Intraspecific struggle

On April 19, a video appeared on the Internet claiming that opposition leader Alexei Navalny was a loyal follower of Hitler. And the day before, the Dozhd TV channel reported, citing “administration sources,” that the Presidential Administration had created a whole department to fight Navalny, they would fight him “like Hitler,” and videos would also become a weapon of struggle.

"What would you do with a man who abused your mother with a smile on his face?" the voiceover asks. This, of course, is about Navalny. It was his comrades-in-arms who painted the statue of the Motherland in Volgograd with green paint. Of course, they forgot to mention that the “abuse” took place in Photoshop. Further, cutting random pieces from Navalny's real and fictitious speeches, the unnamed authors of the video explain that the oppositionist is the direct heir of Hitler himself. And at the same time, his connections, real and fictional, with various nationalist movements are commemorated - from the now banned DPNI in Russia to Great Russia. An interesting point - Navalny, of course, had no ties with Great Russia, but one of its founders, Dmitry Rogozin, is now an ardent Putinist patriot and deputy prime minister of the government.

They obviously didn’t spare any money for the video, technically it was made with high quality, but the content is so miserable that the oppositionists, starting with Navalny himself, advertised it not without passion. Although the idea itself is not new, Dmitry Kiselev in Vesti Nedeli back in September 2013, immediately after the election of the mayor of Moscow, explained to the audience that Navalny is Hitler today.

Of course, it’s not the video that is interesting, but an amazing coincidence: in the evening, Dozhd reports that the Internal Policy Department of the presidential administration, subordinate to Sergei Kiriyenko, will begin to turn Navalny into Hitler through videos, and in the morning the Internet is having fun, looking through the miserable work of counter-propagandists. Both the idea itself and its implementation are so ridiculous that it’s hard to refrain from the conclusion: this is not an episode of the fight against Navalny (the fight against Navalny has been going on without any interruptions for more than a year, the oppositionist himself gets confused in the number of cases brought against him, his brother in prison, his headquarters are smashed by enthusiastic public figures), but part of some kind of internal intrigue. Who looks like a fool at the end? Kiriyenko. Who is playing against him? Different people, for example, the speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, who is clearly fighting to maintain influence and the right to determine the course of the presidential campaign. The deputy head of the Internal Policy Department is Timur Prokopenko, a Volodinian cadre, who has excellent connections with journalists who once switched from RBC to Dozhd (as we know from Prokopenko’s own telephone correspondence, hacked by hackers and leaked into the public domain). Could he tell his acquaintances a sensation to help his former favorite boss in the game against the current, unloved one? Why not. And the journalist, taking into account the complete opacity of the authorities, simply has no choice - he has to make news, referring to "anonymous sources."

Who looks like a fool at the end? Kiriyenko. Who is playing against him?

This is all pure conspiracy theory, of course. But it allows you to think about power better than it looks. Because if we don’t have the fruits of undercover battles for places on the bureaucratic Olympus, but a real attempt to discredit a dangerous and popular political opponent, then what should we think about the intellectual abilities of the people who rule us? It even becomes a little scary to live from such thoughts. It’s hard to call our bosses good and honest people, but let’s still think that they are not complete idiots. So calmer.

Twitter, meanwhile, reports that Navalny has begun work on the book My Fight Against Corruption.