BAR SET LOW, HERE WE GO
Putin, stray dogs, unfinished buildings and bloody history fade for a day
The Russian aria was always going to be a few different things: beautiful, baffling, incomplete, unique. It’s a complex country with a complex history, and the opening ceremony at the Olympics are songs to the world and to ourselves, trying to capture the parts of our nation we want to show. Beijing, London, Vancouver, Sochi: it is always a country’s global television show, and a chance to show the world your most beautiful self.
“We certainly felt painfully the burden of this responsibility,” said the Russian television producer Konstantin Ernst, who was in charge of the opening ceremony. “We realized that the opening ceremony carries the name of the country.”
The rest of the song is the Games themselves, and we will get to that. In the run-up to Russia’s Winter Olympics all the talk has been focused on unfinished buildings, stray dogs, Vladimir Putin, terrorism, corruption, surveillance, and dissidents, in approximately that order. These Olympics, when viewed through the lens of the powerful men who made them, are anything but the most beautiful Russia.
The opening ceremony, though: This was the Russia wanted to show the world, and wanted to show itself. There was emotion, but not sentiment. There was Russia’s achievements in dance, in music, in space, in the great power of this country. There was the deep red of the revolution, the Soviet hammer and sickle, church bells and cannons, czars and Bolsheviks, boxers and dancers and the occasional poet. Russia.
No, no nation ever includes all its history, even if Russia’s history is messier than most. Stalin’s purges weren’t going in here, any more than an American Games would include a section on the Vietnam War. (They are in no way, of course, strictly comparable events.) Though in fairness, some of this country’s historical nastiness made an appearance. The official ceremony guide, in the section about the balloons that combined to represent St. Basil’s Cathedral, noted that “According to legend, Ivan the Terrible blinded St. Basil’s architect Postnik Yakovlev after commissioning the cathedral in 1552 — so that nothing would ever again be so beautiful.”
No, art and history aren’t always easy, here.
“It’s very brief,” said Valeriya, a bright young Sochi volunteer who is a university economics student in Moscow, when asked how the ceremony represented the whole of Russia. “There is so much history, and it is much more complicated. It’s a show. So it’s hard to take it too seriously. It’s a show.” But when she and fellow student Artem were asked if it made them proud of Russia, and to be Russian, they both nodded, without hesitation. Asked why, Artem said, “(It makes me proud) that we could do this, and these things (in the ceremony).”
Russia did these things, it’s true. But suffering helps makes great art, so there were some of Russia’s
‘It’s very brief. There is so much history, and it is much more complicated. It’s a show. So it’s hard to take it too seriously. It’s a show.’
VALERIYA Sochi volunteer
great ballet dancers, but not Mikhail Baryshnikov, who defected in Toronto in 1974, and has been an American citizen since 1986, and who opposes Putin’s infamous anti-gays laws. There was a ballroom scene pulled out of Tolstoy’s War And Peace, and mentions of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky and Nabokov, even as elsewhere prominent Russian novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya told the BBC that her new book was being investigated for promoting homosexual propaganda.
Russia is complicated. The volunteers and people on ground here have been wonderful, trying to help, learning English to make conversation, putting the best face on their country. When you talk to them, they speak about how badly they want these Games to be a success, about pride. They are separate from the people in charge.
And it is impossible to untangle all the threads of Russia to make this simple, because Olympics are sports and politics, no matter what the aristocrats say. According to The Associated Press, in Moscow, as the Games were opening, at least 19 LGBT activists were arrested for holding rainbow flags and singing Russia’s majestic national anthem. Four more were arrested in St. Petersburg. Russia arrested 61 in total for various unauthorized protests, including an opposition leader on his way to Sochi, according to The New York Times.
In Istanbul a plane was diverted after a hijacking threat from a man from Ukraine, which Putin has reportedly bought with natural gas and billions in loans, and which is engaging in repression of its massive street protests. When the Ukraine team entered the stadium, they were given a great cheer.
The torch bearers held plenty of controversy, in their own way. Irina Rodnina, is both a threetime Olympic figure skating champion and a woman who, in September, tweeted a racist picture of Barack and Michelle Obama, and a banana. Alina Kabaeva, a rhythmic gymnast, has been romantically linked to Putin. Yelena Isinbayeva, the champion high jumper, made homophobic comments at the world championships last year.
These Olympics will make for beautiful television. The Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains, spaceship venues and stage-managed sets. It will look spectacular and extravagant and imperial. And as it does, the Kremlin will be strangling Rain TV, the nation’s lone independent television network, which has been dropped by major cable providers under reported pressure from Putin.
Messy business. Soon the sports will come in a flood, medals and heartbreak and the engine of the Olympics, and Russia will have more chances to be its best self. The bar has been set so low for these Games, and it’s not hard to imagine it getting better, holding together, staying safe — no actual attacks anywhere on the night of the opening ceremony seems like a good sign — and becoming a success in the eyes of even the most hotel-poor journalists.
And there will and should be an asterisk, like the too-easy metaphor that arrived when the five Olympic rings turned into four, plus a snowflake in the top righthand corner. (Hey, in Canada we messed up the cauldron.) Russia is an old country and a young country and a complicated country, and these Games carry the name of that country, and they will reflect it, good and bad. Here we go.