Andrey Konoval, via LiveJournal A recent photograph of a billboard greeting visitors to a zoo in the Russian city of Izhevsk, featuring the region's president and a leopard cub born in April.Six months after the Russian Orthodox Church admitted that it had altered a photo on its Web site to remove what looked like an expensive watch worn by its leader, Patriarch Kirill, another fancy watch has disappeared from a portrait of a leading Russian - this time, the president of Udmurtia, a small ethnic republic in Russia's Volga district.
Andrey Konoval, via LiveJournal Until last week, a poster at a zoo in Russia showed what appeared to be an expensive watch on the wrist of a regional official.
Andrey Konoval, via LiveJournal A Russian blogger's photograph of a large sticker of a plain watch pasted on to a portrait of a l ocal official.In both cases the watches appeared to be Breguet time pieces worth tens of thousands of dollars, which are so often found on the wrists of senior figures in Russia's ruling United Russia Party that one blogger has suggested the political grouping should be renamed “the Party of Breguets.†The main difference between the two cases is that while the patriarch's watch was deleted from a photo by digital sleight-of-hand, the pricey watch pictured on the wrist of Udmurtia's president, Alexander Volkov, was literally covered up, by pasting a very large sticker, bearing the image of much plainer watch, on to a billboard at a local zoo.
Catching public figures sporting luxury watches has become something of a hobby for Russian bloggers in Moscow, but it is rare in Izhevsk, the rundown capital of Udmurtia. On Monday, a local journalist and blogger, Andrey Konoval, documented the alterations to the large portrait of Mr. Volkov in a post on his b log, illustrated with before and after pictures and two brief video clips, showing the revised version of the billboard, and the blogger's unsuccessful attempt to peel the sticker off.
Although Mr. Volkov has held his post for 19 years, being president of a backwater populated by speakers of an obscure Finno-Ugric language means that he is not often in the limelight. Eight years ago, my colleague C.J. Chivers visited the presidential palace for a celebration of Udmurtia's most famous export, the Kalashnikov. A few months ago, Mr. Volkov found himself hosting a state reception for the Buranovskiye Babushki, a local pop group made up of six elderly women who managed to finish second at this year's Eurovision song contest, singing their hit, “Party For Everybody.â€
In that context, when Mr. Volkov looked at his calendar for May 21 of this year and saw that he was scheduled to pose for photographs with a newborn leopard cub born at the local zoo six weeks earlier, he might well have looked forward to the occasion. Now however, there appears to be a concerted effort underway in Udmurtia to alter or delete the images taken that day.
That effort ap pears to have started about ten days ago, after a blogger who writes as pravdorub-rus reported that a photograph of Mr. Volkov holding the leopard that day, reproduced in a large poster greeting visitors to the Izhevsk zoo, showed him wearing what looks very like a Breguet Classique Grande Complication, worth about $120,000. As the official Russian news agency RIA Novosti noted, “the sum slightly exceeds Volkov's annual salary.â€
A press secretary for Mr. Volkov, Viktor Chulkov, admitted on Monday that the designers of the poster had glued a new watch over the Bregeut, but said that neither watch was ever worn by the President in real life. “In my opinion, this is an attempt to make a scandal out of nothing,†Mr. Chulkov told a government newspaper, Rossiskaya Gazeta.
Instead, he added, the designers of the poster dreamed up both of the watches themselves. “The designers, who were handling the preparation of the poster, say that they wanted to embellish their work,†he said. “Why they embellished it like this,†he added, referring to the Bregeut, “and then they decided to stick something on top of that â€" we are trying to that figure out.â€
Mr. Chulkov also said that he spends several hours a day with the president and has never seen either watch on his wrist.
After the disappearing watch was reported in Mr. Konoval's blog post, however, the Russian news site Rusnovosti.ru dug up and published four photographs that appeared to show the Bregeut on Mr. Volkov's wrist, including one very clear image from a local news site, IzhLife.ru, of the president clutching the baby leopard in almost the exact pose documented on the billboard.
Izhlife.ru, via GoodNewsAnimal.ru A photograph published in May by a local news Web site in the Russian republic of Udmurtia showed Alexander Volkov, the regional president, cuddling a leopard cub at a zoo.It proved impossible to track down the original report that photograph illustrated, since IzhLife.ru's entire Web site seems to have been taken down, although new reports were published on Tuesday on both the IzhLife Facebook page and the IzhLife YouTube channel, describing developments in the regional parliament and auditions for the Miss Russia pageant in Izhevsk.
If the IzhLife Web site was taken down as part of an effort to scrub the images of Mr. Volkov's watch from the Internet, the revisionist historians behind the scheme appear to have been foiled by the editors of GoodNewsAnimal.ru, a Russian Web site dedicated to scouring the Web for images of cute animals. Captivated by the photograph of the baby leopard, that Web site documented the president's visit to the zoo in great detail, copying the IzhLife photo and even adding video of the fateful photo-op, proving that the image on the poster was not a figment of the designer's imagination.
Follow Andrew Roth on Twitter @ARothmsk.
Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.
