One of the biggest sources of gossip in my gramma's life was when the Russian church muscled out the old Kadets-descended priests and laypeople in her little Florida ROCOR church, right around the Canonical Communion with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007.

Almost instantaneously we were up to our ears in slick guys with shiny suits making improbable real estate deals with money that just apparated from Lord Knows Where. I have a high tolerance for sketch, but Easter services rose past that threshold rapidly; there is only so much leopard print and fishnet I can take when walking around a tiny church at 2 AM.

Offtopic, but during that period, between 2007 and when gramma passed, I noticed another fascinating phenomenon. The old grannies would talk about some young gangster or other "finding their Jewish granma". I chalked it up to the usual venomous levels of Russian antisemitism[1], but a couple news stories later, and I'll be damned if there wasn't a brace of these jokers claiming Right of Return, supposedly from some Jewish relations they lost track of pre-WW2. Now, I'm not accusing anyone of anything here, but if I was a Russian gangster looking to move money around, and I look at the Right of Return, and then I think to myself about how, uh, lackluster records keeping was on the Ostfront . . I mean, the idea of maybe falsifying some family records might cross my mind. And maybe, if Israel needs some cash, maybe there's a renegade political party that needs some outsiders, they won't check those records super hard, either.

And that's how mischief in history happens right there.

[1] Particularly among the generation that got chased out with the Whites, the "last boat from Kaffa". To their dying day that generation basically considered Communism to be the "fist of the Jew" smashing the old order, and they carried that grudge their entire lives. I know, oof.