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.

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Everything you need to know about the Sochi Olympics

You see Sochi all the way over on the Caucasian (i.e., bad) side of the Black Sea. In the breakup of the former Soviet Union, Russia lost the choice parts of the Evil Empire's Black Sea frontage -- including Odessa and the Crimean peninsula (where Sebastopol and Yalta are) -- to Ukraine, so since then it has had to make do.

by Ken

My first idea was to run the above post head and then leave this space blank -- ha-ha! I mean, you don't need to know anything about the Winter Olympics, do you? Then I would have added the assurance that, as with most things, this too would pass.

But there are a lot of readers out there with serious questions about the festivities. So I thought we'd just do a quick Q&A to cover the basics.

Q: Where the [expletive deleted] is Sochi anyways, and how come I haven't heard of it.

Really, if we were going to try to list the places you've never heard of, we'd be hear all night and into March and April. But Sochi-oblivion can be forgiven, sort of. Until now it really hasn't been much of a place. (Unless you're from there, in which case this is just the sort of talk you hate.) As New Yorker Editor David Remnick recalls, Russian President Putin lobbied the International Olympic Committee's site selectors heavily "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." The magazine's Adam Gopnik takes it a step further, calling the pre-Olympic Sochi "more or less the Asbury Park, or even the Sea Bright, of the Soviet Union."

At the same time, New Yorker financial columnist James Surowiecki, in "The Sochi Effect," describes the Sochi Olympics as --

a monument to Putin's Russia -- a nationalist showcase, intended to demonstrate just how far the country has come in the past two decades. It has also given Russia its first world-class winter resort, and has significantly developed the infrastructure of the Caucasus. In that context, overspending can become, perversely, a point of pride. The contractors on the Pyramids almost certainly padded the bills, too.

Q: But doesn't Surowiecki start out by saying, "Whatever happens on the ice and snow of Sochi in the next couple of weeks, one thing is certain: this Winter Olympics is the greatest financial boondoggle in the history of the Games"?

Yes. Surowiecki notes:

Back in 2007, Vladimir Putin said that Russia would spend twelve billion dollars on the Games. The actual amount is more than fifty billion. (By comparison, Vancouver's Games, in 2010, cost seven billion dollars.) Exhaustive investigations by the opposition figures Boris Nemtsov, Leonid Martynyuk, and Alexei Navalny reveal dubious cost overruns and outright embezzlement. And all this lavish spending (largely paid for by Russian taxpayers) has been, as Nemtsov and Martynyuk write, "controlled largely by businesspeople and companies close to Putin."

He adds that "conflicts of interest and cronyism are endemic" in the Russian economy, though he stresses that "the link between corruption and construction is a problem across the globe," and explores why construction is such a fertile field for corruption, especially where government spending is concerned, and even more especially in countries where the process of awarding contracts is "opaque," and where government "isn't accountable."

Worse still, even such "economic boost" as may result from "corrupt spending" is "an illusion, the equivalent of a sugar high."

Paolo Mauro, an economist at the I.M.F., says simply, "Corruption is bad for economic growth." It's well documented that corruption discourages investment, because it makes businesses uncertain about what it takes to get ahead; as one study put it, "Arbitrariness kills." Corruption also skews government spending. The economists Vito Tanzi and Hamid Davoodi found that corruption leads politicians to overinvest in low-quality infrastructure projects while skimping on maintaining existing projects. (It's easier to collect bribes on new construction than on maintenance.) And, in a pathbreaking study nearly twenty years ago, Mauro found that countries with high levels of corruption spent little on education. In economist-speak, corrupt politicians put too much money into physical capital and not enough into human capital. Crony construction capitalism leaves us with too few teachers and too many ski jumps to nowhere.

Q: Okay, okay, already. Just tell me, which is the good Olympics, the Winter or the, er, other one -- spring?

