2009 Russia may be a human rights nightmare, but this is encouraging:
On April 22nd Dmitry Anatol’yevich Medvedev became the first Russian president to launch a comment-enabled blog on Russia’s broadest, most contentious political blogging platform, Zhivoy Zhurnal (LiveJournal), or ZheZhe as it is informally known. He will be blogging by video, so he inaugurated the event with a 5-…½-minute video address, taped at his residence, to the Russian blogosphere, which is an exponentially multiplying contingent in the country with Europe’s most rapidly growing population of Net surfers. (Out of 141 million Russians, 29 million were using the Net in 2008, as compared with three million in 2000.) This growth matters: the Net is the last bastion of relatively free speech left in the country.