Serious question: Was former DUer Catherina some sort of Russian disinfo op?

[DFW]

133. Some us learned Russian not only because of us thinking it was cool

Getting in touch with long lost roots/ancestors, and stuff like that, maybe going into the foreign service some day, foreseeing an era when it might be useful in professional life, and finally, because I love their folk music, and wanted to be able to sing those old songs. I even got to do a duet of Russian folk songs with Theodore Bikel one New Year's Eve. Here's a guy who was in a film with Humphrey Bogart and sang the Newport Folk Festival with Bob Dylan, and he invites me to do a duet of Russian folk songs with him! When I entered college, I joined the Balalaika orchestra for the music. It was the only college balalaika orchestra in the USA at the time.

It had nothing to do with loving the regime (Soviet or post Soviet) or socialism. Just like there are dude ranches in Germany, we liked the old Russian folklore. Some of their dissident authors wrote cool stuff, too. Vassily Aksyonov was so uncomfortable to the regime, he was kicked out of the Soviet Union and taught in Washington, DC for a while. I must have read his wistful story about the banalities of Soviet life, На полпути к луне (Halfway To The Moon) about twenty times through.

As for JPR, I hope that all who went there found comradeship and happiness. From I heard, it didn't turn out quite that way, but there is that old expression about people sleeping in beds they made.