The Russians are Back -- But What Do they Want?

Back in December I noticed a striking spike in my readership among a select set of IP addresses that were locate in, of all places, Russia.  Now, I don't speak Russian, or write in Russian, and I have never been to Russia.  But there they were, and I wrote about it at the time in this piece, in hope of getting an explanation.

I didn't get any, and rather quickly the Russian views of this column dropped to about nothing.

That lasted for a while, but now five months since, they appear to have rediscovered this column.  Yesterday, for example, over 30% of the reads the previous day were from Russia, and that's inexplicable.  After all, if you recall, the article was about Social Security.  I don't know if they have any comparable retirement structure in Russia, but I doubt my insight would have helped them all that much.

So the column was not of what we would have thought should have interested Russians.  It was not about President Trump, or the 2016 election, or James Comey, or Mike Flynn, or who talked to whom.  It wasn't about Hillary Clinton facilitating the sale of a quarter of USA uranium to the same Russians she professes not to like anymore.

It was about whether I could take advantage of a peculiarity in the Social Security regulations that might let me take home a few hundred bucks more a month.

Why would the Russians care about that?

But apparently, they do, and I don't really know what I am supposed to do about it.  You see, at least if you ask Maxine Waters or Chuck Schumer or all of the mainstream media, it is a fireable offense to communicate with Russians, unless of course you are named "Clinton" and you are selling them uranium.

So before God and all witnesses, and before anyone starts to infer that this column is influenced by Russians, or that I am a tool of Moscow or Leningrad or Dnepropetrovsk, I do solemnly swear that I do not communicate with Russians, and they do not tell me what to write, and that the fact that they like my column enough to read it like crazy is due to some element over which I have no control.

I would like to think that, perhaps, they want to implement some form of Social Security in Russia, and are soliciting opinions from "talented" thinkers and writers in regard to the current system in the USA.  Yeah, that has to be it.

For jollies, I set a counter on yesterday's column, the one about the MIT Alumni Association recruitment -- one that couldn't possibly be of interest to the Russians.  Of the first 25 reads in the seconds after posting, zero were from Russia.  Maybe they don't have alumni associations in the universities over in borscht land.  But then by the end of the day, 23% of the reads were from Russian addresses.

I don't know.  I'll think about it over the weekend.   

Do zvidanija (I looked it up).

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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