(1) I rarely post comments on blogs other than ET and Daily Kos.
(2) Off the top of my head, Stephen Cohen, Georgi Derlugian, Jerome, several of the writers at intelligent.ru (which appears to be kaput), and ... ok, definitely not decent, but Mark Ames has written some otherwise impressive articles.
I don't personally feel it is my place to save the Russians from themselves. So far as fruitful efforts to change Russia go, I'm struggling to make a fruitful effort to change my own country, you know, the one running about invading countries, spying on its citizens, imprisoning people without cause and torturing prisoners, rigging elections, becoming frighteningly isolationist, and in the grip of some maniacal ideologues. Hint: it's not Russia. So, my hands are full. You're on your own. Good luck and Godspeed. I'm confident the Russian people will adore you when your blogging finally succeeds in freeing them from their oppression. Though they'll inevitably get sick of your shit and wage a possibly bloody coup on your mythology a few decades later.
(3) Congratulations. Especially considering all the competition out there.
(4) Save for one or two times I've been led astray, I don't read your blog. I only know of you because you visit all the blogs focusing on Russia and say confrontational and nasty things to the people writing them. Instead of accepting that fact it's a big world and there are bound to be people who disagree with you, you seem to be under the misguided impression that you can harass people into either agreement or silence, which is profoundly ironic given your concern about freedom of thought/speech in Russia.
(5) Ignore you? Impossible. (See above.)
P.S. I should let you know that I am no expert and have never asserted any kind of objectivity when writing about Russia. I make it clear that I am just trying to get the pendulum to swing the other way and to illustrate the hypocrisy of the American media and its coverage of Russia. I have a deep and perhaps irrational love for the country and its people, and while I can champion democracy with the best of them, I've experienced enough to know that I don't have the answers for Russia, that I don't even have the answers for my own country, and that the answers America has tried to give Russia have been the wrong ones. I don't think there is anything implicitly negative about state-run operations or anything implicitly positive about capitalism. I know that the people I've known are not the backwards crazies unable to get their act together, or amoral and duplicitous figures that the American media has for decades portrayed Russians as. I know that Putin's regime is not a beacon of democracy, but that things are notably better than they were under Yeltsin, and that I'm having "smart and savvy leader" envy at the moment. I can appreciate Putin, Khodorkovsky and Limonov at the same time, though I can't say I'd want any one of them running my country. But then, that's not my predicament, choosing who should run Russia or deciding how they should do it. My predicament, Russia-wise, is monitoring the propaganda spread in my own press, wondering what kind of ideology the belief that "Khodorkovsky is simply too hot to be stuck in Siberia like that" comes under, and generally being in awe of the audacity, resilience, beauty and absurdity of this country.
It's a rather satisfying feeling, once you let it start being about Russia and stop being about you. I hope you can one day experience it. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
здравствулте!
(2) Intelligent.ru is a rabid Russophile propaganda site. Claiming that they are a source of criticism of Russia is an outrage. They publish the craziest of the crazy. Moreover, as you say, it's defunct. Cohen (a frenzied Russophile who is published mostly by his wife in her crazed left-wing diatribe the Nation) doesn't have a blog and I'm not aware that Derlugian does either. As for Jerome, your comments are belied by my view of his text, which is both personally abusive and uncritical of the Kremlin (when it rarely addresses Russia).
You haven't named a single blog (or even author) that regularly criticizes Russia in a manner more "appropriate" to your taste than mine. In other words, your claim is utterly devoid of substance.
The fact that you dare to make statements about the content of my blog when you admit you don't read it makes you an enormous hypocrite. So much for the depth of your liberal values in fairness!
In short, you are not to be taken seriously. Russia is the best country in the world . . . except for all the others!
