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Putin\'s Latest Stunt Invites Ridicule

Europe September 7, 2012, 12:48 am
By ELLEN BARRY and ILYA MOUZYKANTSKII

MOSCOW - After news broke that Russia's strongman president intended to don a snow-white costume, climb into a hang-glider and guide a group of young cranes on their long southern migration, a colleague here wondered aloud: “Who says Russia needs more heroes? Its Photoshoppers are among the world's best.”

He was right. Satirical images were flowing onto t he Internet so quickly that it seemed they were being produced in some espresso-fueled sweatshop. There was a striking remix of a Mr. Putin astride a flying crane; and another which showed him bareback (but with stirrups) on a huge, rampant shark. Another showed him swimming the butterfly stroke - an iconic photo released by his press office in 2009 - now sporting a silly-looking beak and white wings.

The next wave of sight gags, based on a photograph from his flight, were more caustic. One showed Mr. Putin in his white bird suit and straitjacket, and another showed him walking beside another bird-man - the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. In a third, the bird suit was red and his eyes were dots of malicious flame, a la Angry Birds. “Welcome to Russia,” read the caption.

The Cranes Are Flying: The Russian president's latest photo-op.

Actually, the year-long upwe lling of dissent here has ushered in kind of a golden age of Photoshopping, a form that seems particularly well suited to the ironic, stylish young Russians who make up much of its core. Sight gags don't require prescriptions for change; they don't even require hope, especially, just a lacerating gaze. One of the first signs that a strange new political current was running through Moscow was a doctored photograph that seeped into every corner of the Internet in September, superimposing Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the Soviet Union for 18 years, onto Mr. Putin.

Maybe it was inevitable that Russians would be the ones to vault Photoshop to this prominence. As my colleague Andrew Kramer has pointed out, airbrushing and photomontage served as powerful ideological weapons through the Soviet era, used to smear or erase those who challenged the regime.

These days, however, young Russians can turn the tables on the authorities with breathtaking speed. Early this year, when a pro-Kremlin publication printed a doctored photograph linking opposition leader Aleksei Navalny to an exiled billionaire wanted by the Russian police, not only did the photographer immediately come forward to expose the fraud, but Mr. Navalny's defenders circulated multiple altered versions of the same photo that showed him standing next to Stalin, Hitler, Chuck Norris and a bulbous-headed alien.

Whatever the reason, the mockery built to such a height this week that it prompted a response from Mr. Putin's press spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov. “You get the feeling that many people have not left behind the mood of summer vacation,” he told a reporter from Dozhd, a cable television station. “They don't want to hear the news, and they have created a kind of vacuum where they can dive into their allusions - sometimes, you must admit, bordering on idiocy.”

Chastening words, though perhaps not enough to drive out the image of Mr. Putin dressed up like a giant chi cken.