Some compare the regime of Vladimir Putin to the regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Sometimes the comparison holds, sometimes it doesn't. But one thing they share is a sense of social panic — and paranoia.

The nature of panic and paranoia often makes it ripe for jokes, though in the end there is little to laugh at in a totalitarian regime. We have gathered some recent signs of the paranoid state of Russian society.

Take Olga Z., a resident of the Moscow neighborhood, who was taking the metro when a neighbor caught her eye. He wore a yellow jacket with a blue sweatshirt peeking out from underneath. She was also concerned that a man who was a lookalike of Ukrainian nationalist Dmytro Yarosh was sitting beside the suspicious citizen in yellow and blue. She immediately informed the police.

Then there's Svetlana Sharkova, a 60-year-old retiree from the village of Lashino near Moscow, who complained to the police that a local plant nursery was selling seedlings of the Ukrainian apple variety "Glory to the Victors."

Police in the central Russian city of Pyt-Yakh, are investigating a report from the local school principal that a student wore blue and yellow ribbons in her hair.

On a bus traveling from Dzhankoy to Sevastopol in Crimea, a retiree reported to police that he saw a passenger with a tattoo on his leg of Stepan Bandera, the noted World War II-era Ukrainian political lead. The tattoo turned out to be Irish actor Cillian Murphy in the role of Thomas Shelby, a character in the gangster series Peaky Blinders.