In Russia's voluminous bag of tactics for smearing political enemies, photomontage is an old trick, but it has made a comeback with the publication of a doctored image of Alexei Navalny, the 35-year-old blogger and lawyer who is the figurehead of Russia's protest movement.
A recent photograph in a Russian news-sheet that emerged this week showed a guffawing Navalny meeting Boris Berezovsky, the self-exiled tycoon who lives in London and serves as the arch-villain in Kremlin propaganda.
Picturing Navalny with Berezovsky – who was convicted of fraud in absentia in Russia in 2007 – was a perfect way to suggest the opposition is funded by shadowy foreign-based forces intent on the downfall of Vladimir Putin, the frontrunner to win presidential elections on 4 March.
"Alexei Navalny has never hidden that Boris Berezovsky gives him money for the struggle with Putin," read the picture caption, in case anyone missed the point.
It was a damaging accusation for Navalny and his allies as they prepare for protests on 4 February. But news, true or not, spreads fast these days. Navalny picked up the image from bloggers in Yekaterinburg and exposed it online as a shabby fake.
The original picture in fact showed him meeting not Berezovsky, he said, but another businessman, Mikhail Prokhorov, a billionaire who owns the New Jersey Nets basketball team and is also running for the Russian presidency. "What an intriguing profession people have," Navalny remarked. "Cutting out some oligarchs and sticking others in their place."
The exact provenance of the article is unclear, but photographs of its pages suggest it was coproduced by a regional arm of Argumenty i Fakty (Arguments and Facts), a popular federal newspaper, and the All-Russia People's Front, a coalition of Putin supporters.
Navalny made it clear he believed the montage was a deliberate piece of black PR by the prime minister's camp.
One blogger wrote on Saturday that 80,000 copies had been printed for distribution in Yekaterinburg, and were being handed out by young people. United Russia, the party led by Putin, got some of its lowest results in the city last month in nationwide elections to the state duma. The outcome of the election was nonetheless widely seen as fiddled by Putin's allies in favour of his party, causing the biggest street protests since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The clumsy attempt to smear Navalny provoked a torrent of scorn online from his supporters. Commenters on his blog posted numerous fotozhaby – literally, photo-toads, or montages – in pastiche of the sham image. One showed Navalny with Hitler, one with a smooth-looking Arnold Schwarzenegger and a third with an alien.
Photographs were often doctored during the Soviet era, especially under Stalin, whose propaganda chiefs removed Bolsheviks or others who had been shot or sent to the gulag from images with the great leader.
Post-Soviet Russian politics has its own tradition of kompromat, or compromising material designed to erode a rival's reputation. This includes real or faked documents leaked to expose suspect business deals or dodgily acquired dachas. Last month, lifenews.ru, a muck-raking website with ties to the security services, released a series of wiretaps of phone conversations of made by Boris Nemtsov, the veteran oppositionist who has spoken at recent protests. The leak was clearly designed to sow discord in the ranks of the protest movement because it mainly featured injudicious personal remarks by Nemtsov about his political allies.
Alexei Yushenkov, who took the original picture of Navalny with Prohkorov when the two met by chance at a radio station, told Russian media he intended to seek legal advice over the montage.
He said the pair were laughing in the image because Navalny had joked the photographer could only take a picture if Yushenkov made him look taller than Prokhorov, whose is 6ft 8in.
Navalny was reportedly on holiday in Mexico on Monday and not available for comment.
