We analyzed Russian blogs to discover networks of discussion around politics and public affairs. Beginning with an initial set of over five million blogs, we used social network analysis to identify a highly active ‘Discussion Core’ of over 11,000. These were clustered according to long term patterns of citations within posts, and the resulting segmentation characterized through both automated and human content analysis. For more information on the article or the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2010/Public_Discourse_Russian_Blogosphere.