OK, so here goes: The New York Times has published an article about another New York Times article which prompted strong responses from the Russian public. Yes, I think I’ve that right. What happened is that someone came up with the interesting (and highly promoted) idea of creating a LiveJournal page for the newspaper and translating a long feature article by Clifford J. Levy, and soliciting some social media interaction and dialogue with the Russian blogosphere. An appealing idea, but it is always hard to know which comments are coming from genuine individual citizens and web users and which comments represent the Kremlin’s astroturfing efforts (creating fake grassroots trends on comment boards) as we have seen in many other examples. Nevertheless, the variety of vibrantly pro- and anti-government reactions to the Times piece makes for good reading.