Where have all the Russians gone?

Ed. here. One of my tasks is to have a look, every now and then, at WWW's readership statistics, just to see who's looking at -- and perhaps reading -- what. It doesn't matter, really, as we ended the experiment of allowing advertising some months ago. But Walt (and now Len) like to think that the pearls they cast are being picked up by the... well... you know.

Almost since Day One, and certainly since the Swazi girls first appeared on WWW, the top two countries in which our readers reside have been the USA and Russia, or the other way around. Since we write mostly in English, not Russian, we assume the Russians are looking at the National Geographic-style pix and videos. Checking the most-hit posts would seem to confirm this.

But yesterday, an amazing thing happened. The Russians completely disappeared from our readership tables! I don't mean they slipped into 5th or 10th place. They vanished completely!

As of this moment, Americans make up the greatest percentage of our visitors, by a very long shot. Next, way back there, comes Latvia. Latvia?! Whoda thunk it? Maybe all the Russians moved to Riga?

Rounding out the top ten (plus) we have (3) Canada, (4) France, (5) United Kingdom (tied with Poland and Ukraine), (8) China, (9) Germany, and (10) Sweden.

I can't understand what became of the Russians. When the Chinese aren't in our world, I assume WWW is on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China because of something we said about the schismatic Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association or freedom of religion or one of the Three Terrible T's.*

So, is there now an Iron Firewall around Russia? Could it be that the KGB (the Russian version of the NSA) thinks Walt is promoting homosexuality? The Russians have a law against that now. If they think that, they haven't been reading very carefully. Or perhaps something is being lost in translation.

Anyone with an answer to this puzzlement is invited to post a comment below. Don't let Walt be the last to know!

* Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen Square. You're welcome.