Humpty - thanks so much for the elaboration. I was hoping you'd chime in to help.
I thought the white stock inlays shown in one of the pictures (whether they were ivory, mother of pearl or whatever) were along the lines of what one might expect to be attractive to the Russian "market". A while back, while trying to track down some information on what turned out to be a Tula hammergun, I spent some time on the Tula Arsenal website and enjoyed immensely looking at the decorations on some of their guns' stocks.
As to the government trying to tamp down anti-socialist sentiment by allowing looting, some of the writings of defectors to the West mentioned a lot of the same happening in the 60s and later among Warsaw Pact troops. This sentiment was supposedly pretty widespread among those troops who went into the then-Czechoslovakia in 1968 - "This place is a lot nicer than home. Why are we here busting it up?" - so much so that many units were sent direct from there to the Chinese border to get that idea out of their heads.
Last edited by Dave in Maine; 11/21/12 09:35 PM. Reason: typo
