There is a text floating around the Internet that is presented as a verbal portrait of the Russian president, compiled by a famous public figure and politician. We checked whether its author is indeed Valeria Novodvorskaya.

In a rather voluminous text, which is an attempt at a detailed psychological portrait, the Russian president is called a “pathological liar” and a “sadist” with “inadequate self-esteem” and “low intelligence.” Full of derogatory characteristics, the text is usually entitled “The Last Letter to the Russians” by Valeria Novodvorskaya — right-wing liberal politician who died in 2014.

The “letter” was actively distributed on social networks. In particular, it was spread by users and communities on Facebook: Petro S. Balog (17,000 reposts at the time of writing this analysis), Svetlana Myatlik (5900), "Antivatnik" (1500), "Art-Protest» (1500), "Shalom, our Israel!" (1400), "For our - your life"(540) and Ivan Storchak (411). On Twitter, user posts became the most popular Winston Churchill (562 retweets) and Andrey Smetanenko (385). The text was also distributed in “Odnoklassniki"

Politician, journalist and public figure Valeria Novodvorskaya since the early 2000s sequentially opposed the policies pursued by Vladimir Putin, calling his "monster", "spawn of darkness" and "Sauron". The number of her articles and speeches criticizing the Russian president is enormous. However, we did not find a single one among them that even remotely resembled the text under study. Your last interview A few days before her death, Novodvorskaya gave the Ukrainian publication “Gordon” and did not mention such quotes. We also add that Novodvorskaya, although she was admitted to the hospital in July 2014 as a result of complications one of the chronic diseases, died suddenly and unexpectedly, so the very existence of the “Last Letter to the Russians” allegedly prepared by her looks strange.

Moreover, the attribution of Novodvorskaya appears under it no earlier than July 2022, in the first half of the same year the letter spread without author. The earliest cases of publishing text on the Internet account for on September 14–15, 2018, and in all situations the same person was named as the author - Facebook user Alexander Tverskoy. On your website this text reprinted Ukrainian channel ATR (the entry has been deleted today), and the oldest publication currently available appeared on Facebook on September 14 at 15:00 Moscow time and contained screenshots of Tverskoy’s post. In these screenshots, Novodvorskaya is not mentioned, thoughts are expressed on behalf of the user, and the text is somewhat different from what has been circulating on social networks in recent years.

Tverskoy’s original post, judging by the time stamps in the reprints, also appeared on September 14, but at the moment neither this post nor the author’s entire page not available, although, judging by web archive, Alexander once actively posted.

Alexander Tverskoy is not an ordinary Facebook user; he is a Russian blogger and journalist who has gained fame for his harsh criticism of the Kremlin. His publications were often reprinted in Russian (“Kasparov.ru") and Ukrainian ("Gordon", Obozrevatel) resources. Facebook repeatedly blocked Tverskoy’s accounts, after which he went to Telegram, but today his channel @tverskoyaa is also not active. In 2018, according to some reports, Tverskoy moved to Ukraine, where he became involved in a dubious scandalrelated to collecting donations from readers. In recent years, the blogger has stopped publishing his texts on any social networks.

Nevertheless, quotes from Tverskoy’s old posts are still actively diverge according to Runet. "Verified" already wrote about another text by a blogger, which was later passed off as an anti-militarist essay entitled “Our Victory” authored by showman Dmitry Nagiyev. Also in this case, “Portrait of Putin” has nothing to do with Valeria Novodvorskaya.

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons