Today, this blog celebrates its one-year anniversary. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US!! The post above is our birthday present to ourselves and our readers/contributors. We think it's the single best, most devastating post we've published to date, basically a summary of reasons this blog should exist.

This blog was born on April 2, 2006. Since then, we've received over 70,000 visits as well as nearly 150,000 page views. We've seen our traffic grow, as the graphs below show, from zero visits and page views per month to over 14,000 visits and over 25,000 page views per month, and we've become the most visited and linked-to independent Russia politics blog in the English language (maybe, for all we know, in any language).

We've published over 1,500 posts including original essays and translations from dozens of contributors, and we've received nearly 3,000 comments. If you tallied up all the comments we've generated on other blogs as well, you'd see that we've provoked far more debate on Russia than any other commentator in the blogosphere. We've become one of the world's leading voices of opposition to the rise of a neo-Soviet dictatorship in Russia -- and we've only just begun to fight!

We humbly thank our contributors and readers for supporting this blog and congratulate them on their achievement. We promise to redouble our efforts in our second year to make it even bigger and brasher than our first. What we really hope, though, is that the Russian people will put us out of business by establishing a civilized government that will make our criticism unnecessary.

LR's Visits Per Month, 4/1/06-4/01/07

LR's Page Views Per Month, 4/1/06-4/01/07