Not that I know of, no. The Russian blogosphere as I knew it in its heyday (not very well) just used whatever LiveJournal was capable of producing without much

Not that I know of, no. The Russian blogosphere as I knew it in its heyday (not very well) just used whatever LiveJournal was capable of producing without much configuration, for the most part, so you had the “cut” used to delimit either the hook or an abstract (под катом [pət 'katəm] is used as the rough Runet-speak equivalent of “below the fold” even today), but not much else. As best as I can tell it was around the time of the English-language The Correspondent hype (either pre- or post-launch—I remember there was a whole section about this one gimmick in the marketing materials) that Meduza introduced these quasi-footnotes, so I guess I just assumed they saw them there and decided they wanted the same thing for themselves. No idea about the real history though.