Brudaks

Is it true that you won a car in the lottery?

YES! But not a car, but fifty roubles, not in the lottery but at horse races, and not won, but lost!

Wait, what, you allowed him to repeat that after having to clean up that mess the first time?

Biathlon actually is an outgrowth of a military winter patrol exercise designed to do just that, i.e. high mobility harassing attacks.

It used to be much more "realistic" - i.e. targets at longer ranges, high power rounds instead of the current .22 LR, etc.

No. A very long time ago (from 1795 until 1889) it used to be defined that way, but it's not a good definition as it's non-trivial to compare (e.g. you need extreme purity of the water, surface tension matters to get exactly one liter, etc) so now for more than a century it was defined as the equivalent of what a particular object (the "International Prototype of the Kilogram") weighs, with copies of that object made that can be very accurately compared to the prototype.

A liter of water at 4C weighs about 0.999975 kg - the actual weight depends on the proportion of different hydrogen isotopes in the water, i.e. how many of the hydrogen atoms in that water are deuterium and tritium instead of the usual single-proton no-neutrons hydrogen, which is another reason why water weight isn't a good definition if you care about being very accurate. Having a physical artifact also has a bunch of drawbacks, so that's why we're (finally) changing to a pure definition.

I heard lots of such jokes (possibly even the exact same one?) in USSR back when American media was not available yet, so they're not fabricated (at least not most of them).

At least in some parts in USSR in 1980's there was (a) general anti-soviet sentiment; (b) economic problems combined with party/"apparatchik" cleptocracy/hypocrisy; (c) a general environment of cynical black humor, so jokes like these were quite popular - even though you still could face consequences e.g. demotion at work for expressing anti-party sentiment.