In totalitarian systems, there is no limit to the perversity and pettiness of mind which can land you in a prison or a labour camp. Here, during the Soviet era, a meteorologist is arrested for a weather report which was perhaps too accurate in political terms, let alone meteorological.

He owed his arrest to the fact that in the meteorological report edited by him he had promised, one day ‘soft Western breezes’ and on the next had foretold an ‘inrush of icy cold air from the North-East, the direction of the Soviet Union.’  The next day he was arrested by the AVO …

Like a similar example of arresting absurdity, this would be funny if it weren’t for the tragedy of lives ruined.

Source: György Faludy, My Happy Days in Hell, trans. by Kathleen Szasz (London: Penguin Classics, 2010 (1962)), p. 394

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