germany even though they were founded in the US simply as a Palestinian support org. I replied to a post and had it disappear, then reposted one and got the message „this post has been deleted“, then my entire X feed disappeared and I got the message „Something went wrong. Try reloading.“ When next I tried to follow a post I saw this.

It was like watching censorship switched off and on in real time. Really tantalizing, like reminding the viewer there is another world out there, which is so close just you can’t see it.

I was watching a video entitled „Undercover cops beating up students at the University of Amsterdam“ when the X feed disappeared and this came up. I hadn’t touched my keyboard or mouse, I was just watching the video.