The blogosphere in Russia was dismissed for a long time as being irrelevant; the political power structure looked on the internet as a toy, mostly good for downloading dirty movies. But while they were otherwise occupied with taking control of all the traditional news outlets in the country, a thriving underground network was taking shape, on places like LiveJournal.

Russian dissidents have long been an ornery and stubborn breed. WordPress is the smeared mimeographed samizdat of Gen-X and Gen-Y, but this cat-and-mouse game is not without its dangers. While I was working on a project in Moscow, the news that a netizen had been sentenced to two years in prison merely for making a comment on a blog that a regional governor was a crook, was a sad preview to the spectacle of the girl punk band Pussy Riot getting the same sentence for "hooliganism" for a mere 40 seconds of anti-Putin protest.