An entity identified as “@forgotpassword” just had the following to say about my last post, about filmmaker Vladimir Bortko’s sudden withdrawal from the gubernatorial election in Saint Petersburg, the sixth or seventh largest city in Europe (depending on whether you consider Istanbul a European city) and the second largest in Russia, the world’s largest country, and its former capital.
It is hard being a bad cop in a world that loves only good cops, but ignorance is nothing to celebrate, much less throw in the face of someone like me who has spent the last twelve years writing about politics, culture, and grassroots resistance in Russia.
What have I accomplished over the last twelve years? I have published 2,256 posts about these important subjects on two blogs, the Russian Reader and Chtodelat News. These posts have been viewed 671,693 times.
The number of views could have been a lot greater, but despite everything I have done to promote my work, there is a lot that does not depend on me. This website can only be successful if readers share what I do here with their friends, coworkers, family members, and social media followers. This means they actually have to take the ten seconds or forty seconds or whatever it takes to publish links to my posts on their social media accounts.
When readers do that, they help me a lot more than if they pester me with disparaging or hostile comments like the one above. Such comments really make me want to call it quits. Unfortunately, the world nowadays is such, I guess, that I get this kind of feedback much more enough than I get support of any kind, verbal or financial.
The second way to support the Russian Reader is by making a donation to me via PayPal or buying me a coffee on Ko-fi. You will find buttons for these services on the left side of this page.
You might have noticed that, recently, I started letting WordPress publish ads on this site. I thought it could be a way of making a little money to support my work. Despite the shockingly large number of ads viewed, supposedly, over the last four or five months, the amount of money I have earned (but not been paid yet) is so tiny as to be laughable. I will probably make this site ad-free again in the very near future.
You can also get updates from this blog on Facebook, Ello, Twitter, Tumbler, and Telegram, not to mention subscribing to it via email by clicking the “Follow” button on the left side of this page.
So, it is really easy to show support for the work I have done over the last twelve years, work I would like to keep doing. In fact, it is much easier than taking the effort to denounce me or, like “@forgotpassword,” tell me in the glibbest, snidest way that I have been wasting my time. // TRR
The Russian Reader 