Nothing is sacred among Russia’s deviant hipster fashion designers, not even a true American hero like Mickey Mouse.

Last time we checked in on Open! Design’s Sergei Kuzhavsky and Stas Zhitsky, they were bending golden nails into jewelry.

Last month, we celebrated the news that Russia is the world’s leading producer of spam e-mail. This week, The Onion riffs on that same idea with a video report about the fictional spam-producing nation of Koy4goff, capital Affordable Paradise.

I read an architecture story once where a preservationist was asked to comment on the demolition of an old public library in Brooklyn. “It was not a major work,” she said tactfully. Translation: it was ugly, and we have to pick our battles. It was an attitude I wish Moscow’s preservationists had adopted on Tuesday rather than taking to the streets in defense of the Central House of Artists, a museum complex that houses two major galleries. For one thing, these activists should be conserving their negligible political capital for buildings they have a chance of saving. For another, the Central House of Artists is an awful building that deserves to be torn down.

Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov secured the purchase of the world’s most expensive house last summer — a $600 million villa in the south of France. Now, he wants to give it back. If this sounds like another oligarch unable to pay his bills, it isn’t; apparently flush with cash, Prokhorov was planning to buy the villa as a present for Russia’s current leader. He only hesitated because he’s no longer sure who that is.

There’s nothing like a well-made fake. And conspiracy theory blog MIR-12 is nothing like a well-made fake. Granted, the production values for the site, part of the viral campaign for an upcoming video game called Singularity, are very high. But that’s just the problem. If real conspiracy theorists had made it, the homepage logo wouldn’t be nearly as slick, nor would the conspiracy, which involves a Chernobyl-type accident at a top-secret Russian weapons facility, be so involved. Then again, the fact that we’re sitting here writing about the stupid thing probably means the advertisers are getting exactly the response they want.

So, the other day BoingBoing featured a link to a seemingly harmless blog called rolcats.com. The site's author purports to be offering translations of images he takes from a Russian lolcat site called kotomatrix.ru. The twist is that they're not real translations at all, but an excuse to make Cold War jokes about Marxism and the KGB. BoingBoing seemed to get that it's a hoax, but in the past few days we've received queries about the site's authenticity from friends who aren't stupid. So let's put an end to the madness! After the jump, a real Russian lolcat caption for the photo seen above.

Congratulations, young people of Russia! It’s your year — 2009 is officially the Year of Youth. But before you get too excited, you should know that the authorities did not do this to celebrate you. They did this to highlight the fact that you are lazy, drug-addicted hamburger eaters who are driving their great nation into the ground. In fact, they’ve made a 3 1/2-minute PSA to guilt-trip you about it. Now don’t take it too personally; Mommy and Daddy are just stressed about the financial crisis — which, by the way, you caused by not having enough babies. (Why the hell did you think they made 2007 “Year of the Child”?) The video, along with our handy translation, after the jump.

Over at The New Republic this week, James Kirchick has an intriguing piece on the Kremlin’s public relations campaign in the U.S. In addition to trusty fog machine Russia Today, Moscow's attempts to curry Western favor include placing hilarious inserts in the Washington Post, wining and dining American journalists at annual retreats and, bafflingly, letting the foreign press meet the boorish and decidedly unpresentable Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. All of this is trumped, however, by the Kremlin’s 2005 hiring of a D.C.-based PR firm, Ketchum, Inc., who take credit for making Putin Time’s 2007 “Person of the Year.” Ultimately, Kirchick is at a loss to explain a) why these PR attempts are so poorly and haphazardly executed and b) why the Kremlin bothers with them at all. Our guess is as good as anyone’s about the second question, but maybe we can get somewhere with the first.

In light of the pending Bernie Madoff indictment, we thought we’d revisit one of our favorite Ponzi schemes: MMM. The Mavrodi brothers, Sergei and Vyacheslav, along with third “M” Marina Muravieva, scammed their countrymen out of roughly $1.5 billion in the mid-’90s by promising investors a ridiculous 1,000% return on what would now be called "micro" investments. They were so good at promotion that by 1994, Boris Yeltsin had to issue a decree forbidding companies to advertise based on projected earnings. But while Madoff’s securities fraudulence leaves us with only sorrow, anger and debt, MMM left behind a rich cultural legacy in addition to those things. We’re talking, of course, about their TV commercials.

Have you noticed your junk folder filling up faster lately? A recent study by the Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab reveals what we've long suspected: Russia is the world’s number one spam distributor and the leading innovator in virus technology. While China still made more viruses in 2008, Russia’s were more complex. But there was no contest when it came to spam: Russia produces 22 percent of the world’s junk-mail messages to the United States’ 16 percent. You may wonder how a country with so few computers and a non-Latin alphabet can manage to distribute so much spam. Well, a lot of Russian spam is written in English. In fact, there may be some sitting in your spam inbox right now! Read on to learn the telltale signs.

Aeroflot has issued an apology about December's drunken pilot fiasco. And in typical Aeroflot fashion, it's pretty half-assed. How can they say they’re apologizing but still not admit that the pilot was drunk? A spokesperson told the Moscow Times, “We accept that his physical condition was not good,” once again implying that he’d suffered a stroke. Slurred speech and impaired walking, granted, are symptoms of both intoxication and stroke. But considering he celebrated his birthday the night before, which do you think it was? Add to that the fact that, when accused of being drunk, he turned sheepish and promised not to touch anything. It seems Aeroflot finds the prospect of being written off as drunk Russians so terrifying, they would rather have us believe that they’re letting stroke victims fly their planes.

Muscovites have been puzzling over a series of vaguely Warholian posters appearing in subway stations. The “product” being presented is called Amerikanskoye Salo, which translates to “American Lard.” Judging from the poster, it comes in several exciting varieties, including chocolate-covered lard and lard drizzled with borscht. Frankly, we are a little puzzled, too. Depending on your source, “Salo” could be: a) a political PR stunt involving Ukraine, b) a viral PR campaign for a new book, or c) neither of the above. The only thing we’re pretty sure about is that this stuff is not for eating.

With all their focus on domestic issues, the U.S. media have been utterly negligent in reporting American job loss abroad. I’m talking, of course, about the recent firing of “sexpat” and Internet personality Deirdre Dare from her job at a Moscow law firm. For those readers who haven’t been keeping up with the London Daily Telegraph’s excellent coverage, we are here to brief you.