Putin pulls off gold medal performance
SOCHI, Russia — Love him or hate him, it looks more and more as if Russian President Vladimir Putin will have his way.
The deeper we get into the Sochi Olympics, the more obvious it is becoming that Russia is deftly staging a sports spectacular that has seduced its own citizens and the world.
Putin is basking not only in the glory of brilliant spring sunshine, but the president is being hailed by his countrymen for having pulled off this $51-billion public relations campaign.
The only thing that could check this lovefest — which includes utterly unexpected, admiring comments about the Games from bitter political rivals such as Alexei Navalny — is if terrorists manage to pull of a grotesque publicity stunt that causes a lot of bloodshed.
The risible complaints by petulant western journalists about their living quarters, the infamous double toilets and other minor problems — such as unplanted palm trees in a city where many residents often go without potable water, heating and electricity — mean absolutely nothing to Russians and therefore have not harmed Putin’s reputation at all. The same can be said of more well-aimed complaints by western observers and leaders about Russia’s human rights record and Sochi-related corruption.
The Russian media mostly ignored the often wild criticisms produced in the run-up to the Games, including the egregious leap that Newsweek took when it ran a cover story called Hate on Ice, linking the controversy over Putin’s views on homosexuality and the difficulties faced by gay figure skaters — when the two subjects, whatever their merits, aren’t linked at all. When Russian media has reported on what was out there in the Twitterverse — or the fact that most western leaders made a lot of noise about choosing not to attend the opening ceremonies — Russians, being famously and ferociously patriotic, reacted predictably by circling the wagons.
Most of this nonsense has played to long-held prejudices that we are somehow fundamentally superior to Russians and that, as a Russian art gallery owner told a journalist, the only news fit to come out of Russia is bad news. There is much wrong in Russia, but crowing over trivial matters and overreaching on issues that are actually important is of a piece with the idea that Putin is thumbing his nose at the world by doing these Olympics his way.
In fact, Putin has mostly ignored complaints from abroad or dismissed them as neo-Cold War “containment” thinking designed to limit Russian ambitions as the West once tried to rein in the Soviet Union’s global ambitions. He has been able to get away with inflammatory remarks about such white hot subjects as gay and lesbian rights because there is a gigantic disconnect between the way most Russians and most westerners think about almost everything.
Russia largely remains a deeply conservative society that backs Putin to the hilt on issues such as the detention of former Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina, for what a huge majority of the population believes was the desecration of what is arguably the country’s most important Orthodox church.
In fact, the two young women who have received so much attention elsewhere have absolutely no constituency at all at home.
Sure, Putin is a heavyhanded autocrat who revels in a cult-of-personality, homophobia is rampant in Russia, the rule of law does not mean a lot and corruption is rife. But that was known long before Sochi, so why the hysteria now? The time to try to do something in a sports context about that was seven years ago — when Russia bid for the Games in Guatemala.
As it is, those enormously expensive trains that run along the Black Sea coast and from Sochi to the mountain resorts of Krasnaya Polyana are running on time. And they are free to ride.
The German news magazine Der Spiegel used that wonderfully evocative word schadenfreude to describe the perverse delight that has been taken in pointing out Sochi’s many imagined and real shortcomings.
“We shouldn’t forget that Russia is hosting a party and we are their guests,” Der Spiegel said.
Just about now, Putin may be recalling how he derisively dismissed his critics a few years ago by paraphrasing that old Middle Eastern saying: “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.”