Interesting trend in popularity of articles on Russia and US

The website is four days old, although it's growth is full of spits and spurts.
What really caught my attention was the popularity of the story about the Russian spring and US election. The latter, I thought was rather timely, because the next day after I wrote a blog Center is the new Right arguing for GOP nomination of Romney by the GOP, Ann Coulter came out for Romney as well as Washington Examiner. The next day I wrote an article about Putin's low regard for demonstrators of Russian spring, and various methods of suppression of dissent.
The later article about Russia, had a shorter life, but managed to accumulate more that double the number of page views for the Romney blog. I wonder why this is? Is it my unique knowledge of Russia and ability to offers interesting insights outweighing the interest in local politics. I thought the two articles were roughly comparable, and wonder why the one about Russia proved so popular with American (where majority of the readers are from, see second picture).  Was the 'smiling bear' smiling bear more unique content, or simple better written?

If you're one of the readers who saw both articles, I would be interested in your impression and preferences.

I have written another pair of articles (earlier) about the Russian spring, a shorter one about a new demonstration scheduled for Saturday (tomorrow, 12/17/11) as well as a longer one, Russian spring in the swamp, which  more in depth, and the funniest of the three. If you enjoyed the 'smiling bear' story
  try the longs story about the Bolotnaya (Swamp Square).