By 1980, the system was still totalitarian, but rotting from within. And its leadership was aging and jittery about the huge project before it. They had sought out the Summer Olympics, but as the Games drew closer they had second thoughts. The other night, I watched a Russian television documentary on the 1980 Games, which revealed that Leonid Brezhnev and his advisers were deeply worried about costs (there were no Kremlin-associated oligarchs then and the energy economy was only a fraction of what it is now); about terrorism (the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympiad was a vivid, recent memory); and about the reaction of the West following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the end, the Soviet leadership found the money and was able to build the needed venues and there was no violence, but sixty-five countries, led by the United States, boycotted the Games in response to the invasion. Sixteen of the eighty-one national teams that did take part marched into Lenin Stadium for the opening ceremony bearing no national flags, as a further protest. The U.S. Ambassador, Thomas Watson, quietly left Moscow two days before the opening ceremony.
Men and women of Putin’s age and even somewhat younger remember well the final moments of that Olympiad: on the streets, there was a mass demonstration of mourning for the death of Vladimir Vysotsky, the great singer-songwriter and actor, who was a tribune of hard-bitten rebellion; inside the stadium, at the closing ceremony, an inflatable version of the Games’ official mascot, Misha the Bear, floated up into the heavens.
Putin, it is safe to say, does not want the Winter Games in Sochi to resemble the fraught events of Moscow in the summer of 1980. To some extent, it is too late: the reports of fantastical cost overruns and corruption, the criticism about human rights (particularly the outrageous backward legislation regarding gays and lesbians), and the spectre of violence in the Caucasus make it impossible to imagine an event as purely athletic, pacific, and show-biz as, say, the 2012 London Games. The stakes have been raised dramatically. There is a long list of Olympiads remembered at least as well for their historical import as for their singular athletic performances—Berlin, Mexico City, Munich, Moscow, Los Angeles (where the Soviets retaliated, in 1984, with a boycott of their own)—and this, in one way or another, is bound to be one of them.
Putin went after these Games with an intense fervor, travelling to Guatemala, in 2007, for the International Olympic Committee’s final meeting to select the host city. He wanted them in Russia and he wanted them for the unlikely subtropical Black Sea resort of Sochi, which his generation knew mainly as a seaside town for mid-level Soviet apparatchiks and their vacationing families. But why? Why did Putin, who continues to face so many political, social, and economic problems, want these Games? Surely, the compulsion to build a year-round five-star resort, complete with a Formula One track, mountain hotels, and a preposterously expensive mountain road and railroad, was not the answer.
No. The theme of these Games is simple: this is Putin’s pop-culture reassertion of Russia, a worldwide media-saturated insistence on its modern power and capacities, all done with a flash and a reach that no diplomatic summit could ever match. Dissident Russian voices such as Alexei Navalny, Masha Gessen, and the members of Pussy Riot all call these “Putin’s Games”; they talk of a pharaoh intent on building, and displaying, his pyramids. In fact, minus the tone of derision, when you talk to Russian officials close to Putin, the explanation for his motives is not so different. The level of risk may be greater than anyone quite imagined in 2007, but Putin wants to show that his country is capable of doing more than sucking oil and gas out of the ground and building a new Dubai in Russia. Putin, obviously, is no democrat. Not remotely. He is not interested in the contemporary requirements of human rights. He is not interested in empowering a real legislature or ceding true independence to the courts. Democracy is not his interest. Stability and development—those are his themes, first and last. And Putin regards any and all attempts from the West, from human-rights organizations, and from the press to call him to account on nearly any issue as acts of anti-Russian self-righteousness and hypocrisy. That is how he sees the world and his critics. He doesn’t hide it. He performs his contempt. That is part of the hard-man persona.
Friday, at the opening ceremony, there will be echoes of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics where a U.S.S.R. no longer exists. On Christmas night, 1991, the Soviet Union was signed out of existence by its last President, Mikhail Gorbachev. With one stroke of his pen, he was out of a job and fifteen republics went their own way. Some, like the Baltic states, took a democratic path. Many more became authoritarian. Boris Yeltsin, the first President of independent, modern Russia, considered himself a democrat. But his last act in office was to install a successor who, after a long career in the K.G.B. and a more fleeting one as a political figure in both St. Petersburg and Moscow, had never paid much lip service to democracy: Vladimir Putin.
Putin is a gosudarstvenik, a state-builder. Even the most predictable moment of the opening ceremony—the raising of the Russian flag and the playing of the Russian anthem—makes this clear. At his insistence, the Russian anthem combines modern lyrics with Soviet music. He retains oversight of the depiction of Russian and Soviet history in all new schoolbooks. He is the singular shaper of modern Russia and looks neither to the tsars nor to the Communist general secretaries as a model; his historical hero is Pyotr Stolypin, a Prime Minister under Nicholas II. Stolypin was known both for his deep agrarian reforms and for his brutal repression of dissent. “A true patriot and a wise politician, he understood that various forms of radicalism and standing in one place are equally dangerous to the country,” Putin said a few years ago.
Gorbachev, who is now in his eighties and in fragile health, has criticized the Putin government for the “colossal scope” of its corruption and for cracking down on civil-society groups. Putin, Gorbachev has said, “thinks that democracy stands in his way.”
No small part of Putin’s towering and eerily serene self-confidence is the knowledge that the majority of his people do not care what Gorbachev says; nor are they especially interested in L.G.B.T. rights. And to prevent a growing, educated, more liberal minority from becoming too influential, state-controlled television, the main source of information for the vast majority of Russians, portrays the era before Putin as one of pure collapse and chaos and homosexuals as a threat to “traditional Russian values.”
Everyone hopes for a safe Olympic Games. The sports fans among us hope for excitement from whichever events it may come. I spent the morning up in the mountains watching snowboarders fly down a slope. It was cool and sunny and beautiful. For a moment, I might have thought I was at an Olympics where the Games are nothing more than thrilling games. But the political tension of the Sochi Games, Vladimir Putin’s desire to reassert a powerful, confident Russian state on the world stage in the face of his critics and his government’s disregard for principles of human rights, cannot easily be eclipsed by the glint of gold medals and fireworks.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com/
Author: DAVID REMNICK
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