Russian protest leader 'smeared' by oligarch photo

One of the leaders of the Russian protest movement has poked fun at an attempt to smear him with a faked photograph showing him beside Kremlin foe and exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Alexei Navalny posted on his blog a newspaper cutting showing an unflattering shot of him next to Berezovsky, with the caption: "Alexei Navalny has never hidden that oligarch Boris Berezovsky gives him money to fight Putin." The photograph swiftly became an Internet hit, with bloggers photo-shopping the image to show Navalny with Stalin, Vladimir Putin or even muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger. The photograph was published in a newspaper in the Urals mountains city of Yekaterinburg and first exposed by a blogger in the city, who wrote that the publication was handed out by people wearing jackets saying "For Putin." The original photographer came forward to say he had taken a shot of Navalny with billionaire turned politician Mikhail Prokhorov, who hopes to stand against Putin in March elections. "The funniest thing is that the original photograph (where I came out far from my best)... shows another oligarch: Prokhorov," Navalny wrote, publishing the original shot. The crudely faked photograph recalled the Soviet era when photographs and even oil paintings of official meetings were regularly censored to remove frozen-out officials. Navalny, 35, a charismatic lawyer with blond model looks, has used his Internet popularity to steer the movement against fraud-tainted elections for the parliament in December, despite concerns over his nationalist views. Berezovsky, 65, is estimated to be worth $700 million by Forbes magazine and is widely disliked by the Russian public, many of whom blame oligarchs for stripping the country's assets in the 1990s. He fled to Britain in 2000 and later gained political asylum after Russia slapped him with fraud charges. He became a vocal critic of the Kremlin after initially backing Putin.