Probably you're thinking of the Summer Olympics, which include all those sports you can do outdoors without overcoats, like track and field plus swimming and diving and gymnastics and so on.

Q: Swimming and diving and gymnastics? Those are done indoors anyways, so why would they be limited to summer? Or vice versa with, say, figure skating and hockey?

Look, I don't make the rules. I guess the people who run the Summer Olympics got to the "hot" sports first. And you don't really think people who want to look at swimmers and divers and gymnasts and runners and such want to look at bundled up figure skaters and hockey players?

Q: What about that cute skater Johnny What's-His-Name? He's pretty hot, no?

Sure, but you notice that to be allowed to be really hot he has to stay away from venues like the Olympics.

Q: So the Summer Olympics are the good Olympics?

Well, a lot of people think so, like Washingtonpost.com's Alexandra Petri, who says straight out, "Even the weakest summer sports are more interesting than some of the strongest winter sports." This is no. 6 of Alexandra's "10 objections to the Winter Olympics," including how much less of the world is involved in winter sports ("The Olympics is supposed to be a world Games, not a Snow-World Games"), which she notes were far from being part of the Olympics' "founders' intent." ("There was no slalom in Ancient Greece.")

"Ah," I hear you say, "but what does it matter that the Winter Games are not as fun to watch? The Olympics, as a whole, are an exercise in pointless jingoism and spurious national camaraderie, and the actual subject of the competition is really of little significance. If there were a contest to see which nation's sons and daughters could make paint dry or reload a Web page most rapidly, we would still have to stand on the sidelines and chant, 'USA! USA!' What is so wrong with curling, anyhow?" And, well, if that's the way you feel, that's the way you feel. I think, though, that when the sport in question comes precariously close to the raw, madcap excitement of watching people try to cross a recently washed floor, you are entitled to ask whether it's really worth rounding up all of Sochi's poor wild dogs.

For the record, Alexandra loves ice dancing and figure skating but isn't much impressed that they make up "a full 2/21 of the competitive events" for the Winter Games.

Q: Then why even get involved with Winter Olympics, if you don't care about curling?

There are other views. The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik becomes almost poetic:

Winter sports are marginalized -- rather neatly marginalized by hemisphere, of course, and then doubly marginalized by tastes. Where with the Summer Olympic Games, every four years some big town makes a claim, usually failed, to cosmopolitan importance -- my shrinking, beautiful home town of Montreal is still burdened by its hideous Olympic Stadium, which helped to drive the Expos away -- in the Winter Games, every four years some small resort town perks its head above the horizon. Television hosts try to look cozy in bulky sweaters, warming themselves beside fake, made-for-broadcast hearths, people talk about the fun they had and the friends they made, and then the place goes back to being a small resort town. As David Remnick has explained, Sochi was, before these games, more or less the Asbury Park, or even the Sea Bright, of the Soviet Union.

Yet those of us with a mind for winter -- a love of the season -- still find something romantic in these games, for they commemorate, however remotely, a central nineteenth-century Romantic theme: the discovery of the paradox of speed in winter. This gives a certain fascination to even the smaller winter sports. Basically, where the summer sports show all the varieties of human action -- throwing, jumping, running, swimming, swimming the same way as someone else at the same time -- the winter ones share a single theme: what can be made of gravity and frozen water together. Curling, luging, skiing; even hockey, the king of sports, depends on the physics of a sharp edge on ice. It's a sliding festival that lasts two weeks.

The monotony of means should not blind us to the romance the sports superintend. As I said not long ago, in a series of lectures devoted to the subject of winter, in the nineteenth century, throughout Europe but in Russia above all, people discovered that the world could move faster in the cold months than in the summer. It was one of the most liberating physical discoveries ever made by modern people. While winter impedes comfort, it accelerates movement. Where mud and dust obscured the roads, and currents made the rivers slow going in Northern lands, the onset of winter ice turned them into corridors of speed.

