If you follow Russian politics, or dwell in the darker corners of the internet, you may have noticed a story spreading like wildfire in recent days around Telegram and X, the site formerly known as Twitter, and finally jumping into the mainstream media. The news? Vladimir Putin, Russian dictator and Ukrainan warmonger, was suddenly dead at age 71.
It all began with GeneralSVR, an anonymous Twitter/Telegram account that claims to be a senior Russian security official with extraordinary insider access to the uppermost levels of the Kremlin power structure. On October 26th, the anonymous account reported that President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin perished at his Valdai villa at “20:42, p.m Moscow time,” felled by a cardiac arrest, unleashing a macabre “coup d’etat in Russia.”
“Now the doctors are blocked in the room with Putin’s corpse, they are being held by employees of the presidential security service on the personal order of [Federal Protective Service Director] Dmitry Kochnev, who is in touch and receives instructions from the secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Nikolai Patrushev,” it continued.
“The security of the president’s double has been strengthened. Active negotiations are underway. Any attempt to pass off a double as president after Putin’s death is a coup d’état.”
Valery Solovey, a prominent Russian political analyst and academic, confirms this wild tale, though many believe that Solovey and GeneralSVR are one and the same person. For context, Solovey has also claimed that Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin is currently in exile, living on an island off the coast of Venezuela.
In reality, Prigozhin was assassinated when his private jet suddenly fell flaming from the sky over Russia, a few months after his aborted insurrection briefly humiliated the Russian president, and shook confidence in his wartime regime. Concrete evidence for Prigozhin being alive or Putin being dead is, of course, nonexistent, though perhaps that isn’t the point.
Satire
The details were like something from a black comedy; many instantly thought of Armando Iannucci’s brilliant satirical film, The Death of Stalin, which squeezed ample hilarity from that monster’s death, and the lethal Kremlin power struggle that followed it.
Just today, the account declared that Putin’s body was “still in a freezer” at Valdai. “As they joke in the Kremlin, “Putin has prepared for #Halloween better than anyone else and is doing an amazingly natural job of portraying a dead man.”
Prior to that, GeneralSVR released a steady stream of details regarding a grim power struggle between Siloviki in Moscow, complete with Putin’s doctors in detention, and Putin’s body doubles leading meetings of Russia’s Security Council. Secretary of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, long seen as the power behind the throne, was said to be masterminding a coup through the use of a Putin lookalike, of which there are several.
Incidentally, the story was also picked up by Newsweek, and various tabloids around the world. The Kyiv Post reported, “Here We Go Again — Another ‘Report’ of Putin’s Death Triggers More Media Speculation”
However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov coolly dismissed the story as “just another hoax,” and said that “everything is fine,” though it’s remarkable how long this particular hoax has endured, despite several sightings of the Russian president. Meanwhile, millions of Russians have been anxiously searching for information online about the rumors, according to a recent analysis of Russian search engine Yandex by Agentstvo, a Russian media company.
If nothing else, the story certainly has legs.
Indeed, the anonymous GeneralSVR account has more than half a million followers on Telegram and 15 thousand on X, and has been widely regarded by serious analysts as something of a disinformation specialist; some have speculated that the account is variously a CIA or even FSB influence operation. Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov has also weighed in frequently with claims of Putin’s supposedly failing health.
In any case, this eruption of rumor shows the ease and speed with which elaborate misinformation can take root and spread from dubious online sources into the mainstream, via clogged social media arteries filled with lies, political propaganda, and the competing influence operations of shadowy intelligence agencies. This particular outburst brings to mind Q Anon, and other anonymous accounts dedicated to spreading political misinformation on social media in the United States and around the world.
With the outbreak of war in the Middle East, following Hamas’s savage October 7th attack against Israel, there’s been a proliferation of accounts spreading propaganda, alongside AI-doctored videos and photographs, further cluttering an already difficult conversation with white noise. As the New York Times recently reported, merely the existence of AI-manipulated imagery online is having a profound effect on political discourse, leading people to discount real images, or believe in false ones.
Unfortunately, as AI continues to advance and evolve, this phenomenon will only get worse, as fake imagery and video becomes more and more photorealistic, and convincing to the human eye. At a certain point in the very near future, it will become extremely difficult to know if what you’re seeing is real or merely a sophisticated fabrication intended to deceive you, further undermining trust in just about everything. It’s a world where political propagandists, dictatorships, and vectors of disinformation will thrive, and where democracy will wither, deprived of the oxygen of a shared reality.
Body doubles
Meanwhile, a Japanese AI company did some interesting analysis, which they released a few weeks ago, confirming that Vladimir Putin does in fact use at least two body doubles. They used AI-enhanced facial recognition algorithms, and compared voice, body movements, and mannerisms. The real Vladimir Putin, they said, could be seen giving a speech at the Red Square Victory Day Parade in May; his dopplegangers popped up visiting a devastated Mariupol, inspecting the Crimean Bridge, and wading into a crowd shortly after Prigozhin’s failed mutiny.
I’ve certainly noticed several different Putin’s throughout the years, and it would surprise exactly no one that he has doubles to guard against the threat of assassination, and to run political errands for him, while he stays safely behind in the comfort of one of his many sumptuous villas. Many dictators, from Joseph Stalin to Saddam Hussein, deployed body doubles for similar reasons.
But is the real Vladimir Putin’s blue corpse hanging in a freezer at Valdai, as one of his body doubles is used to maintain power in the Kremlin?
That seems highly unlikely to me. Until actual evidence emerges of such a monumental event, it’s safe to say he’s alive and well, still directing his catastrophic invasion of Ukraine from afar, biding his time. In the meantime, individuals and intelligence agencies alike will continue to play their games spreading disinformation online, constructing false narratives at the expense of our global discourse, and shared common reality.
And that’s something that Vladimir Putin, former KGB operative and disinformation-spreading dictator, can still certainly appreciate himself.