There's a great story over at the Russian ex-pat English paper, The eXile, about a online controversy that started with LiveJournal's Abuse Team closing down a nationalist Russian's blog. The crime? A photoshop adaption of a Soviet propaganda poster from WWII, rewritten to spout some fairly banal anti-Western sentiment:

The story began sometime in May: a certain user vchk, blogging on the Russian sector of the Livejournal site, uploaded an old Soviet propaganda poster that had a Slavic child against the backdrop of a dead woman and a burning village. The inscription was supposed to read "Daddy, kill a German!" But vchk -- or whoever messed with the original -- wrote it the cute way: Kill a NATO soldier.

Then, about a month and a half ago, after an anonymous denunciation to Livejournal's now infamous Abuse Team led to the guy's blog getting closed down, several politically-minded bloggers, including a mathematician named Mikhail Verbitsky (the now-defunct user Tiphareth), organized a virtual flashmob in support of Livejournal's first Russian political victim. Dozens of people started posting "Ubei NATOvtsa" or "Ubei NATO" in solidarity. The provocation -- as some called it -- led to a massacre indeed: according to unofficial estimates, some 20-30 blogs -- including Tiphareth's -- were deleted for indecency, violence, or violations of the Abuse Team's Terms of Service. Some were restored after users deleted the offensive posts, while some, like Tiphareth, proudly refused and took their blogging business elsewhere.

There's also an accompanying article in the same issue of the eXile that describes the Russian Livejournal community as more intellectually vibrant than the American one. The author argues that all the most talented bloggers in Russia all congregated at LiveJournal, creating a blog hub black hole that once it got started had a powerful magnetic pull... something along the lines of what the Scoop group-blog format has done for the discourses on everything from the Oakland A's to the Democratic Party.

The LiveJournal has more than three million American users, with an average age about 18 years old. It is the usual teenage stuff -- bitching about boyfriends, "Got sooo wasted at Jim's place last night," "I am starting a new job tomorrow, bagging at CostCo." Only a tiny percentage of these blogs is of any interest to more than a dozen of blogger's immediate friends.

The Russian LiveJournal domain is different. For some reason since the beginning (around 2001) it has attracted a disproportionably high number of the "Who's Who" in the informational and cultural space -- journalists, writers, publishers, politicians, etc. Russian is the largest non-English domain of the LiveJournal, with almost 200,000 accounts. Most of it is dross, like anywhere else. Nevertheless it is incomparably more engrossing than the American version. In the American domain one can jump from one blog to another for hours without encountering anything particularly eye-catching. Once you get in the Russian domain, within two or three clicks you'll find something memorable -- an outrageous sex diary, some really edgy photos or drawings, a sharp political commentary.

It does not mean, of course, that America doesn't have interesting blogs -- there are quite a lot of them, but its blogspaces are much more fragmented, whereas Russian blogs are more concentrated on the LJ.

In fact I don't remember such a robust nation-wide internet political community (bringing together broad intellectual elite with their readers in a single space) since the days of the IntelectualCapital.com, which ended with the Internet bubble; incidentally, its only foreign edition was in Russian. Yet even the Intellectual Capital in the best days barely had 10% of the fun of the Russian LJ now.