Sometimes, La Russophobe likes to venture out into the blogosphere and check out what is happening there. Here is the story of one such trip.

A while ago, I posted a comment about an article on Russian cakes on Russiablog. I said the cake pictured in the article was topped with powdered sugar and I found that ironic, since many times I'd tried to buy powdered sugar in Russia and couldn't do it, and when I could get it was rather brittle and unpleasant to eat in the raw form. Most Russian cakes of this kind, I wrote, were topped with liquified sugar rather than raw powdered sugar. I wrote a comment to the editors of Russiablog and told them about my observations. One of them responded by saying he stopped reading my post as soon as he saw my comment about powdered sugar since he knew this to be inaccurate, saying it was easy to buy powdered sugar in Russian which was plentiful. So I wrote back and asked them where they'd been able to do it.

Suddenly, Yuri Mamchur and Charles Ganske, editors of Russsiablog, got quiet. No answers. Neither one would name a single Russian city outside Moscow where they'd been able to buy powdered sugar (La Russophobe has lived in many such cities and visited dozens more). I followed up like the pit bull La Russophobe is known to be.

Finally, Ganske told me that he'd just been blindly relying on what Mamchur had told him, since he (Ganske) had never been to Russia (La Russophobe has spent years living in Russia). Unfortunately, Ganske didn't say that in his statement, he just said I was wrong. I asked him why Yuri hadn't responded and he said didn't know and he didn't feel like questioning him about a "mundane" matter like powdered sugar because he was "away." Not "away" enough to stop posting on Russiablog, mind you, but "away" enough to ignore this issue. Ironically, a photograph in the Russiablog article shows a whole table of these cakes, and none are topped with powdered sugar.

Now, La Russophobe is as liberated as the next feminist, but La Russophobe wasn't born yesterday. She knows that Russian men like Yuri don't go around baking much, so it's highly suspicious that they'd have the slightest real idea about powdered sugar. La Russophobe is a foodie, though, and through bitter personal experience she's found it quite difficult to get powdered sugar in Russia (as well as many other things - try to find broccoli or peanut butter in Smolensk, I dare you!), and when she finds it its always powdered beet sugar, quite different from (and inferior to) the cane variety. So she's got a double interest in finding out whether Yuri is just shooting his mouth off.

Which, by the way, Yuri does quite often. For example, Yuri wrote on Russiablog (no kidding!) that "95% of the people" standing in line to file past the tomb of Lenin in Moscow are Americans. He said that I'd written "millions" of comments on Russiablog. Being a composer, Yuri is the emotional type, and being Russian, isn't overly concerned with small things like facts when a good feeling is there to be had.

Oh, and I might add: Russiablog published not one but two of the posts from this blog (Sharapova and Yanukovich) and La Russophobe was responsible for at least half the comment traffic generated on their site. Here is what Yuri wrote in a post that appeared just after La Russophobe's two articles appeared on their site: "We are delighted to see the increased traffic and comments on Russia Blog." So this little exchange might be considered cutting of your nose to spite your face, since now La Russophobe has lost interest in Russiablog. Eerily like Russia itself, isn't it? In fact, it's almost poetic.

Meanwhile, another dialogue was proceeding between me an the editors. Strident Russian nationalist Mike Averko posted something on Russiablog claiming that the average Russian lifespan had increased at a greater rate under President Putin than the American lifespan had increased in the same period. Once again, La Russophobe's interest was peaked. Is this really true, she thought? After all, La Russophobe is as familiar with the demographic data on Russia as anybody, and she knows full well that Russia's population is rapidly declining, in part due to a very short adult lifespan, especially for men, and that by 2050 demographers predict that Russia's population will be 1/3 less than it is today.

So I asked Mike to document his claim (yes, that's right, when he posted it he relied purely on his own word, no evidence of any kind). No dice. Nada. Mike got as quiet as Mikhail Khodorkovsky in solitary in Siberia.

Now, don't get me wrong, I feel for Mike. There he was with his own private little preserve at Russiablog, pretending to be some kind of expert before Russiablog's tiny little audience, holding forth with all kinds of ridiculous Russophile propaganda. Then I come along and spoil it all for him. It's annoying, I feel his pain.

But after all, facts are facts. Is what Mike said true, or isn't it? La Russophobe is as interested as the next person in broadening her horizons and learning from somebody who knows more. So I asked the editors to document the claim, or insist that Mike do so. Their answer: Nothing. Nada. Silence. Again, La Russophobe would not give up. Finally, Ganske told me that it's "not his job" to fact check the assertions that get put on Russiablog, not even when they are challenged. Not that he agrees with what Mike wrote, mind you, he said. It's just that facts are not at the top of his list of things to do. In other words, Russiablog isn't exactly the New York Times. So naturally, it isn't exactly La Russophobe's cup of tea.

For her part, La Russophobe always responds immediately to reports of errors. For example, a Russiablog reader pointed out that she'd got it wrong when she said Sharapova had played Venus Williams at Wimbledon. In fact it was Serena Williams; a correction immediately went up on the Russiblog article, and La Russophobe apologized for the error and thanked the commenter who'd pointed it out. But Mike? Just got quiet.

Mike also wrote a post which accused Johnson's Russia List, probably the single most well-respected blog source of Russia information in the world today (it is a linked blog on the New York Times Russia page), of "cronyism and political bias" simply because it refuses to publish HIS articles. He also wrote: "JRL regulars aren't my intellectual superiors." Indeed.

So La Russophobe had to rethink her participation in Russiablog and has removed her link to the blog from her list of links. She got a little taste of how Solzhenitisn felt when all of Russia ganged up on him and tossed him out of the country, calling him a traitor and a moron and a foreign spy when all he'd said was (in rather sharp language) that the USSR sucked and would soon destroy Russia. In other words, he spoke the truth. Turned out he was kinda (well, totally) right, but people who talk like that in Russia pay a stiff price for their truth.

And so it goes in the blogosphere.