The Motherland is schooling the United States on how to run their own magazines: Apparently "fashion journalism" emphasizes both words equally in Russia, which makes everyone crowding those tents here in Bryant Park this week look like, well, fashion bloggers.

Aliona Doletskaya is the editor over at Russian Vogue, and the qualifications she brings to the table as a reporter and editor outnumber the amount of haircuts Anna Wintour receives on a yearly basis. Dolestkaya holds a Ph.D. in comparative linguistics and said a recent cover photo for the glossy epresents “the Byzantine past of the country.”

Byzantine, smyzantine. Would Doletskaya have the яи́чки to put African-American basketball player Lebron James on the cover of Vogue, looking like a damn dirty ape? How about taking the brand name to India and dressing those below the poverty level in Burberry to better shill $3,000 umbrellas to people who live off of less than a buck twenty five a day?

Nope? Then get back to us when Doletskaya is ready to play in the big (racist) leagues.

Just imagine what Miley Cyrus could've done for Vanity Fair's September issue. After all, the racy pics of the 15-year-old shining beacon of the American economy in the June issue have landed Graydon Carter his best-selling issue of the year. A very respectable 435,000 units moved on the newsstand. And she wasn't even on the cover.

With the numbers in hand, we can finally analyze what this issue became: An exercise in publicity.

It's likely Carter and photographer Annie Liebowitz didn't know they were sitting on circulation gold; they just thought they had secured pop culture's biggest rising star for a photo spread in the well. Instead, once the photos hit, they were met with cries of exploitation, which forced the Cyrus camp to claim the girl was taken advantage of, while Carter and Liebowitz stood by their decision.

When it came to media coverage, the story wasn't just relegated to insider media coverage — there was the celebrity factor too, which meant Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood were weighing in, splashing the magazine's cover (of Bobby Kennedy) and the Cyrus pictures in an endless loop of free VF advertising. The magazine racked up countless millions of image exposures — as 915 letters and a 20X traffic spike on the website — and left the confines of anything Conde Nast publicity could control.

And when it comes to the numbers, it was to their benefit.

But not every magazine can capitalize on continuous drum beating about a controversy inside their pages. And that includes a Conde Nast cousin.

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Although the recent LeBron James Vogue cover didn’t do so well on the stands for what, perhaps, are obvious reasons, there’s a lot of speculation that the all-black issue of Vogue Italia will exceed money-making expectations. For one thing the issue — see sneak-peek pics* from Naomi Campbell’s Vogue Italia spread above and below — has received international attention. For another thing, far more ads were sold for this special issue than normal. Sure, part of it is the novelty aspect. But it also dispels the myth that black models can’t sell magazines or products.

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Remember that Vogue-King Kong controversy that ambushed the media chattering classes back in March? Anna Wintour and Annie Leibovitz were gouged by politically correct knives for repeating a racist and stereotypical image of King Kong and a lady of liberty, making cover star LeBron James look like a screaming ape next to a helpless (though smiling!) Gisele Bundchen. Now that the dust has settled, it's time to look at how Americans at large viewed the issue. In a word, poorly.

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In all the blog chatter about Vogue's King Kong cover, have we, perhaps, missed the most fundamental issue?

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Slate's Wesley Morris: "Between the outrage over Obama's Jeremiah Wright problems and Bill Clinton's unbelievable mutation from American's first black president into Karl Rove, I don't have the bandwidth to fight Anna Wintour. Seeing that cover as purely racist doesn't give the people looking at it enough credit. It dates Vogue for relying on the allusion but it also dates us for going crazy over it. Racial hysteria is the old black. Maybe it's so old it's avant-garde—very Vogue." [Slate, earlier]

Yesterday we tried to explain, but did not excuse, Vogue's "King Kong" cover, and assumed neither Anna Wintour nor Annie Leibovitz had any idea their LeBron James-Gisele Bundchen photo would cause so much controversy.

But maybe, in fact, they did. Or at least they should have.

Here's a World War I enlistment poster (via) from 1917, famous from its era, that encouraged men to sign up with the army to fight the German enemy. (Interestingly, the Germans found it so convincing, they Nazis used the same concept for their own World War II poster.)

It's hard to imagine Wintour or Leibovitz, or their staffs, in all their years studying photos and imagery, never came across this poster, or understood its racial ramifications with the ape carrying the helpless Lady Liberty. They understood it well enough to put Gisele in an eerily similar dress.

We doubt when choosing the April cover, with LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen, Vogue editor Anna Wintour ever conjured up the thought, "This is just the type of controversy we're looking to court." In fact, the idea the cover would cause any rift within the media or black communities probably never crossed her mind. Instead, she saw: Pretty model wearing fantastic gown, giant athlete wearing synthetic fibers. Even photog Annie Leibovitz probably didn't foresee the coming scandal.

But that doesn't let her off the hook for this "King Kong" cover, even if LeBron himself doesn't have a problem with the photo. Sure, the NAACP, which SPEAKS FOR EVERY BLACK AMERICAN EVER, has barely weighed in and says it has bigger problems to deal with, but inside baseball players like Men's Fitness editor Roy Johnson calling foul:

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Forgive the Associated Press for only yesterday getting around to covering the "King Kong" controversy surrounding LeBron James' appearance on the cover of Vogue. After all, they only announced themselves as celebrity obsessed on Friday.