A beautiful day in Russia, 75 degrees and sunny, and it’s been a whole six weeks since someone last blew themselves up in the subway. But the Russians, never ones to shy from dark thoughts, are thinking and talking about China, and the latest batshit insane trend: murderous rampages in kindergartens.

There was another one today, this time with seven children stabbed to death by a guy who lived in the same building as the kindergarten. It’s just the latest in a string of these, all seeming copycat versions of the original kindergarten-stabber, who was executed at the end of last month.

So the taxi driver and I had a conversation about that on the way to Stary Arbat this morning. He was talking fast, and had a thick Georgian accent in Russian, but I got most of what he was going on about, especially when he repeated “sick” three times to describe the killings. Russians, you might remember, have already lived through the worst atrocity committed against schoolkids in memory–the mass hostage-taking and botched rescue attempt in Beslan that left 186 children dead. So when you see them outraged, you know it’s something bad.

In China, it’s not just that someone is killing these kids; they’re not even doing it like the Stockton maniac with an assault rifle. They are stabbing them. It’s almost too much to comprehend. I mean, what context would cause someone to hack a bunch of little kids to death? Wealth inequality? Oppression of the farmers? Communist doldrums?

I’m usually all about finding the root causes of societal outrages–part of my work here in Moscow is to look at the motivations and desperations of the most recent subway bombers–but it seems that in these China killings, there is nothing to be understood.