Why Sochi? There actually are reasons why President Putin wanted the Olympics there so badly

Why Sochi? Because the North Caucasus [click on the map to enlarge it] matters a lot to President Putin.

by Ken

When I shared with you, dear, readers, "Everything you need to know about the Sochi Olympics," I kind of fudged one question that probably occurred to you, as it has occurred to everyone on first hearing the words "Sochi" and "Olympics" butted together: "Why Sochi?" I sort of answered the question with the clear understanding that it's 'cause President Putin wanted it. In most matters Russian these days, that should be sufficient answer. But of course it still doesn't answer the question of why President Putin wanted it.

Or as Christian Caryl puts it in a fascinating (and long) NYRB blogpost appropriately titled "Why Sochi?": "Why on earth would the Kremlin decide to host the Games in an underdeveloped place where terrorists lurk nearby -- a place that a front-page New York Times story this week describes as 'the edge of a war zone'?"

And the answer, he says, "is not as complicated as it may seem."

Vladimir Putin comes from St. Petersburg. He rules from Moscow. But it is the North Caucasus that launched him on his path to the summit of Russian power. Anyone who wants to understand the many controversies now roiling around Sochi must start with this fundamental political fact.

Russia launched its Olympic bid in 2006, a moment when Putin was basking in his hard-won status as the leader who had finally vanquished the long-running rebellion in Chechnya. Putin did not choose Sochi by chance. He believed that presiding over an Olympic miracle in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, not far from places that had been battlefields a few years before, would cement his triumph over historical enemies.

Putin, the former secret police chief who rose to the post of prime minister in Yeltsin's waning days, understood that reversing this humiliation was the key to his own political ambitions. He soon got his chance . . .

The "chance" was the separatist uprising in Chechnya, which gave him Putin the opportunity to show off his capacity for brutality and bravado, with "his notorious vow that 'we'll hunt them [the terrorists] down and kill them, even if they're in the toilet.' " It may not have played well on the international stage, Christian says, but "Russians, by contrast, exulted in his swagger." And with his combination of brutal repression to reverse Yeltsin's humiliation and pouring in large quantities of money to pacify the Chechens ("While many reports on the Sochi Games have focused on their staggering cost, owing in part to extensive corruption, few have noted the precedent: Putin's gigantically wasteful yet undeniably effective stimulus plan for the reconstruction of Grozny, the Chechen capital"), he pretty much pacified Chechnya under Russian control.

Enter the Olympics. Throughout the life of the modern Olympic movement, hosting the Games has offered a powerful form of national rehabilitation to countries that have ended up on the wrong side of history. In 1964, Japan used the first postwar Olympic Games on its soil to showcase its new openness and its economic development less than two decades after its rise from the destruction of World War II. In 1972, the West Germans tried to use their staging of the Munich Games to comparable effect, only to find it marred by the horrible irony of a massacre of Jewish athletes. The organizers of the 2008 Beijing Olympics went far beyond these predecessors in their efforts to present the image of a new society that had, by all appearances, effortlessly forgotten the genocidal ferocity of the very same Chinese Communist Party that was now organizing the world's highest-profile sporting event.

Putin's bid to bring the Olympics to Russia follows a similar pattern. In an interview published just a few days ago, Putin explicitly links the Games to the humiliations of the recent past: "There is also a certain moral aspect here and there is no need to be ashamed of it," he said. "After the collapse of the Soviet Union, after the dark and, let us be honest, bloody events in the Caucasus, the society had a negative and pessimistic attitude." The Olympics, he explains, are a necessary part of an effort to "strengthen the morale of the nation." Putin and other Russian officials have also suggested that the massive infrastructure developments at Sochi are merely the prelude of a general push to develop tourism throughout the North Caucasus, currently the poorest region in Russia. In this respect, Sochi is an integral part of the Kremlin's counterterrorism strategy, which aims to salve discontent by jump-starting the local economy. One is inclined to be skeptical that this approach can work.

One gathers that President Putin doesn't share this skepticism. Still --

If the Games are successful, one anticipated byproduct is that this would help reclaim Russia's place on the world stage and make the so-called "humiliation of the 1990s," when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia lost its status as a world power, a thing of the past. But the story of modern, prosperous Russia is set against a backdrop of contrasts: poverty, refugees, violence, and human rights violations. There are countless stories to be told.

The latest events remind us, in short, that it is not so easy to escape the hamster wheel of the past. The insurgency that Putin thought he had crushed has since scattered its embers around the entire region, inflaming other parts of the North Caucasus that had long remained immune. . . .

Well, maybe the Olympics won't solve all of President Putin's problems in the region, but I guess he's prepared to go incrementalist.

#