One of the most popular photographs of Valeria Novodvorskaya on the Internet is her portrait with a large white poster on which it is written: “You are all fools and do not get treatment! I’m the only one who’s smart, standing beautiful in a white coat!”
If you type Valeria Novodvorskaya’s name in a Google photo search, you will definitely see this photo more than once - it is often used to illustrate articles about Valeria Ilyinichna. And the film made about her by the Berlin studio Narra and the cooperative of independent journalists “Bereg” was even called “White coat" Obviously, this is not a real photograph, but a photomontage, but nothing is known about the circumstances of its creation. We decided to figure out where this meme came from.
Novodvorskaya herself, for some reason, considered it to be the author of the writer and journalist Joseph Halperin - at least once she said so publicly. In 2012, President Dmitry Medvedev went to a May Day demonstration wearing a white trench coat, and corresponding adaptations of the white coat meme immediately appeared on the Internet. During the next release “Personally Yours” program with Novodvorskaya, presenter Tatyana Felgengauer asked Valeria Ilyinichna how she felt about the fact that Medvedev stole her creativity. “He didn’t steal the creative from me, but he stole the creative from a completely different journalist who made this edit on the Internet. His name is Joseph Halperin, this journalist,” Novodvorskaya answered. Halperin himself, however, in a conversation with Verified, suggested that Valeria Ilyinichna had messed something up: “I have never made any memes - neither verbal nor visual. In fairly frequent conversations with Valeria Ilyinichna, she never raised this issue; perhaps something came up in a normal conversation, just to clarify her position, but no one concentrated on it.” So who created the white coat meme then?
In 2004, so-called photoshopped photos—funny pictures altered in Photoshop—became popular on the RuNet (later this word almost went out of use, and the term “meme”, borrowed from English, became much more widespread). One of the main sources of photojabs was the collective blog Dirty.ru (now d3.ru), whose users often competed with each other, making pictures on a given topic.
May 6, 2004, founder of Dirty.ru Jovan Savovic suggested to site users make a photoshop out of photos by Valeria Novodvorskaya in a light raincoat, with a large poster with the inscription “We will fight the dark force, the Chekist horde” on his chest. For the convenience of users, Savovich posted and edited version of the photo - with an erased inscription, instead of which anything could be written.
“By the way, I took the original from MrParker magazine (first blog of journalist Maxim Kononenko on LiveJournal, was blocked in 2008. — Approx. ed.), for which I thank him. Well, I can’t even imagine who took the pictures,” Jovan wrote. Later it turned out that the photo was taken by political strategist Marina Litvinovich at the rally “Civil society versus police state", which took place on May 1, 2004 at the Solovetsky Stone on Lubyanka Square. In addition to Novodvorskaya, the rally was attended by Irina Khakamada, Grigory Yavlinsky, Lyudmila Alekseeva, Viktor Shenderovich and others. After Litvinovich was sent to comments in LiveJournal link to the post on Dirty.ru, she shared with the community a link to her photo archive, where the picture could be downloaded in higher resolution (unfortunately, the photographs themselves were not indexed by the Wayback Machine Internet archive and disappeared from the public domain). In a conversation with Verified, Marina Litvinovich confirmed the authorship of this photo.
After the first photoshopped photos appeared in the comments to the post, the user ravva (Arthur Rau, at that moment the build editor of Lenta.ru - Ed.) invited those who wished to use his photograph from the same rally - better quality and taken from a more convenient angle for editing. Unfortunately, the original of this photo is also not preserved on the Internet, although it exists archival copy of the album Arthur Rau on fotki.com. At the time of writing this analysis, “Verified” was unable to contact Rau. But the template made from this photograph has been preserved.
Users offered many versions of processing of both photos - in the Telegram channel of Jovan Savovic in a post dated April 13, 2023 it is stated that there were about a hundred of them in total. In the comments to the original post on Dirty.ru most of them are no longer displayed (in the archived version available more), but they were preserved in Savovich’s personal archive). The version with the inscription “You are all fools and are not being treated!” has spread the most widely across the Internet! I’m the only one who’s smart, standing beautiful in a white coat!” IN archived version of the post The author of this photoshop is indicated - user chaikovsky.
At the time of publication of the “Verified” analysis, it was not possible to contact the user chaikovsky and identify his identity. However, we were able to trace the history of the meme to the moment of its creation.
Cover collage: Provereno.media
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