Scariest Disciplinarian Ever

Poor girls. Packed off to some sort of twisted neo-orthodox dark parody of a convent school for young ladies, immediately sentenced to a vicious switching in the courtyard for deportment errors or getting kasha on their wimples or whatever, they’re already feeling like they are trapped in a nightmare not of their own making:

And then, for the first time, they get a look at the man who is going to beat them raw. Before he escaped from the tower in Sverdlosk, the monks there knew him as “Crazy Pasha” and made sure to push his loaves through the bars with a stick. Now the lunatic is in charge of his own asylum, and he looks like the love child of Groucho Marx and one of the early Patriarchs of Suzdal — the one with fleas.