On the other hand, Alexandra Petri complains (objection no. 8):

Almost every Winter Olympic event can be summarized as follows: Someone is on a plane of snow or ice (it can be flat, or inclined) and that person falls down or does not fall down. There are different ways of falling down or not falling down. The speed varies. The terrain varies. Sometimes there is music playing in the background. But if you see someone watching the Olympics and you ask, "Oh no, did the person on the snow or ice fall down?" you will blend right in to the conversation 100 percent of the time. This is wrong.

Q: Moving on, will media coverage of the Sochi Olympics be compromised by the tight media control exercised by the Russian government?

Quite possibly, but let's face it, media coverage was already going to be compromised by the billions and billions of dollars NBC Sports is shelling out for U.S. broadcast rights and for the actual coverage. That means coverage was always going to be built around dramatic "story lines," which will be plucked out or concocted by the TV people to maximize "human interest," meaning heart-string tugs, good-guys-vs.-bad-guys conflict, and appeals to raw chauvinism.

Q: Will the time difference have much of an effect on coverage?

Good question. Because Sochi is many, many time zones ahead of us -- on, um, Sochi Standard Time -- there are many, many hours' difference between there and here, in whichever of our time zones you happen to be in. In fact, it's so far ahead of us that it practically goes around to the other side and sneaks in behind us.

As a result of the time difference, things that have happened in Sochi haven't happened here yet, which means that we have to be very careful about "spoilers" slipping out of the Caucasus. As a last resort, you can stick fingers in your ears and chant, "Na-na-na-na-na-na" and so on.

Q: You sound like one of those stick-in-the-muds who doesn't have any use for either the good or the bad Olympics.

Pretty much, though Alexandra Petri does make one solid point, at least on behalf of the Summer Games (objection no. 4):

You can't tell if the participants are attractive or not because everyone is wearing layers that make them look like either those dancing windsocks outside used car dealerships or Power Rangers. "That's good, because I do not want to be distracted from the athleticism by lustful imaginings" was seldom said by anyone.

From the Sochi opening ceremonies

Well, enjoy. Remember there are a lot of NBC executives chugging antacids nonstop because they don't trust you to do your part for your country (and their sponsors). Just think: "USA! USA!"

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To Russia With Rainbows

The 2014 Olympic games are set to be held in Sochi, Russia-- notable for their snow capped mountains, love of winter sports, and rabidly homophobic laws about "gay propaganda" (whatever that means).

While these games have all of the trappings of Berlin 1936, the one organization we'd expect to have a clear head about these bigoted laws is the International Olympic Commission (IOC). The IOC chose Sochi before Russia passed their anti-gay laws, so the least you would expect them to do is allow Olympic athletes who are repulsed by Russia's institutionalized homophobia wear rainbow flags or other forms of pride and protest.

Well, if you thought the IOC would be rational about this, you'd be wrong.

In fact, the IOC is choosing to enact a little known rule that will ban athletes from making "political" statements-- including statements about Russia's homophobic laws.

But we don't have to accept this. Daylin Leach, a Blue America-endorsed candidate for Congress in PA-13 (and gay rights advocate in the Pennsylvania Senate where he serves) is running a petition campaign to demand that the IOC to suspend their rules to allow for support for gay athletes and gay Russians. But he needs your help.

  Here's what you can do:

First, click this link to sign the petition.

Second, share the link or the meme below on your Twitter and Facebook pages.

  Together we can have a real impact on the IOC, and when we watch the opening ceremonies, know that the rainbow flag pins are because of Daylin's campaign and everyone who supports it.

Will Wentworth Miller's coming out embarrass Russia's rampaging official homophobes just a little? One can hope

by Ken

To be honest, I never heard of Wentworth Miller before now. He is, I gather, the star of Prison Break, and lots of people have heard of him. And now he has picked what seems to me an excellent moment and method for coming out. This letter he wrote to the St. Petersburg (Russia) International Film Festival is posted on the GLAAD website.

