When President Vladimir Putin decided to hold the forthcoming winter Olympics at a summer resort near the Caucasus, he must have known that it wouldn’t be cheap. By itself, the high-speed train system that will shuttle spectators between venues when the games are launched next week has cost close to US$12 billion — twice the cost of the entire previous winter games in Vancouver. Other extravagances for the “Putin Olympics,” and the inevitable anti-terrorism expenses, are expected to drive the total final costs above $50 billion, much of it provided by the oligarchy —kleptocracy would be a more accurate term — who have reaped their immense fortunes from the plunder of divested state assets during Mr Putin’s stewardship of the Russian economy.
The vast sums that Russia will lavish on the Sochi games are just one part of Mr Putin’s charm offensive. The release of Mikhail Khordokhovsky and the Pussy Riot activists are another sign that his Kremlin apparatchiks are as mindful of public relations in the run-up to the games as their counterparts in Beijing were six years ago. As with the People’s Republic, however, the Russians are about to discover that it will take more than a few gestures to distract outsiders from the authoritarian tendencies of the Putin presidency. On the very day that Khordokhovsky was released, after serving most of his 10-year prison sentence on trumped-up charges, the Kremlin was busy sentencing another high-profile critic, the environmentalist Evgeny Vitishko to three years in a penal colony. Whatever the Russian authorities say, the foreign press is unlikely to harbour illusions that freedom of expression will be respected during the forthcoming games any more than it has been during Putin’s repressive reign. Should any doubts remain, they need only consult the list drawn up by the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Moscow, founded by the extraordinarily courageous dissident Andrei Sakharov, of 41 other political prisoners who have been dispatched to various prisons and penal colonies for peaceful criticism of Mr Putin’s policies.
Some of Putin’s attempts to intimidate his critics have backfired badly. Last year, Alexei Navalny, a blogger who called the president and his cronies a bunch of “crooks and thieves” was successfully prosecuted for embezzling public funds when he worked for the regional government in Kirov– charges discredited several years ago. Like Khordokhovsky, Navalny’s real crime was daring to question the president’s authority in the impish tone that drives autocrats crazy. Consider a statement like: “I’ve been reading this little book. It’s called the Russian constitution and it says that the only source of power in Russia is the people. So I don’t want to hear those who say we’re appealing to the authorities. Who’s the power here?” – and it’s easy to see why the Kremlin would prefer to have Navalny breaking rocks in some gulag. But the court ended up suspending his five-year sentence after the trial, chastened no doubt by the widespread negative coverage that his trial had earned abroad.
Beyond the individual prosecutions of human rights activists and government critics, there is also the ham-fisted legislation that forces critical NGOs to register as “foreign agents” and threatens harsh fines for “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships” — even though homosexuality was decriminalized in Russia more than 20 years ago. Both initiatives speak volumes about the crude nationalism that Mr Putin has stirred up since his return to power. Last December, Foreign Policy described how “Russian government officials, abetted by their political allies in the Orthodox Church, routinely speak of homosexuality as a decadent, Western import aimed at weakening Russia from within…” and noted that the laws have created a situation in which “vigilantes feel empowered to harass and, in some cases, torture and kill gay individuals or individuals perceived to be gay” with impunity.
The Sochi games are bound to be spectacular – how could winter games in a summer resort not be? ‒ but they should not serve to disguise Mr Putin’s authoritarian behaviour. Putin’s tendencies were denounced with great eloquence in the closing statements made by the punk band Pussy Riot at the end of their show trial, and one of Maria Alyokhina’s remarks may well turn out to be the epitaph on the president and his associates, despite their current strength. “All you can deprive me of is ‘so-called’ freedom,” said Ms Alyokhina, “This is the only kind that exists in Russia. But nobody can take away my inner freedom. It lives in the word, it will go on living thanks to openness [glasnost]… it goes on living with every person who is not indifferent, who hears us in this country.” When the cameras start rolling next week in Sochi, we should remember the courage of people like Alyokhina and Navalny and the thousands of other Russians, who have dared to assert their political and intellectual independence at such great cost.
