By
Paul Robinson, a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics, and is the author of the Irrussianality blog Russia’s distant provinces are little known, and any effort to tell us more is welcome. Unfortunately, a BBC report from Siberia fails to illuminate, opting for tired clichés and discredited prophecies of impending catastrophe.
“Russia is finished,” the Atlantic declared back in 2001. Twenty years on, Russia is still here, but the predictions of doom continue unabated, as seen in the titles of books such as Richard Lourie’s
A picture supposedly showing a snake after it swallowed an AK-47 is frequently circulated on social media:
But this is not a genuine photograph of such a snake.
One of the first things we look for when examining a potentially doctored picture is for additional pictures that show the scene from other angles. If a picture has been photoshopped, it’s unlikely you’ll find multiple pictures of the object from different angles. Surprisingly, we found an additional photograph of this SnAK-47, which indicates that this is a physical object, not a digitally created one:
While these pictures appear to document a physical object, this “snake” is not real. For one, it seems unlikely that a snake’s body would wrap so tightly around the angular shape of this gun. If a snake did eat an AK-47, its body would stretch from one protuberance to another, creating a more rounded shape.