Smear in Russia
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
A photograph of a grinning Aleksei Navalny, the blogger turned leader of street protests in
Another photograph, showing Mr. Navalny with a man wanted by the police in
Mr. Navalny said it was a fake, and his assertion was supported when the original, unaltered photograph appeared on Russian Web sites. That, in turn, set off a flurry of parodies using altered photographs, including the image of the alien, all seeming to highlight the outdated nature of some Russian propaganda.
“Vladimir Putin and his team do not understand the Internet,” Mr. Navalny said in a telephone interview, referring to the prime minister.
The image appeared to keep with a long and rich tradition in
Within hours of the newspaper’s distribution at an ice sculpture festival in Yekaterinburg, 850 miles east of
The photographer, Alexey Yushenkov, who was not involved in the later alteration, posted the original photograph and a series of shots just before and after, helping to establish their authenticity.
Taken in May in the studio of the radio station Echo of Moscow, the photographs showed Mr. Navalny standing beside not Mr. Berezovsky but another Russian businessman, Mikhail D. Prokhorov, owner of the New Jersey Nets and a candidate for president — someone not considered a discrediting associate.
Within hours, Russian bloggers had turned the tables on the faux photograph.
Online, Mr. Navalny was seen grinning beside the alien with his urn-shaped head. The caption said that Mr. Navalny “never kept secret that in his struggle with Putin he took money from aliens.”
Through the day Sunday, other photographs appeared: Mr. Navalny with Stalin (who, incidentally, was a pioneering user of political photomontage); Mr. Navalny with Mr. Putin; Mr. Navalny with a nude male bodybuilder.
Mr. Navalny, who spoke in a telephone interview from
“Contemporary technologies, the contemporary information society, are barriers to such primitive approaches,” he said. “You publish something in a regional newspaper. Within an hour, it is on the Internet. Quickly, the real photographer is found.
“The general effect of all these actions led to more people learning that Putin and his team are just swindlers and fraudsters.”
A real-estate lawyer by profession, Mr. Navalny rose to prominence through his LiveJournal blog, which has been read by more than a million people, and through Web sites intended to get the masses involved in reporting on official corruption. He coined the epithet “the Party of Swindlers and Thieves,” in reference to Mr. Putin’s United Russia party, a phrase adopted by protesters.
Photomontage achieved its height as an ideological tool in the 1930s but remained in practice even in the late Soviet period, said Olga L. Sviblova, the director of the
Even if the alteration is obvious, Ms. Sviblova said, a photomontage can be effective as caricature, leaving a lingering, negative image.
“Ideological propaganda works better if it is blunt,” she said. “We, unfortunately, have to acknowledge that crude political technologies do work — up to a point. And maybe we are reaching this point today in
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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