Participants in Russia’s protest movement against Vladimir Putin on Friday expressed fury at a film aired on a federal channel, claiming it used false evidence and smeared demonstrators. The film, called “Anatomy of a Protest” aired late Thursday on the NTV channel, one of Russia’s popular networks broadcast nationwide, claiming the opposition gave people money and biscuits to attend rallies and waged wars on the Internet. Combining jerky secret-camera footage, washed-out faces of some of the speakers and an ominous narrative, the 36-minute film also claimed the opposition is after a bloody revolution without popular support. “This film is not the first nor the last,” said head of the liberal party Yabloko Sergei Mitrokhin. “It’s in the style of pure Soviet propaganda, of totalitarian propaganda.” NTV — nominally private but owned by the media arm of state gas giant Gazprom — has previously made similar specials about the opposition, claiming they were foreign spies. “It will have an effect on a certain part of the population that has no other source of information,” Mitrokhin told AFP, alleging that the film was made on “direct orders of the Kremlin.”
