Russian Blogger Smeared With Doctored Photo

Doctoring photographs for political gain was a tool of government in the old Soviet Union. Seems like it still might be – in modern Russia.

A doctored photo appeared recently in a regional Russian newspaper, causing a stir.

It showed blogger and pro-democracy activist Alexei Navalny standing next to a disgraced oligarch.

After Navalny complained it was a fake, the original showed up on the web within a few days.

Stephen Cohen is a professor of Russian studies and history at New York University.

He says Navalny was targeted because of his opposition to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. Doctoring photographs for political gain was a specialty of the government in the old Soviet Union. Well, seems like it still might be in modern Russia. A doctored photo appeared recently in a regional Russian newspaper. It caused a stir. It showed blogger and pro-democracy activist Alexei Navalny standing next to a disgraced oligarch. After Navalny complained that the photo was fake the original showed up on the web within a few days. Stephen Cohen is a professor of Russian studies and history at New York University. He says that Navalny was targeted because of opposition to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Stephen Cohen: Navalny has become a very popular and populous figure because he’s a blogger. He formulated an expression about Putin’s party. He calls it “the party of swindlers and crooks.” And this tag caught on. He has about a million followers of his blog, his website, and he’s credited for bringing a lot of people to the street protests following the December parliamentary elections. There was a real photograph of Navalny with Mikhail Prokhorov, the owner of the New York Nets, who’s also an oligarch and who says he’s gonna run for president. So he’s been at these talk shows in Russia and at street protests with Navalny, there were photographs of them together. Somebody got the notion to replace Prokhorov with Boris Berezovsky. Boris Berezovsky is probably inside Russia viewed as the most odious of the oligarchs, who through insider trading through the Kremlin in the 1990s seized billions and billions of dollars of former state property while the majority of Russians fell into poverty.

Mullins: But why is Berezovsky any worse to be seen with than Prokhorov?

Cohen: That’s a really interesting question. Public opinion polls in Russia over the last 10 or 15 years consistently show that about 75% of the Russian people hate them as a group. Prokhorov is slightly more popular for several reasons: first of all, he’s handsome, he’s 6’8″, a basketball player, he’s a bachelor. The point is that his reputation is not as odious as Berezovsky.

Mullins: It was pretty convincing back in the days of Sovietology when you tried to figure out whose face was erased even if the hate remained. So if you’re thinking about kind of Photoshopping in the old days and Photoshopping now I wonder if the Russian populous is as vulnerable to it because they know how easy it is to do on the net, so maybe they’re more hip to it, which leads to a big so what?

Cohen: It may nullify itself. That is to say Navalny figured it out. The internet may proliferate this kind of defamation, but it also exposes it very quickly, somebody else on the internet immediately corrects it or shows its falsification. But I would just make two points here. There’s no reason to tie that to Putin personally. These groups exist on both sides, born against the Kremlin all through Russia. There’s not much political control, almost none on the internet, so it’s a new aspect or a renewed aspect of Russian politics. It’s ugly, but we’re familiar with it in this country as well. The larger point is we in the West who are completely wired are probably exaggerating the importance of the internet in Russia today in Russian politics. The protests in the streets of Moscow in December were very large due in very large part to the internet. But it was almost exclusively an upper and middle class phenomenon, and an urban phenomenon. Remember, there are 150 million people in Russia. Overwhelmingly the people in the provinces are not on the internet. So what we’re seeing here at the moment, thought it may grow, is a phenomenon that is a result of a more affluent middle class, particularly in Russia’s four or five large cities, who, like my children, live on the internet every day. But whether it has a real electoral impact, that is could it turn the Russian people, for example, against Putin remains to be seen. I rather doubt it.

Mullins: Stephen Cohen’s latest book is called Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post Communist Russia. The book has just come out in paperback. Stephen, thank you.

Cohen: My pleasure.

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