By Robert Greenall, BBC News, Feb 29, 2012

[....] In a country with tightly controlled TV and few independent newspapers and radio stations, the internet is a vital space for alternative opinion. Almost all of it appears on the blogging platform LiveJournal, known in Russian as Zhivoy Zhurnal, or simply ZheZhe.

Set up by US developer Brad Fitzpatrick in 1998, as a way to communicate online with his friends, LiveJournal - complete with its mascot "Frank the goat" - may seem at first sight a strange medium for Russia's new-found political vibrancy.

But Russians have made LiveJournal their own, turning what is in the West a relatively obscure and nowadays rather dated platform into a huge, seething mass of political anger, colourful prose and clever repartee [....]

Analysts say there are a number of reasons why LiveJournal became so popular and permanent among Russians [....]

(The numbers, from a side chart: 5,791,138 users and 171,915 communities using the Cyrillic alphabet)