James H. Billington, in the Wall Street Journal, contrasts two famous churches of the Eastern Schism, identifying in the architecture of St. Basil’s, in Moscow (above) the centralizing impulse of the Muscovite despotism, and finding -—by contrast—- in the design of the Church of the Transfiguration at Kizhi in Karelia the echo of the very different individualistic culture of Hanseatic Novgorod.

The Russian News and Information Agency Novosti reports that Vladimir Putin has put out a hit order on the insurgent killers of the four Russian diplomats slain in Iraq.

President Vladimir Putin Wednesday ordered Russia’s special services to do everything necessary to find and eliminate the killers of four Russian diplomats in Iraq, the Kremlin press service said….

Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Federal Security Service, told journalists that his service had received the instructions. “We will work to ensure so that not one of the terrorists who committed the crime escapes just punishment,” he said.

It is credibly rumored that when several Russian diplomatic personnel, including the KGB rezident, were kidnaped by Hezbollah in Lebanon back in the 1980s, Russian specialists were dispatched to Beirut, who proceeded to kidnap near relatives of Hezbollah’s leadership. The male apparatus of those captured relations was delivered to Hezbollah bosses, along with a promise that the Russian security forces would be collecting theirs as well, if the Russian diplomats were not released immediately unharmed. The Russians were released.

The effectiveness of Russian measures contrasted with useless American pleas for the release of Beirut CIA station chief William Buckley, whose death by torture was videotaped and tauntingly released to the Press.

Whatever will the Council of Europe, the New York Times editorial page, and Andrew Sullivan have to say, do you suppose, about the soon-to-occur treatment of the insurgent kidnappers by avenging Russian security forces?

Will accusations of denial of due process and Geneva Convention Rights make the front page of the Post and the Times? Will Seymour Hersch expose Russsian brutality in the New Yorker? Will the lachrymose chorus of blogging bed-wetters spill another few trillion electrons condemning Russian coercive interrogation?

Frankly, I doubt it.

Jewish children with teacher, 1911

The Library of Congress is exhibiting the photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944). These remarkable images were made as magic lanterns slides, and were displayed in color using a set of red, green, blue filters. The LOC has been able to produce new digital colored images by a process they are calling digichromatography, and their results are very impressive.

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Hat tip to Chuck.