yep, russians are tenacious b'stards, you'd have to be with a history of getting done over by swedes, then mongols, then czars, then communists, then mafioso. ANZ are nothing to even nerds out of Russia. For a thousand years every serf dreamt of being a kulak, the agarian entrepeneur.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak
I've seen their sailors on shore leave, would back one of them over mike tyson in a bar fight.