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There used to be little stigma around getting paid to extol the Russian president. Now, as his popularity ebbs with young people, online celebrities see such praise as a career wrecker.
By Anton Troianovski
MOSCOW – Ksenia Hoffman, a Russian video blogger, said the blogger had sent an article in March: Were she curious to post a post on Instagram that would mention the approach to the referendum on President Vladimir V. Putin’s constitutional amendments?
“They’ll pay for it,” he recalls, saying the blogger.
Ms. Hoffman, 22, says she turned down the offer. The appearance of using the Kremlin’s message, he said, is probably maxim likely to tarnish the image of an Internet influencer. And this has “serious consequences for advertising sales.”
“The public mood has changed,” said Hoffman, who has 800,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Among the constitutional amendments to the vote, there is one that sets a legal basis for Putin to remain in the workplace until 2036. The Kremlin is sure of victory in the referendum, which takes place on Wednesday, but his desperate career in recent weeks begging the voting Russians exposes a more basic challenge: for the masses, Putin has lost his aura as his nation’s unwavering and irrevocable leader.
Putin’s declining approval score tells the story as a component, but his decline in Russian pop culture more vividly underscores his inability to join the Russians. It may be inevitable, but it’s no longer inspiring. It receives an increasingly hagiographic policy on state television, where a Sunday prime-hour demonstration is called “Moscow.” Kremlin Putin, ” but it’s no longer great.
And celebrities, whose big apple has had a symbiotic relationship with leaders, feel the wrath of their enthusiasts when they seem to stick to the Kremlin line.
“These artists concerned about their reputation with the general public,” said an established Russian music critic, Artemy Troitsky, “have begun to quietly move away from the state.”
There was a time when the annexation of Crimea prompted Putin’s confrontation with the West to the point that the president exerted a more emotional influence on his audience. His conscientiously controlled Hollywood-style stunts at the point, riding topless on a horse, immersing himself in a submersible, matched the stated symbol he sought to assign to geopolitics and the widespread feeling among Russians that it was time for the rustic and getting up. westward.
“You and I, the whole country, are for him,” says one bachelor through 2015 hip-hop star Timati. “He’s a superhero.”
But over the past two years, pollsters say the mobilizing force of Russia’s clash with the West has dissipated, replaced by concern about the country’s economic and political leadership. The expansion of an anti-Putin trend in Russian pop culture, where the Internet has invaded the former monopoly of state television in mass entertainment, is following this change.
“These submersible dives are no longer so entertaining,” said Tatyana Stolyar, co-founder of Antiglyanets, a favorite source of celebrity culture on telegram service telegram.
When Timati recorded other single pro-Kremlin before moscow City Council elections in September: “I’m probably not the most in protests, I don’t distribute nonsense.” with got rid of it. The media called it the most hated video in the history of the Russian Internet; his co-star apologized.
The pandemic accelerated the public replenishment and coincided with Mr Putin’s constitutional referendum, a time when he had to mobilize the public. But with the country suffering the third-highest variety of times and under economic shock, Putin’s leader is under fire.
Maxim Galkin, a comedian who is a staple of state television, wounded the Kremlin on his Instagram account, which has 8 million followers.
In a parody, viewed more than six million times, Mr. Galkin makes a phone call between Mr. Putin and the mayor of Moscow discussing the mechanisms for other Americans to walk in an acircular manner during the closure. The president is calling the mayor to be careful not to give the impression that the executive will adjust when other Americans can breathe.
“Yes, we discontinue some people’s best oxygen friend,” Galkin Putin said. “But not yet for abundance, for now.”
The other young Americans, who were among Putin’s top fervent supporters, turned hard in another direction. In December 2017, independent poll organization Levada Cinput recorded an 81% approval score for Putin and 86% for 18- to 2-year-old Russians. By May this year, Putin’s score had fallen to 59% overall, and only 51% among 18- to 4-year-olds.
“This is amplified over the Internet,” said Denis Volkov, deputy director of the Levada Center, the Kremlin’s distance among young people, “in a context of general fatigue with Putin.”
On the Internet, which is the most commonly uncensored in Russia, the next outing of youTube and Instagram stars is increasingly concerned about politics. Yury Dud, a 33-year-old sports journalist who reaches tens of millions of audiences on his YouTube channel through celebrity interviews, has an opposition voice.
“The vote on constitutional amendments is shameful,” he wrote recently on Instagram, attracting 1.2 million likes. “The only point of the vote is to give Vladimir Put the option to stick in effect until 2036.”
The government’s apparent attempt to lean on online celebrities to get out the youth vote backfired when some of those same “influencers” went public about it. Erik Kituashvili, a car blogger with nearly four million followers, claimed he was offered $100,000 in exchange for urging fans to vote. Katya Konasova, who reviews beauty products and online shopping sites for her 837,000 YouTube followers, claimed she was offered $14,000 for hinting “poignantly” that the amendments would be good for “motherhood and childhood.”
“I don’t blame those other Americans because they just don’t realize what they’re doing,” Kituashvili said in a blasphemous diatribe on Instagram, touching those celebrities who advised his supporters to vote in the referendum. . “They may feel incredibly embarrassed when they find out they’ve just sold their homeland.”
The fact of those claims, or who exactly made the contributions, also cannot verify independently, however, the mere fact that a lot of popular and popular bloggers said it is an indicator of the public’s mood. Konasova, who declined to comment on the story, said in a YouTube video that its provision came from an unspecified source “deviantly, thanks to the wisdom of my acquaintances.”
“You know your audience,” Elena Sheidlina, an Instagram star with millions of followers, said in an email.
“To me, it’s transparent that the reputation of a great apple artist who is in direct and public contact with the authorities,” he said, “fits the target of the audience attacks, and this has been very recently.”
The close ties between Russian ruling elegance and its leading artists have been rooted in political fabric since Soviet times, giving the executive cultural legitimacy and celebrities richness and benefits. The Kremlin became one of the world’s largest television channels sometime after Putin tok the force 20 years ago, and has necessarily become the bearer between Apple’s great emerging artist and a massive audience.
Few other Americans raised their eyebrows, so when the Parades of Russian celebrities supported their presidential campaigns or when Filipp Kirkorov, Russia’s biggest pop stars, congratulated Putin in 2017 on his wonderful achievements that they were “incomprehensible.”
But this time, some of Russia’s biggest stars don’t seem to be participating in the campaign. A spokesman for Kirkorov, who was asked if he had voted in the referendum, replied that he was “ending time with his circle of relatives in the pandemic.”
Those who did not resolve the difficulty were discovered in front of a wave of anger online. Evgeni Plushenko, an Olympic skater and world champion, posted an Instagram video about brilliant piano music along with his wife and 7-year-old son. It urges the hearing to vote in the referendum on the amendments to “a special bok called The Constitution” without mentioning that these amendments would allow Putin to remain in force until 2036.
“Consider this comment as an aversion,” replied Valentin Petukhov, a generation blogger.
For this, Mr Petukhov received 108,063 likes, and continues.
Sophia Kishkovsky and Oleg Matsnev contributed to the investigation.
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