Whilst a Moscow court was dealing with the Pussy Riot case in the summer (ultimately finding the defendants guilty), Russian star conductor Valery Gergiev caused a stir with a protest in London. News agency FogNews presented the story in early August 2012. They reported that Gergiev interrupted his Carmen performance at Covent Garden and spoke out clearly on the question of the rule of law in Russia. If the court proceedings were not suspended within a month, Gergiev would, according to FogNews, never return to Russia. The story was entirely invented, and Gergiev, seen as one of Putin’s circle, promptly denied it on Twitter. Before that though, the story had really made waves on the Internet.

RIA FogNews (fognews.ru) – the name alludes to the state-run RIA Nowosti (literally: “Russian Information Agency News”) – publishes only false news. However, it is by no manner of means simply a lavishly produced media satire pinpointing problematic developments in Russian society. At the same time – although no-one has declared this openly yet – FogNews can also be interpreted as one of the most striking recent Russian media art projects – and as one of the first works explicitly involving social networks and exploiting their potential to spread news stories – both true and false – very rapidly.
There was initially no particular response when fognews.ru was formally registered on the Internet on 28th January 2012. Soon however FogNews got one of its first “scoops”: a story about the resignation of Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov (which came true nine months later) and another claiming that Lyudmila Putina, President Vladimir Putin’s 54-year-old wife, was pregnant and being cared for in a German clinic. In late April the latter story had become the top story on Russian news aggregator news.yandex.ru. Although the FogNews home page announces “novae res a nobis confictae” (“news invented by us”), numerous Internet media had simply run the stories without checking them. A radio station that FogNews had “quoted” in its Putina story promptly threatened to sue.

n theory the “news agency” might also face tougher penalties: powerful “victims” such as Gergiev or Putina could sue for slander – defined in Russian criminal law as knowingly disseminating false information or information that damages the victim’s reputation. That may be one reason why all of FogNews’ authors have hidden behind pseudonyms so far.
Certain allusions suggest however that they are close to the St. Petersburg art scene: leading FogNews writer Sofia Perovskaya, who was also responsible for inventing Gergiev’s protest, indicates in her “CV” that she completed studies in painting at the St. Petersburg School of Art and subsequently wrote a thesis on Jacques Lacan – the psychoanalyst plays a particularly important role in the St Petersburg art scene.
At the same time anonymity gives rise to wild speculation. Although there is no concrete evidence to support their assertions, bloggers accuse FogNews of being a child of Putin’s spin doctor Vladislav Surkov, a former deputy director in the Kremlin administration and subsequently Deputy Prime Minister. Similar conspiracy theories have previously been floated with reference to artists’ group Wojna and Pussy Riot.

In fact, the strategies of the “news agency” can be linked to those adopted by the two political art collectives: Wojna and subsequently Pussy Riot carried out very effective marketing on the Internet for real-world art actions, subsequently amplified, in the case of Pussy Riot, by the Russian state’s inappropriate reactions. FogNews, which apparently shares the political and activist approach of the two groups, goes a step further: it refrains from staging any kinds of event in public space, and simply invents, in the process subtly but vigorously critiquing the dire state of affairs in Russia.
This is revealed inter alia in Perowskaja’s pieces, which address St. Petersburg politician Vitaly Milonov – the hardcore fundamentalist is seen as a symbol of the 2012 political season. According to FogNews, he advocates compelling childless women under 23 to do military service. In “real” life he is keen to haul pop star Madonna up in front of a Russian court for allegedly disseminating pro-homosexuality propaganda. Both stories are equally abstruse – it is hard to distinguish here between mainstream reality and crazy invention. FogNews thus produces an important new insight: Russian reality in particular has grown significantly less stable during the 2012 year of protests. And this is certainly threatening for the Kremlin. One of the central topics in Putin’s propaganda was and remains stability. The gradual disappearance of that stability must be extremely unsettling for his regime.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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