On dupes, vandals, and charlatans

RIGA - Latvia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been hoodwinked and humbled, all thanks to an exhibition put on by a charlatan photographer.
It could have all been easily avoided. Instead, it was up to LSM, the country’s state broadcaster, to do the Foreign Ministry’s work for them with a few searches on Google, and a bit of common sense.

Unfortunately, by the time LSM unearthed the swindle last weekend, it was too late: the Foreign Ministry had already been duped, making the error of granting its support to Sergey Melnikoff’s outdoor, shamelessly-plagiarised photo exhibit “The People of Maidan.” Three people had already been arrested, accused of vandalising the photos on display in the Latvian capital. Riga’s City Council had already stepped in to draw the exhibit to a humiliating and premature close, and Melnikoff himself had already lashed out in fury — threatening to take Riga’s City Council to court.

Workers at the Foreign Ministry should not be surprised by any of this. From the outset, the red flags would not have been more blatant if waved in front of their eyes by shouting Matadors.
To start with, vandalism was always a serious risk. The Ministry has acknowledged that Russian state media has sought to influence the opinions of some Rigans. On few current events is this more true than when it comes to their view of Ukraine’s Maidan protest movement of 2013-14, particularly among the city’s Russian speakers.

The Latvian government’s line is that the Maidan was a brave stand against Ukraine’s endemic corruption, a move towards European values, and a surge towards the rule of law. But Russia’s state media has demonised the Maidan as a US-backed, nationalist putsch of a democratically elected president. Some Rigans tune in to watch; some believe Russia’s narrative.

How many Rigans are actually influenced by Russia’s view of the Maidan is up for debate: some say very few; others say more. But it is largely beside the point in this instance: it only takes a few people to sabotage photographs, so the existence of any opposition views should be cause for the Ministry to treat the exhibition with caution if they are putting their name to it.

Yet the Ministry threw caution to the wind. They could have insisted the photo exhibition should be housed indoors as a condition for their support, where it would be easier to secure — rather than in a public space, where a risk of international embarrassment ran high, and where it could be a sitting target for vandals keen to make a quick, easy, and destructive political point.

This was all the more important because the Ministry was dependent on Melnikoff and his fellow event organizers to guarantee the exhibition’s security. (Riga’s laws state the organiser is obliged to provide their own security services for these events.)

If the event was not placed inside, the Ministry should have doubled its efforts to check if Melnikoff was a reliable associate — and not the fraudster he turned out to be. By the Foreign Ministry’s logo being on the exhibition, their own reputation intertwined with the assumed respectability of Melnikoff, a Ukrainian-born photographer with US citizenship.
Trusting him turned out to be woefully naive. The Ministry left itself open to abuse from a charlatan masquerading as someone “world famous.” Melnikoff abused this trust spectacularly, letting Riga and the Ministry down in a variety of ways. His organisation’s security failed to stop the vandals, even after the first vandalising offense. They let it happen a second time on their watch, despite assurances to Riga’s police that they could handle the security situation.

This would be bad enough. But the Ministry failed to check out Melnikoff’s work itself before letting him plaster their logo on his website and on the public exhibition. Where was the resident art critic at the Ministry? Why was this work not emailed to a photographer to check if these photos were legitimate? Even just running it through Google images would have done the trick.

If they had, they would have found out that Melnikoff was anything but “world famous.”  They would have discovered Melnikoff had used crude plagiarisms — some simply nabbed from the website Shutter Stock, others pinched from AP photographers. He was asking for donations to an organisation based in Florida whose funding model looked ostensibly sketchy. This was all available information in the public domain. Why was this not looked over? Or if it was checked out, why was this not a cause for alarm at the Ministry? Even a quick perusal of his website shows a lack of professionalism that should have raised eyebrows.

How about Melnikoff’s claimed connections to Buckingham Palace? To Hollywood? To the Dalai Lama? It would not have required employing Sherlock Holmes to look into some of these dubious claims. A call to the British Embassy probably could have got to the bottom of his apparent friendship with Queen Elizabeth II.
It raises the question: had anyone at the Ministry even met Melnikoff before they allowed him to put on the exhibition using their logo? A quick Google search shows a man dogged by controversy and dubious business practices from Florida to Kyrgyzstan. His views during his interview with LSM are replete with astounding anti-Russian xenophobia — which does not match up to the somewhat more affable relations he appears to have during a YouTube discussion with Russian President Vladimir Putin, though Melnikoff appears in the photo almost as though placed there thanks to a child’s scissor cut-out and the use of a glue stick. (See 4 minutes 17 seconds into the clip).

The Ministry was ultimately lured in like a silly, clumsy teenager using a rose as a romantic gesture for the first time: hurrying to show devotion to Ukraine, but forgetting to check it first for thorns.
The debate whether this was due to incompetence, or laziness, or both, is one that needs to happen in the Ministry without delay. How many other events has the Foreign Ministry courted controversy with lax checking procedures is impossible to say, but this should be a lesson as good as any that the Ministry’s policy of “hope for the best, prepare for the best,” in this instance, represents a dismal naivety from those who should know better.

Richard Martyn Hemphill is the editor of The Baltic Times.