In a performance at the city’s St. Isaac’s Cathedral on Feb. 23, “Defend the Fatherland Day,” the St. Petersburg Concert Choir sang a cheerful little ditty about a submarine headed toward D.C. with “a dozen hundred-megaton payloads.” (A few days earlier, state TV had shown a map of the U.S. marking possible nuclear targets.) Said ditty was written in 1980 by a Soviet dissident and was intended (then) as a parody of militaristic propaganda; its reappearance now has causes a minor uproar. – Global Voices