It doesn't help that Artemy Lebedev is a giant, giant
  douche nozzle - if you read Russian, you can convince
  yourself of this by browsing his blog.

Yep. The things they do are not that great to allow for his tone. "Kovodstvo" was a good read for me when I was starting my proffesional career as webdev (around 1999), but I left it for the higher quality in English (and because Lebedev's studio still cannot code HTML).