Face Is a Rat

What the picture shows

A collage of four photos arranged in a two-by-two grid. On the left, top and bottom: two pictures of rats, an ordinary gray-and-white pet rat and a hairless rat sitting on its hind legs. On the right, top and bottom: two portrait photos of the same young man with distinctive tattoos on his face near the eyebrows and cheekbones, labeled in small text (resembling a name or a handle). In one photo he has long dark hair, in the other a very short haircut. The composition visually compares the man’s facial features with a rat’s face, playing on the nickname “rat.”

Who is pictured and the nature of the conflict

The man in the photos is a Russian rapper performing under the stage name Face (real name Ivan Dryomin), one of the best-known Russian rap and hip-hop performers of the second half of the 2010s, who became widely known after the release of the album “Puti neispovedimy” (“Inscrutable Ways”) in 2017.

The “rat” nickname stuck to him after a public conflict with video blogger Ruslan Tushentsov, who accused the rapper of physical assault and released a video titled “Face Is a Rat,” calling him a “rat” in the slang sense of the word: a traitor, someone who doesn’t stand by their words or actions. In slang, including prison and street slang, “rat” means an informer or someone who steals from their own.

How the visual meme was born

After the scandalous video and the ensuing online discussion, users began jokingly illustrating the nickname literally, pairing photos of Face with pictures of rats and noting a faint resemblance in facial features such as a pointed profile or the shape of the cheekbones. Collages of a person and an animal side by side became a stable format for visualizing the “rat” joke.

This “person looks like an animal” format is characteristic of the Russian internet in general: similar comparisons have been made with other public figures. In Face’s case, however, the nickname “rat” specifically stuck thanks to the story with Tushentsov, not to a random external resemblance as such.

Context of the conflict in Face’s career

The accusations from Tushentsov became one of the public scandals around the rapper in the late 2010s. Given the performer’s general popularity, such scandals quickly spawned memes and discussions on social media, and the nickname “rat” became one of the ironic labels that stuck to him in online communities, used even apart from any direct reference to Tushentsov’s story.

How the meme is used today

The “Face Is a Rat” collage is used as a ready-made illustration for any mention of the conflict or for jokes about the performer’s reputation online. It is also reused more broadly as a template for comparing any person the users want to accuse of betrayal or unreliability to a rat: another face is substituted for Face’s, while the idea of a “person + rat” collage is kept. A typical caption for this format is “found out about my friend’s plans, I won’t keep quiet,” next to a photo of an acquaintance and a rat, or simply “well, definitely a rat,” with no further explanation.