August 21, 2013

Re: St. Petersburg International Film Festival / "Guest of Honor" Invitation

Dear Ms. Averbakh:

Thank you for your kind invitation. As someone who has enjoyed visiting Russia in the past and can also claim a degree of Russian ancestry, it would make me happy to say yes.

However, as a gay man, I must decline.

I am deeply troubled by the current attitude toward and treatment of gay men and women by the Russian government. The situation is in no way acceptable, and I cannot in good conscience participate in a celebratory occasion hosted by a country where people like myself are being systematically denied their basic right to live and love openly.

Perhaps, when and if circumstances improve, I'll be free to make a different choice.

Until then.

Wentworth Miller

Member, HRC
Member, GLAAD
Member, The ManKind Project

I don't see how this response could be improved on, in either content or tone.

As I assume everyone is aware by now, Russia is now in the throes of a national wave of virulent official homophobia, culminating in a law that bars something called "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations." It has been made pretty clear that any word or deed that takes an other-than-hate-filled attitude toward any aspect of homosexuality can and likely will be dealt with to the full extent of the law.

There's no doubt that a lot of Russians harbor attitudes toward homosexuality that would have been familiar in the U.S. of, say, ten years ago. And since homo-hating is even now a popular hobby in our country, it's hardly surprising that Russian politicians can strike a responsive chord by targeting the homos. Or perhaps I should say "scapegoating" the homos? Because there's surely little doubt that the campaign is sanctioned, if it didn't actually originate, in the Kremlin with President Vladimir Putin, for whom it provides a handy diversion from having to explain to all those ordinary Russians why their lives suck.

It's on account of the goddamn homos!

There are a lot of people saying or thinking that it's none of our business. It's a domestic Russian matter, and we have no right to dictate our values to the Russian people. I like to think that this argument wouldn't be heard if we were talking about, say, a country in which slavery was legal. But in any case, the argument says nothing in regard to Wentworth Miller's beautifully expressed point: "I cannot in good conscience participate in a celebratory occasion hosted by a country where people like myself are being systematically denied their basic right to live and love openly."

I like to think that President Putin didn't reckon, in his cynically opportunistic targeting of Russia's LGBT community, on the way the rest of the world has been changing. And I like to think that Wentworth Miller's impeccable response to the invitation to the St. Petersburg Film Festival will be read by prospective participants in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. It's a sad and regrettable thing to ask would-be Olympians, who after all get this opportunity only every four years, to just say no to the Olympics.

It's going to require a lot of soul-searching, but I hope that a lot of those would-be Olympians, not to mention the organizing committees of the participating countries, will think it through to the point that Wentworth Miller did -- that "the current attitude toward and treatment of gay men and women by the Russian government" constitutes a situation that's "in no way acceptable."

It's a pretty picture: President Putin holding an Olympics to which no one comes.

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Has Putin Ruined The Olympics For The Civilized World?

Although Stephen Fry is best known in the U.S. for his role as Melchett in Blackadder and as Gordon Deitrich in V For Vendetta, in the U.K. he's a major celebrity-- an actor, screenwriter, director, author, playwright, journalist, comedian, television and radio personality and... an activist. He's also gay. This week he wrote an open letter to David Cameron and the International Olympic Committee calling for the Olympics to pull out of the 2014 Winter games because of Vladimir Putin "is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jew." Russia's new anti-gay laws are being compared to the Nazis anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s. "Putin," he wrote, "is eerily repeating this insane crime, only this time against LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] Russians. Beatings, murders and humiliations are ignored by the police. Any defence or sane discussion of homosexuality is against the law."

The 2014 Winter Olympics, due to take place next February in the Black Sea resort and costing an estimated £35bn, are the most expensive in history and were planned as a show of strength by the Russian president.

But the growing backlash against the new laws, passed this year, has now escalated into calls for the IOC to strip Russia of the Games and, in the US, to boycott them.

