Putin road movie hits YouTube diversion

A Russian YouTube hit has given an alternative view of Prime Minister Putin's summer travels through Russia.

(If you can't view the video above, hit this link.)

Throughout the summer, Russian state television has been promoting what heavyweight broadsheet Nezavisimaya Gazeta called Putin's "heroic image". He's been shown on a Harley-Davidson at a bikers' rally in Crimea, putting out forest fires from an amphibious plane in Ryazan Region and firing a dart into a whale on a scientific expedition off Kamchatka.

The culmination of the PR campaign was a four-day trip in a new yellow Lada Kalina on a recently constructed highway between the Far East cities of Khabarovsk and Chita. For four consecutive evenings, the main bulletins on state TV showed the Prime Minister driving along the highway and stopping off for stage-managed photo opportunities. He took tea with villagers, chewed the fat with lorry drivers and construction workers and visited a hydro-electric power station and the proposed site for a space centre.

All the reports featured prominently the brightly coloured Lada, and the Prime Minister talking up its attributes. In Channel One's Vremya bulletin on 29 August, he told construction workers that it "goes smoothly, holds the road beautifully and is not noisy".

The news coverage of Putin's trip caught the attention of TV critics. Anna Kachkayeva called it the "prime minister's serial", while Irina Petrovskaya dubbed it a television news version of a "road movie".

Several commentators contrasted Putin's man-of-action portrayal in the TV news with recent coverage of President Dmitriy Medvedev, who has more often than not been shown in his office or attending official functions. An analysis published on the Communist Party website noted that, in August, Putin had closed the gap on Medvedev in terms of exposure on the main TV channels. There was even talk of the TV stations moving into pre-election mode or at least trying to undo the limited damage inflicted on the leadership's opinion poll ratings during the recent wildfire crisis.

But Putin and his image-makers failed to realise how vulnerable PR stunts like this have become to subversion from the internet.

The Prime Minister probably didn't notice the little knot of people from the appropriately named Diversant (Saboteur) off-road-vehicle club who had gathered along the side of the Chita-Khabarovsk highway in the hope of catching a glimpse of him behind the wheel. As he drove past, they had their cameras at the ready and what they filmed (above) wasn't quite the picture shown on television.

Instead of the mainly close-up shots of the Lada Kalina, giving the impression that Putin was virtually alone on the open road, the Diversant film shows Putin's car dwarfed by an enormous motorcade, numbering, according to one eyewitness, over 100 police cars, black jeeps and back-up vehicles.

More damaging for the Russian car industry was the revelation that the motorcade contained two more yellow Lada Kalinas, one driving behind Putin and the other riding on the back of a transporter truck. The common assumption was that the spares were needed because the car was so unreliable.

The watching motor enthusiasts greet the second Lada Kalina with good-humoured mirth. When they see the third, they fall around helpless with laughter. One can be heard bewailing the fact that the "whole thing was paid for with our money".

The Diversant film was an instant internet hit. One version posted on YouTube on 30 August had received over 560,000 views by 12 September and another posted the following day just over 230,000. It also became a popular talking point among bloggers, as did an article by Diversant's leader, Semen Shifrin, entitled "A country of big empty spectacles", which originally appeared on a Chita city website.

Shifrin described how police and other officials thoroughly vetted the club members ahead of Putin's arrival, checking that they did not have any political banners and such like. He then reflected on the significance of the massive motorcade. "Why was there security like this?" he asked. "Who is the Prime Minister hiding from? Why does he fear his fellow citizens like this? Why don't the journalists covering this entire journey write about the hundreds of people on the road with walkie-talkies, about the three Ladas, about the huge motorcade, about this empty spectacle?"

News of the Diversant video also broke into the mainstream media. It figured, among other places, in Irina Petrovskaya's weekly TV review in the pro-government newspaper Izvestiya; in a lengthy article on power games in the Kremlin on the respected political analysis website Politcom.ru; and in a review of Putin's summer PR campaign on Ren TV, the last refuge of independent comment on Russian terrestrial TV.

It even appeared on Belarus' Nationwide TV (ONT), which used it as a weapon in the media war that has been raging between Moscow and Minsk since early in the summer. "Four days of work by Moscow PR men and journalists with the budget of a TV film have been wasted. Another scourge - fools on the road - has been added to the two well-known Russian scourges [fools and roads]," the state-owned channel observed.

Two of Russia's most distinguished political commentators, Igor Bunin and Tatyana Stanovaya, drew similar if less insulting conclusions about the episode. In a joint article on Politcom.ru, they said that "revelations like these significantly reduce the effectiveness" of the kind of pro-Putin PR churned out by state TV.

They also suggested that "public scrutiny via the internet" was beginning to change political behaviour in Russia. "The authorities have started to make decisions on the basis of reports and controversies on the internet," they wrote, and even suggested "The blogosphere has in effect begun to get close to performing the role of the 'fourth estate'."