Camp-followers of the CMT will take a high-minded interest in the tales that have unfolded over the past week around the historian Orlando Figes. The story–for the latest on which, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/23/poison-pen-reviews-historian-orlando-figes–involves the use of the Amazon website for the anonymous posting of ‘reviews’ which appear to have been motivated more by personal animosity and professional rivalry than by the disinterested assessment of a book’s value. One of the academics attacked in the reviews, Figes’ fellow Russianist Robert Service, compared them to the use of anonimki (anonymous letters to the state or the press) in the pre-glasnost Soviet Union. ‘Gorbachev banned anonimki from being used in the USSR as a way of tearing up someone’s reputation,’ he wrote. ‘Now the grubby practice has sprouted up here’. Is that comparison apt or hyperbolic? What exactly is being reinvented in Figes’ posts?