One comrade’s sorrow is another comrade’s… antiquaries?

When it snows at night in the center of Yekat this is what Lenin looks like. From behind.

Yesterday was a great day for me. Not only was I at the U for almost twelve hours, but another equally magnificent occurrence also took place in my superb life as expatriate extraordinaire in the unique Urals. I arrived slightly after 9 am, because I had to write an analytical paper on the narrator’s perspective in the second chapter «Гроза» from Tolstoy’s «Отрочество», which I had failed to write the day before because… you know… well, it doesn’t really matter. After all I managed to write it before class. Everything went well. The whole day was pure bliss. Until six pm, half an hour before my Swedish Movie Club was to begin, and I went to the cafeteria to grab something to eat, but couldn’t, because I found that my wallet had been stolen. My cell phone had also been stolen. Later, this morning, I realized that they (he/she/it) have also stolen Jen’s USB-memory card with a whopping 128 Mb on it… Luckily, I called my mother last night and she blocked my VISA card in time before they managed to steal any money from my account [I’m so stupid, comrades, I keep an amount close to three whole monthly salaries on my VISA card… I’ll look into that and change it, promise. Though I’m pretty sure that I keep so much money there just because I always feel like I’m about to run away any minute. Or that at least I want to have the possibility to run away at any given moment. That’s why I am stupid in that way… it’s just, you know, like a part of my personality, this whole ‘running-away-any-day-now’ mentality, it sits pretty damn deep down…] and now all I have to do is to wait for a new one to get here, which is pretty bad because it’s getting colder in Russia and I need a new winter coat. Anyway, today I went to get a new SIM-card for my old phone number, and everything seems to be in order. Though it’s still pretty much a bummer, it turns out that I have the sweetest students; yesterday, when they found out what had happened, one of them bought me food, and another one drove me home.

What puzzles me most in all of this is the motive of the thief. After all, he/she/it only got away with a wallet containing around 500 rubles, a Swedish ID-card, a Russian library card, a Nokia phone that’s so old it probably costs to get rid off, plus a memory card that’s equally old and useless. This leads me to suspect that I was robbed by… an aspiring antique dealer?