When Alexander Gorbunov, one of #Russia’s most popular bloggers, got a call from his mom in April, she said police officers had barged into his parents’ apartment. The police claimed his phone had been used to make bomb threats in #Moscow, where he was living, but Gorbunov suspected a different reason for the raid—that his online rants, posted under the pseudonym @stalin_gulag, had hit a nerve inside the Kremlin. His writings, skewering the government over corruption and mocking President Vladimir #Putin, had earned Gorbunov, 27, over a million followers on Twitter. After the police visited his parents, and later questioned his brothers, Gorbunov felt he had only one way to protect himself: take off the mask of anonymity and speak out even louder. “With no independent courts in Russia, no honest justice system, no legal means of defending your rights, the only way to protect yourself, however fleetingly, is to go public,” he said in an interview in Moscow. “That was my only chance.” After revealing his identity…