Two Things I Learned Today: Russia

From disparate sources:

• One (from the notes to my edition of Dostoesvsky's The Idiot): Russians legalized dueling for the first time in 1894.

• Two (from Elif Batuman, The Possessed): Among items confiscated by Stalin's thugs when they arrested the writer Isaac Babel in 1938: "Duck for bath"--a rubber ducky?