La Russophobe posted her list of the top 10 Russia Blogs on Friday in LR rates the Russia Blogs. The next day, Anatoly Karlin responded with his own picks in A Short Guide to the Top 10 Russia Blogs.
Some interesting picks from both writers. It’s interesting to see that there are a few commonalities between the two lists, which you wouldn’t necessarily expect when you consider that Anatoly’s blog used to be Da Russophile.
If you want to see how things have changed in the past couple of years, compare with my Top 5 Russia Blogs list from January 2008.
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Just a quick note – my list isn’t a “Russophile” list, it’s the product of the most objective assessment I could muster from within the prism of my belief system.
Had I embraced the Russophile side of the Russophile/Russophobe binary, then SWP, Ioffe, and LR herself would not have been on the list – they’d have been ejected in favor of commentators like Mat Rodina or Mike Averko! ))
In other words, the two reviews are compiled by a “Russophobe” and someone who isn’t really an advocate for “Russophile” views.
Interesting what Anatoly said about Russia Blog being in decline. I remember during my years in Sakhalin, and watching the chaos of the Gazprom takeover of the Sakhalin II project and the hounding of TNK-BP, Russia Blog was putting up post after post insisting that Russia was a great place to invest in, and I stopped reading. I’m guessing Russia Blog’s decline coincided with the tanking of the Russian economy along with the rest of the world.
That quite simply cannot be the case, because being wrong really doesn’t tend to affect one’s popularity. The Economist predicted about a dozen of the last zero Russian collapses, but its Russia reporting remains respected amongst those who don’t follow it closely and don’t know better. Heck, global warming deniers are permanently wrong, but that hasn’t stopped anti-AGW hysteria from rising since “Climategate”.
No, the reason for Russia Blog’s decline is much more prosaic. Charles Ganske no longer works there; Yuri Mamchur still posts occasionally, but is now at university. The volume of output is much lower, as is the quality.
I should clarify that Charles’ and Yuri’s posts were always pretty good. It was the other contributors who came later that I never bothered with.
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