Everyone keeps asking me about this: On Friday, one of Moscow’s major advertising agencies held a “brainstorming session” in its division specializing in “black” PR (smear campaigns), under the working title “Stop Navalny.” Our source says the meeting was convened on an emergency basis: the day before, the head of the agency met with one of the top figures in the United Russia party and received an order to discredit the well-known blogger, head of the RosPil project, Alexei Navalny. During that meeting, the campaign budget was also set: 10 million rubles (roughly $340,000 at the time). (The names of those involved in the talks and the name of the advertising agency are known to the editors.) During the “brainstorming session,” an idea emerged: find someone who looks like Navalny, bring in makeup artists to make the resemblance perfect, and film video footage of him in various “compromising situations.” The idea was approved, and work began. At the same time, it was decided to launch a series of “exposés” using “documents” fabricated with Photoshop. http://www.novayagazeta.ru/politics/48964.html Well, what can I say. The person most annoyed by all this is my wife, grumbling: now you can blame absolutely anything on a Kremlin provocation. I myself have no idea whether this is true or not. But remembering the elegant Kremlin political-technologist tricks involving the infamous Katya Mumu (a reference to a well-known Russian political sex scandal), I can believe it. I have no reason not to trust Novaya and Murtazin on this issue. And Alexei Chadayev, a former Kremlin ideologue who was once “especially close” to the inner circle, wrote quite plainly after leaving his post: Having produced a gigantic number of crooked and temporary schemes, we ourselves failed to notice how we drove straight into a full-scale legal crisis, with a crisis of legitimacy already looming behind it. But no one looks at the problem from that angle. The PR-state sees it as nothing more than another little PR war, a chance to exercise propaganda capacities that have been sitting idle for lack of any serious task. In that respect, Navalny is a gold mine. Back when he was only fighting Transneft, an army of court political technologists rushed in to propose PR counterattack projects. For all of them, he created a new market to replace the ones that collapsed in the 2000s. And once Navalny went on the attack against United Russia, it became paradise. Now dozens of people are getting decent contracts, because the fatherland is in danger, “the enemy is attacking” (deliberately misspelled internet slang in the original), and therefore, gentlemen, haggling is inappropriate. Old hands are even recalling ’96, understanding where this is all heading. http://www.chadayev.ru/blog/2011/06/28/vremennye-slaz/ They never spared money for this before, either. Ten million more, ten million less. Why should people bother counting money when they effectively own an entire country—the world’s largest oil exporter? So yes, there is a chance you’ll see a video where I first snatch cell phones from a group of school violinists in Kuzminki (a district in Moscow), and then head off to a sauna with some girls, handing out bribes to traffic cops along the way. As usual, one well-known feature of United Russia works in our favor: most of the budget will probably be stolen, and only a tiny fraction will go toward the creative work and filming. And of course, after the article in Novaya, making kompromat with a lookalike would be stupid. Most likely it will be something else. But there will definitely be something. And if there weren’t, that would only mean we’re doing a poor job and posing no real threat to the crooks and thieves. The efforts of United Russia and the Kremlin crooks in “black PR” are, in general, one of the main indicators of how effective our work is. So we keep going. If the Party of Crooks and Thieves hasn’t prepared its videos yet, we already have one. Remember, I held a contest for a script for an animated video against the Party of Crooks and Thieves? The most popular suggestion was to use United Russia’s 2002 election manifesto. So that’s what we did. I present this video—the fruit of our collective efforts—and once again express enormous gratitude to the unsung heroes who did all the work out of sheer enthusiasm. These people are true patriots of Russia.
http://youtu.be/B-vkox2SHTo You can download the original MP4 here. 288 megabytes. OUT (HQ).mp4 I suggest—and ask everyone—to make a serious effort to spread this video. That is, when we’re dealing with the internet, “serious effort” means don’t be lazy and spend 10 minutes of your personal time on the right thing and a civic-minded act. All social networks. Emails to friends. ICQ, Skype. Imagine that every time you send someone a link to the video, you’re tugging on Gryzlov’s mustache (Boris Gryzlov, a senior United Russia politician). Or flicking Medvedev on the nose. Whatever amuses you more. It’ll make the process of sharing it more fun. And let’s try an experiment with sending the link to the video by text message. We can see that for every February 23 or March 8, SMS viruses work great. Everyone gets loads of idiotic messages with stupid jokey verses and toasts. Let’s use that for the public good. Something like this:
There is one small problem: for example, my dad and my mother-in-law have regular phones, not smartphones. I can just imagine them trying to open this link right now. But if they do manage to open it, they’ll remember this video for a long time :) Let’s give it a try. Gryzlov’s mustache is worth it.