Over the weekend this blog was pleased to welcome its 500,000th visitor — a mighty achievement for an unfunded specialty blog like ours (our counter visitor counter registered its 220,000th hit, which combined with the 280,000+ on our old counter over at the Google address at the time we vacated pushed the total visits over half a million). Soon, our blog will record the 1,000,000th page view of our content and publish its 12,000th comment. Founded by Kim Zigfeld in April 2006, we have grown to become one of the most formidable voices on neo-Soviet Russia in the world, and our visitation statistics — as we have often said before — are as much due to the efforts of you the reader as they are to those who create our content. So pat yourself on the back for playing your part in confronting the neo-Soviet horror of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
But this is no time to rest on our laurels. The enemy we face is monumental and utterly evil. Our struggle against it has only just begun. We encourage you to see this milestone as confirmation that your efforts are paying off, and to redouble your efforts to publicize our content using services like Digg, Delicious, Dogpile, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz and others to tag and circulate our web pages.
Just in time to celebrate this occasion, commenter “Charlotte” writes in response to our list of unreformed Russian vices, our most-commented-upon web page with over 300 comments to date:
I’m an American who has recently moved to Russia… and it’s a whole different world. Like a time warp, really. The only thing I could compare it to would be Nixon-era America… but even that is not quite strong enough. About the most I can say for Russia is that it’s exactly like you’d think it would be after decades of Communism. The New Russia, like the FSB, seems to be the same old… “stuff” rebranded.
Well said, Charlotte, well said. And good luck in your daily struggle for change! Russia can’t have too many Americans in country.