Fry said: "An absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014 in Sochi is simply essential. Stage them elsewhere in Utah, Lillehammer, anywhere you like. At all costs, Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world."

The new laws, passed by the Duma, prohibit "propaganda" in support of "non-traditional" sexual orientation and threaten heavy fines for anyone "promoting" homosexuality to under-18s.

They have coincided with a sharp rise in reports of homophobia and attacks on the LGBT community in Russia.

In the letter, which was also sent to the London 2012 organising committee chairman, Lord Coe, Fry added: "The summer Olympics of 2012 were one of the most glorious moments of my life and the life of my country. For there to be a Russian Winter Olympics would stain the movement forever and wipe away any of that glory."

The comedian said that despite opposing the prime minister's politics he had the "utmost respect" for Cameron for the way he had pushed gay marriage proposals through parliament and stood up for LGBT rights.

"For that I will always admire you, whatever other differences may lie between us. In the end I believe you know when a thing is wrong or right. Please act on that instinct now," he said. A Downing Street spokesman said it had repeatedly raised the issue with Russia.

"We remain greatly concerned about the growing restrictions on LGBT freedoms in Russia and have repeatedly raised our concerns, including at the 2013 UK-Russia human rights dialogue in May. The prime minister outlined our concerns with President Putin during a meeting in Downing Street in June ahead of the G8 summit.

"We are working closely with the IOC and the BOA to ensure that the Games take place in the spirit of the Olympic Charter and are free from discrimination."

The issue has gained momentum just as Moscow prepares to host the world athletics championships. Four years after the Sochi Games, Russia is scheduled to host the football World Cup.

President Obama, who has refused to rule out a US boycott of the Games amid strained relations between the two countries over a number of issues, said he had "no patience for countries that try to treat gays or lesbians or transgender persons in ways that intimidate them or are harmful to them."

Asked about the issue by Jay Leno on his Tonight Show, Obama added: "I think they understand that for most of the countries that participate in the Olympics, we wouldn't tolerate gays and lesbians being treated differently."

...The IOC said last month it had received assurances from the Russian government that athletes and spectators would be exempt from the law, and Igor Anansky, the chairman of the state Duma committee on physical culture, sports and youth affairs, said in August the law would not be invoked during the event.

But the sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, said on 1 August the law would apply to athletes in Sochi in a statement that is likely to set the state's policy. "No one is forbidding an athlete with non-traditional sexual orientation from coming to Sochi, but if he goes on to the street and starts propagandising it, then of course he will be held accountable," Mutko said.

Russia's recent crackdown on homosexuality has seen it ban gay pride parades in Moscow and outlaw adoptions by same-sex couples and the "propaganda of non-traditional sexual orientations" among minors.

The gay propaganda law, as it is widely known, imposes fines for virtually any public discussion of LGBT issues, and foreigners face larger fines, detention for up to 15 days and deportation for violating it. Four Dutch activists who were filming a documentary about LGBT people in Murmansk were arrested under the law in July and banned from Russia for three years.

A prominent gay rights activist, Nikolai Alexeev, said although Fry's letter "won't change anything" at the Olympics, it would help raise awareness of the plight of LGBT Russians. "When respected people around the world call this out, it highlights what's going on in Russia," Alexeev said.

He said the parallels Fry draws between Russia's crackdown on LGBT rights and the start of Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany are "ever more relevant as of late", adding: "Today it's just laws, but these laws can lead to more repression and persecution of homosexual people in the future."

In March, Fry met the St Petersburg politician Vitaly Milonov, who authored a citywide ban on gay propaganda last year that helped lead to the federal ban enacted in June.

After a private discussion that was filmed for Fry's BBC2 documentary Out There, which will be screened later this year, Milonov promised to pray for Fry's soul, and the comedian referred to the meeting in his letter, describing it as an encounter with what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil."