The Russian blogosphere conveniently, if bafflingly, revolves around LJ. Each week, RUSSIA! scans the chatter and brings you the top five topics.

Medvedev—not as smooth as he thinks he is.

• Blogger artem68 catches Medvedev in a series of awkwardly enthusiastic facial spasms, grinning and grimacing at some champion sportswomen at an official celebratory function. Watch as Medvedev bestows flowers, blushes, admires the medals pinned to chests of tall ladies in suits and makes strange faces, over and over. And over. [ Исинбаева засмущала президента]

Philospher Dugin, a complicated man. He likes beards. He hates blogs.

• In a video posted by rovego, philosopher Alexandr Dugin disapproves of Medvedev (who recently got himself a blog) for participating in that horrid blog world. As "the president of bloggers," of "young pimpled monstrous cretins" who "fall out of context and live a simulated, demonic life," Medvedev did ba-a-ad. And so, blogger rovego digs up another little interview, where the heavily-bearded Dugin discusses his historically-oriented treatise on beards. Apparently, Peter the Great castrated the Russian people by making them shave the beards, the church condemns the beardless to hell, beardless people aren't very Russian and are basically gay and "a man without a beard is a man without pants." [Блогосфера]

Ye Olde Lovable Jester Rockstar, Ilya Lagutenko.

• This past week, LiveJournal celebrated its 10th birthday. One of the celebrities to videoblog and wish LJ a happy BD was Ilya Lagutenko, lead singer of Russia's biggest rock band, Mumiy Troll. Wearing a sock-like hat, the charming goof gushes a bit and promises a special, unreleased song-present... it's a few seconds of a loud, faux drum solo. And everybody gushes back "we love you." Let's see Bono do that. [Илья Лагутенко поздравляет ЖЖ]

Unfortunately, this is the most common motif of "Russian baby" Google image search results.

• Blogger pitasha posts the results of her self-posted thousand-people Lj-poll. Among her readers, the top most popular Russian first names given to baby newborns of 2008-2009 are Mihail, Alexandr, Ivan, Maxim and Artem for boys and Sofia, Maria, Alisa, Polina and Anastasia for girls. Commenters take "statistics" seriously, complain about the lack of Tatianas. Oh, brave new world. [статистика имен 2008-2009 (результаты, ОБНОВЛЕНИЕ)]

Zemfira and hers, Bilan and his.

• It's matrimonial rumor time for Russian pop stars that's got the bloggers all flustered. Plenty gossipin' folk are huffing about songstress Zemfira rumored elopement with actress/director/screenwriter Renata Litvinova ("She never said she's gay!"), then puffing about Eurovision champion Dima Bilan's rumored upcoming wedding to model Elena Kuletskaya ("But he's Gay Gayovich!"). At least one commenter's got the right idea: "Don't envy others' happiness. It's a sin." [Билан через неделю женится.] [Земфира и Рената Литвинова обручились?]