Troublemaker website Gawker.com has shamed magazine publisher Conde Nast by crowd-sourcing what it calls a “public service” Russian translation of a GQ piece on the bombing of blocks of flats in Russia ahead of Putin’s first election in 1999.

Conde Nast prevented its own piece, entitled “Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power”, from appearing anywhere online or in US copies of GQ which were sent to Russia.

The piece takes another look at the four bombs which killed hundreds of people and were blamed by the Russian security services on Chechen terrorists. The previously little-known Putin was elected a few months later as Russians demanded decisive action against the Chechens.

GQ reporter Scott Anderson in fact has a bit of a scoop, as he persuaded former FSB security service officer Mihail Trepashkin, a key player in the affair who was recently released from a labour camp, to talk for the first time.

Other parts of the blogosphere were outraged at the length of time it took for Radio Liberty, a US-funded Russian language station with many listeners in Russia to report the story.

And oddly, apart from Gawker, the other site that does well out of this story is Chechen separatist website Kavkaz Centre — it tops page one of a google search for the banned English text.