Did anyone else smell a rat when news emerged yesterday that VKontakte’s Pavel Durov had sold his entire stake in the social network that he founded?  GlobalVoices, for one, saw Durov’s exit coming, and not for simple reasons of financial gain.  Bloomberg explains why the deal seems like tricky business:

The decision to cash out might be no big deal, except that this is Russia. Durov sold to a trusted partner of Russia’s richest man, Alisher Usmanov, who is known for his unswerving loyalty to President Vladimir Putin. The 29 year-old Durov appears to have been too independent to be allowed to run a social network that had a wider reach than the nation’s tightly-controlled major TV channels.

But there’s more to the deal than how easy it is to see Putin’s influence.