Proto-blogger

Before there was SiberianLight (R.I.P.), and long before there was Scraps of Moscow, there was Belly Button Window. This is a blog by an American who travels a fair bit these days, judging from the recent posts - more to the point, he lived and worked in Russia for several years surrounding the financial crisis of '98. Thanks to the miracle of Movable Type, you can check out his first impressions of Russia in 1997 as a Peace Corps Volunteer and his subsequent life and times (apparently as an office worker in the professional services field with an accounting firm) in 1997, '98, and '99. It's not clear whether he actually had all of this on-line back then or uploaded a diary of some kind, interspersed with timely press clippings. But the flavor of pre- and immediately-post-crisis Moscow is unmistakable.

I can't say I read everything - the guy's awfully prolific - but my favorite of the posts I did see was this one (about a topic I just can't avoid) aggregating some news coverage around Alla Pugacheva's 50th birthday back in '98 (though he back-dated it in '97 for some reason). He also has posts like this one about fixtures of Moscow expat life like the Starlite Diner, about what it was like to be an expat back in the day, and about some things that never seem to change. Oh, and some observations from his time in Ukraine in 1999. Fascinating, really, like a trip back in time to a bygone era. I spent a small bit of time in Moscow myself in 1997 and 1998, and it's strange to compare that Moscow to the Moscow I came to know in 2001-05.