Meet Eugene Ivanov.

Blogging on Russian politics at The Ivanov Report, and here at Instablogs Mr. Ivanov describes himself as having received a PhD from the USSR and then, by some mysterious process, as having ended up living the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. He doesn’t say what nationality he belongs to, but from appearances he is Russian. It’s also not clear what citizenship he holds. What is clear is that he got his education in under communism in the USSR.

I’m also a Russia blogger — and a little bit more significant than he is. According to Technorati he has collected 13 blog reactions to his work, while over at La Russophobe I have collected 984. In terms of traffic, according to Alexa my blog currently ranks 1,043,877 in the world, while Mr. Ivanov ranks 12,411,201. And I don’t blog in only one place outside of Instablogs like Mr. Ivanov; I divide my time between Publius Pundit, La Russophobe and Pajamas Media. So my stats are vast understatements of my actual significance.

Given these facts, would you find it a bit odd if I told you that Mr. Ivanov’s blog roll doesn’t even acknowledge that my blog exists, nor does it acknowledge the existence of the #1 Russia blogger in the world, Robert Amsterdam, attorney for Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky? If I then told you that both Mr. Amsterdam and I are sharply critical of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, would you then hazard a guess as to how Mr. Ivanov feels about that subject? And knowing how Mr. Ivanov feels about Russia, and where he was educated, would you put two and two together and be able to make a guess about how interested he is in the security of the West and the preservation of its values?

Mr. Ivanov calls himself a Republican, yet there’s no indication whatsoever that he supports the party’s hard line on Russia. Does he support John McCain for president, when Mr. McCain has called for Russia to be booted out of the G-8 for being ruled by a proud KGB spy? Did he support Ronald Reagan, when he called Russia an “evil empire”? Maybe he’s a “Republican” the way lunatics like Pat Buchanan sometimes claim to be — hardcore right-wing wackos who actually seem to admire the neo-Nazi regime of Vladimir Putin. You know, folks Ronald Reagan wouldn’t cross the street to spit on.

Recently, Mr. Ivanov made libelous statements here on Instablogs about Russian youth opposition leader Oleg Kozlovsky, calling him a “petty criminal.” Mr. Ivanov is furious that Mr. Kozlovsky recently published an op-ed in the Washington Post attacking the Kremlin for backsliding on democracy, after having major news stories written about him by the Post and the Chicago Tribune. Mr. Kozlovsky has never been arrested for any crime other than daring to lead public protests against the Kremlin’s KGB crackdown, so he’s no more a “petty criminal” than Martin Luther King or Mohandas Gandhi were (both men spent plenty of time in prison). Notably, Mr. Ivanov doesn’t even link to Mr. Kozlovsky’s blog when he attacks him with a pathetic Soviet-style smear job, denying Mr. Kozlovsky the chance to speak for himself just as the Soviet goons always used to do.

Mr. Ivanov asks how Mr. Kozlovsky was able to write his op-ed for the Post while in prison, where he said he was sitting when the column came out. There’s as simple answer: He wasn’t. He didn’t say he wrote the column while in prison, he said it was published at that time. Mr. Kozlovsky wrote the article weeks before he was arrested, and he wrote it about his illegal induction into the military service several months earlier. His article was in the editing process when he was arrested, and the Post’s editors finalized and published it while he was in prison in a great act of solidarity and defiance. They added the reference to his most recent arrest, which was widely published in newspapers and in the blogosphere (Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov mentioned it in his own op-ed in the LA Times, for instance). Anyone with even a small grain of intelligence can clearly understand all this just from reading the column.

Mr. Ivanov accuses Mr. Kozlovsky of being a “pawn” of leaders like Kasparov - but that’s the last thing he is. Mr. Kozlovsky has repeatedly and publicly criticized those leaders, and does so in the Post op-ed as well. Mr. Kozlovsky is a new breed of leader, a grass-roots organizer with real guts and real passion for his country, willing to risk everything for its future, and that’s the very thing that scares Kremlin shills like Mr. Ivanov.

And the same can be said for Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who recently humiliated Russia’s agents in Georgia with yet another devastating election victory. Mr. Ivanov launches another pathetic smear attempt, clearly blinded by a frenzy of hatred as is the whole Russian nationalist crowd right about now. Luckily, I beat Mr. Ivanov to the punch on this story, reporting days earlier, showing that the Georgian elections had been widely praised by observers. Mr. Ivanov’s shoddy attempt to claim that any imperfection disqualifies the results simply ignores the outrageous amount of pressure being put on the Georgian regime, its widespread support in Europe and Russia’s own abysmally undemocratic “elections” which have been widely condemned by all international observers.

We can expect more of this kind of neo-Soviet smear campaign from the likes of Mr. Ivanov and this fellow Russophile enablers as they struggle to justify and rationalize and facilitate the Putin dictatorship. But they’ll find it’s much more difficult to pull the red wool over our eyes the second time around.