{"id":3379,"date":"2020-12-22T16:46:44","date_gmt":"2020-12-22T16:46:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=142350"},"modified":"2020-12-22T16:46:44","modified_gmt":"2020-12-22T16:46:44","slug":"russian-watergate-russian-social-media-reacts-after-navalny-dupes-fsb-agent-on-his-poisoning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/22\/russian-watergate-russian-social-media-reacts-after-navalny-dupes-fsb-agent-on-his-poisoning\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Russian Watergate’: Russian Social Media Reacts After Navalny Dupes FSB Agent On His Poisoning"},"content":{"rendered":"
Within 24 hours of being posted, Russian opposition figure Aleksei Navalny’s video report of a conversation in which a Federal Security Agency (FSB) chemist confesses to participating in Navalny’s poisoning with a deadly nerve agent in August racked up nearly 12 million views.<\/p>\n
A video report posted one week earlier that identified the FSB agents who tracked Navalny and purportedly attempted to assassinate him at least three times has been viewed nearly 19 million times.<\/p>\n
The shocking report, in which Navalny tricked FSB military chemist Konstantin Kudryavtsev into confessing that FSB agents smeared a toxin from the Novichok group in the oppositionist’s underwear in a hotel in Tomsk in a bid to kill him, lit up the Russian Internet<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n A full day after the video landed, Navalny’s name was still No. 2 on Twitter’s “Russia Trends” list. And St. Petersburg writer and journalist Tatyana Shorokhova<\/a><\/strong> wrote: “This was the day the entire Russian Facebook rumbled.”<\/p>\n History In The Making<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n “What Navalny did to the FSB with his investigations, in terms of the extent of the demoralization and humiliation of the employees of this ‘new aristocracy’ is comparable only to the historical moment when the monument to [Soviet secret police founder Feliks] Dzerzhinsky was dragged along the Lubyanka like a market girl by the hair “wrote the humorous Stalingulag account on Twitter<\/a><\/strong>, referring to the August 1991 toppling of the colossal Dzerzhinsky statue in front of Moscow’s KGB headquarters at Lubyanka.<\/p>\n Moscow photographer Yevgeny Feldman also highlighted the potentially historic significance of the episode, writing on Twitter<\/a><\/strong>: “Russia’s Watergate: senseless and pitiless.”<\/p>\n