Thanks for your willingness to dig into the language weeds with a polyglot prof.

At a party in Riga yesterday I collided with the alternate reality that even well-educated, fluent in English resident in London Russian-Latvians who grew up in Soviet times live in:

"We subsidized those Latvians"

"They lived better than all the rest of the Soviet Union"

"Zelenskiy is a Nazi traitor to the Jews"

"The Donbass was always Russian"

"The Holodomor was worse in Russia"

As your countryman Peter Pomerantsev said, "nothing is true and everything is possible".

Best from sunny Jurmala, Latvia.