Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 15 – In a measure of both
the progress video technology has made and the regress Russia has under
Vladimir Putin, Moscow’s First Channel at the time of its broadcast of the
opening of the World Cup photoshopped a clip so that the British embassy in the
Russian capital was replaced by a Russian Orthodox Cathedral.
Viewers and some independent news
agencies immediately noticed the deception on the television broadcast and when
it was posted on the YouTube channel of the Russian network (t.me/mbkhmedia/3134, t.me/arkhlikbez/4306 and znak.com/2018-06-15/pervyy_kanal_v_rolike_k_otkrytiyu_chm_na_meste_posolstva_velikobritanii_pokazal_hram).
It
was quickly taken down, but it remains cached in various places, including on
the Znak site, because on the Internet nothing is ever completely lost.
This
incident immediately brings to mind David King’s classic 1996 study, The Commissar Vanishes, in which he described
and showed the ways in which political opponents of the Soviet regime where
removed from photographs with those Soviet leaders still in good odor.
But
in fact, in the Internet age, this Putin-era outrage recalls more the case in which
subscribers to the second edition of the Bolshaya
Sovetskaya Entsiklopedia were advised in 1953 to cut out pages containing the
biography of disgraced and then murdered secret police chief Lavrenty Beria and
insert in their place pages devoted to the Bering Strait.
Of
course, only the most subservient of Soviet citizens or their Western
counterparts did what they were told. Most kept the Beria pages as an
increasingly valuable souvenir of their lives and times.
In
one sense, however, Putin’s people have gone Stalin’s one better: they have sought
to eliminate not just disgraced individuals but a large building in the middle
of Moscow that still exists and that millions of Russians are familiar with
because it has often appeared in television programs and films about the
Kremlin.
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