EDITORIAL: The Cosmic Fraud & Failure that is Russia Blog

EDITORIAL

The Cosmic Fraud that is Russia Blog

We’ve written several times in the past about the outrageous pro-Kremlin propaganda exercise known as Russia Blog a/k/a “The Real Russia Project.”  Working closely with Kremlin-operated Russia Today TV and funded by the corrupt and discredited Discovery Institute, which Little Green Footballs routinely savages because it seeks to promulgate the teaching of “intelligent design” Bible studies instead of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public school, Russia Blog is published by a Russian citizen named Yuri Mamchur who has close ties to the Kremlin (having been educated in a university run by the Kremlin and descending from a family of Soviet aparachiks), and shamelessly seeks to undermine Western security by circulating a ridiculously false impression of Russia.

Russia Blog’s home page currently displays 30 posts dating back to December 19, 2008.  If these posts were your only source of news about Russia, you would not know the the Russian ruble has lost nearly half its value, plunging to an appalling 2.8 cents in value, down from 4.2 cents over the past two months — because Russia Blog doesn’t report facts that are inconvenient to Putin’s Kremlin. You would not know that Kremlin-paid spies had been apprehended attempting to infiltrate opposition political organizations like Oleg Kozlovsky’s Oborona group.  In fact, if you put the name “Oleg Kozlovsky” into the Russia Blog search engine, you will learn that Russia Blog has never heard of him; therefore, its readers wouldn’t know that Oleg had been published on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and received a major human rights award from the hand of film star Sigourney Weaver after being illegally shanghaied into the Russian Army to silence his opposition work. Do the same with the name Stanislav Markelov — you get the same result.  For a Russia Blog reader, Markelov’s assassination never took place.

A person who read only Russia Blog would think that the collapse of the Russian economy and world oil prices was a good thing, because it gave Russia “the opportunity to diversify.”  He would believe that the Russian economic downturn is largely the result of “investment strategies” that made the mistake of putting billions into “rotten” U.S. securities and not cracking down hard enough on the “oligarchs.”  He would not have read a word about the new “Solidarity” opposition organization created by Boris Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov, nor would entering “Vladivostok protests” in Russia Blog’s engine reveal a single syllable about the virulent anti-Putin protests occurring in that city over Putin’s auto import duties.  He would, however, see the celebration of Russia’s efforts to boot the U.S. military out of its base in Kyrgyzstan, and read warnings that might just as well have been written by the Kremlin about the need to modify U.S. foreign policy or face even more draconian punishment from the mighty Kremlin. And he would see a video from Russia Today declaring Russia the winner in the gas dispute with Ukraine.

We are glad to report, however, that for all its furious and utterly shameless dishonesty, Russia Blog is a total failure on the web.

Only one of the thirty posts currently on Russia Blog’s home page has more than 5 comments.  More than half the posts, 17 in all, have zero comments, and only 43 total comments have been received on all 30 posts combined, for an average of 1.4 comments per post.  In just the first two weeks of February, this blog has published 60 posts, twice as many as Russia Blog published in two months, and only 12 of those posts had zero comments, a mere one-fifth of the total.  Eight of the 60 posts collected more than 20 comments each, and the sixty posts combined attracted 529 total comments in two weeks, over ten times more than Russia Blog got over the course of two full months and, at an average of 8.9 comments per post, 6.4 times Russia Blog’s rate of commenting.

Russia Blog fares no better if you examine attention being paid to it by other bloggers. According to Google, Russia Blog has 1,340 total links from blogs while this blog has 1,770.  It’s another crushing defeat just in absolute terms, but when one remembers that Russia Blog has been collecting links for 48 months, since January 2005, while this blog has only been collecting them for 34 months, since April 2006, then one sees that Russia Blog is generating a mere 30 links per month while we are generating 52 per month, nearly twice as many. (In fact, this WordPress web address has only been seriously active for the past six months, so the figures are even more stark than they appear; the foregoing figure doesn’t include our Blogger address links).

Russia Blog’s performance is particularly pathetic given the fact that it is a funded operation, collecting donations, publishing paid advertising and receiving direct financial support from Discovery Institute. This blog has none of those financial features.  Clearly, Russia Blog’s investors are not getting value for money as they help undermine American national security and subvert democracy in Russia. It’s not surprising, then, that bitter little Russia Blog does not even acknowledge our existence; though we are one of the top Russia blogs on the planet, we do not appear in its blogroll.

By operating for profit, Russia Blog subjects itself to rigorous copyright protections, and yet it brazenly ignores them, reprinting entire newspaper articles such as one about billionaire Kremlin flunkie Oleg Deripaska
without the permission of the original source (in this case, the Wall Street Journal).  At any moment it could be sued and shut down for seeking to profit from other publications’ work product, and we fervently hope it will be.

A recent Russia Blog post announces a “World Russia Forum” being hosted by Discovery Institute and something called the “American University in Moscow.”  AUM has nothing whatsoever to do with The American University in Washington DC, but rather shamelessly tries to trade on AU’s prestige. AUM nothing but a sham, run by that loathsome Russophile reptile Edward Lozansky who we’ve previously exposed on this blog for fraud and who regularly publishes his pro-Kremlin propaganda screeds on Russia Blog itself, and is as naked a pro-Kremlin enterprise as Russia Blog itself.  The “Forum” will be hosted at the Russian Embassy, as clear an indication as you could want of Russia Blog’s malignant ties to the Kremlin.  The fact that Discovery Institute can afford to host such charades in the U.S. capital is a clear indication that they are funneling a pipeline of Kremlin money into the propaganda war within our own shores.

Since Russia Blog’s own pathetic incompetence and dishonesty is obviously taking it  the way of the USSR, some may suggest it’s not necessary for us to continue documenting its fraud. But the fact remains that the enterprise is well funded and unwary readers can stumble over its webpages by chance at any moment and be fundamentally misled about what is happening in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Therefore, we must warn them off.