One of the most curious black PR smear cases is unfolding in an interesting way. It’s called “Gaidar Ran Someone Over,” and I’ve been following it because it’s developing right before my eyes and is quite an instructive example of how planted disinformation works.
As some of you may remember, Maria Gaidar studied at Harvard. I knew she had been planning to enroll there, had been preparing for a year and a half, submitted her application several months in advance, and so on, as usually happens.
And then, when she announced that she was leaving, various pro-Kremlin media outlets started pushing theories about her “sudden departure.” In particular, sites like Politonline and Pravda.ru (remember those?) published one wilder version after another, including some nonsense about “Gaidar running over a child.” There really was a traffic accident in Kirov, and a 13-year-old girl died, but since Gaidar herself was not driving at the time and was surrounded by plenty of people, everyone simply thought the claim was absurd.
What makes this case of black PR especially notable, though, is that the story proved remarkably persistent and began circulating from blog to blog and forum to forum. For an interesting reason: the death of the girl was pinned on a female trolleybus driver, but nobody believed she was actually guilty. The whole thing is murky; it looks as if some higher-up really did run the girl over and then dumped the blame on an unfortunate woman. Perfect breeding ground for rumors and gossip.
And so Novaya Gazeta, together with volunteers eager to get to the truth, carried out a major investigation into this case
They examined in considerable detail why the trolleybus driver could not have been responsible for the accident, clearly established that the story about Gaidar was fabricated and published specifically by the propaganda dump Pravda.ru, and most interestingly of all, *Novaya* also believes that the child was struck on the road by senior police officials.