kotoshihin.narod.ru was a personal website of a Nizhny Novgorod journalist who wrote under the pen name "Grigory Kotoshikhin": a collection of his publications on politics, religion, and ethnic issues of the Volga Federal District, hosted on the free hosting service "Narod.Ru". The site was listed in the nn.ru directory (the "/rub/" section) [1], and the author gave Nizhny Novgorod as his place of residence, with the contact address kotoshihin@narod.ru [2]. The earliest preserved snapshot of the home page is dated 25 May 2002 [1].
Who Grigory Kotoshikhin was
The site's author wrote that he lived in Nizhny Novgorod and worked in journalism "in addition to his main job"; "Grigory Kotoshikhin" and "Semyon Blagoveshchensky" were pen names under which he published in Nizhny Novgorod outlets: "Nizhegorodskiye Novosti", "Nizhegorodskaya Gazeta", "Nizhegorodskaya Pravda", "Monitor", "Gorod i Gorozhane", as well as in the Volga regional edition of the weekly "Vek" and the newspaper "Dialog-Region" [2]. The range of topics, as he described it himself, was politics and political technology, "civil society", religion, ethno-political issues, and the internet as a socio-political phenomenon [2].
What the site looked like and what it offered
The home page was structured as a table of contents with a menu of "who I am", "which articles", "search", "guestbook", "links", "send a letter" [1]. Publications were grouped by topic and year: a "Religion" section (about the Russian Orthodox Church, Catholic dioceses in Russia, totalitarian sects, the situation in the Nizhny Novgorod diocese) and a "Politics and Ethnic Issues" section (about the names of vodkas of the Volga Federal District, a ranking of the region's constituent entities following the results of 2001, alternative civilian service, pan-Turkism, and the Russian Germans of Nizhny Novgorod) [1]. A section on mobile communications and paging in Nizhny Novgorod was added later [2]. The site had its own search form — the author noted that "the search engine on this site itself doesn't work very well, and indexes new materials with a delay" [2]. Among the materials was an article on the September 2002 election for head of Nizhny Novgorod, in which the author predicted a win for the incumbent mayor Yury Lebedev, while in reality Vadim Bulavinov won by a margin of 0.6 percent; the author himself called this piece "a monument to journalistic overconfidence" [2].
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
According to Counter.nn.ru recorded in the site's card, its rating was 14.0 points. No votes for the site within Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day were recorded in the preserved samples. The site was listed in the nn.ru directory as part of Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s [1].
Fate of the address
The author himself explained the stop in updates on the site's page: "Since the autumn of 2002 I have practically stopped writing under the pen name 'Grigory Kotoshikhin' (and under a pen name at all), so the material for updating this site has, as it were, run dry," as the home page stated [2]. The last article update indicated on the site is dated 2 October 2002 [2]. When checked in August 2026, the site at this address was still responding [3].
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2018 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Last check, 2026 (archive)