Putin knows that his plans for Russia will remain ineffectual unless he can inspire the nation. When he first came to power, he was quick to realize that the Russian people longed to feel better about themselves; it was his job to assist in this process.
As in Soviet days, the Kremlin identified sport as an instrument of its purposes and Putin personally helped Russia’s bids to become a host country for global competitions. With his lifelong passion for judo and his personal workout regime, he was well qualified to head the Russian campaign to host the Winter Olympics in January 2014 and the FIFA World Cup in summer 2018. In both, he was triumphant. Funds were released for Russians to give an impressive account of themselves in the projected events. Training facilities were renovated, and there was excited speculation about what the Russian skiers and skaters might achieve at the Sochi Winter Olympics. Putin revealed that 214 billion rubles were spent on the preparations – 100 billion of which came from the state budget with the balance from private investors.1 A new railway was tunnelled through the mountain that separated the city from southern Russia. New motorways were built. The city’s old sanitary system, which spewed its sewage into the Black Sea, was upgraded. Sochi would present a dazzling achievement to the visiting world.2
Putin attended the opening ceremony, and used the opportunity to share his vision of the Russian past, present and future. Perhaps he would have liked to be one of the torch-bearers at the moment when the Olympic flame reached the city, but he had had to welcome the International Olympic Committee dignitaries. The torch had, however, been carried by both Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu and Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov, a keen footballer who said he wanted to get his diplomats to lose ‘their double and triple chins’. Whatever happened, official Russia was going to be prominent throughout.3
Stage designers, directors and choreographers had received an assignment to outdo the displays at previous Olympics. Whereas the organizers of the London 2012 summer games drew attention to the achievements of the British National Health Service, the Sochi planners celebrated what the Russian people had done to defeat the Third Reich. Every year since 1945, on 9 May, Russians had held a parade on Red Square to commemorate their forebears who drove the Wehrmacht back to Berlin and crushed Nazism. The original scheme for the Sochi opening ceremony was to place on each seat an envelope with the photograph, name and date of birth of a Soviet citizen who had perished in the Great Patriotic War. It had also been planned to hold a minute’s silence in the stadium, but when the IOC got wind of this, it intervened to stop the Russians from so blatant an attempt to politicize a sporting occasion.4
Nonetheless, there was jubilation at the opening ceremony on 7 February 2014. Above the stadium, in the gathering darkness, were hoisted five gigantic artificial snowflakes which miraculously turned into the rings of the Olympics logo. Everything went well until one of the snowflakes failed to alter shape. This did nothing to spoil the festive atmosphere because the chortling spectators responded with applause.
Everything else followed without a hitch. A ballet based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace was performed, focusing on early nineteenth-century aristocratic life – no merchants, soldiers or peasants were included. Not even a tsar. The Russian Empire’s history was sanitized and the tensions that tore it apart in 1917 smoothly glossed over. The next scene, using the same tranquillizing technique, dealt with the October Revolution. No reference was made to Lenin or Trotsky. There was a vague impression of basic changes in society, but there was no allusion to what the communist seizure of power was about. Even Stalin’s violent policies for economic transformation at the end of the 1920s received anodyne treatment. But there were gasps of surprise when the enormous model of a bright red locomotive appeared in the sky above the arena while a dance ensemble on the ground imitated train wheels in relentless motion. No allusion was made to the cost in famine and blood of Soviet industrialization. No hint was given of the Great Terror of 1937–8. It was as if Stalin’s purges and labour camps had never happened.
The obliqueness continued in the portrayal of the Second World War – perhaps the organizers were deferring to the International Olympic Committee and its ban on overt politicization. Of the gruelling battles against the Wehrmacht, there was no suggestion. Instead the performers, men and women, acted out a tableau in static poses of intense suffering. Simple and understated, this was the ceremony’s most poignant scene.
The post-war decades were brigaded into a single period. Whereas tsarism had been illustrated in blue and the revolutionary years in red, everything after 1945 was a blaze of white (which meant that all three colours of the national flag had been highlighted by the end of the evening). Carefree boys and girls wore neckerchiefs of the Pioneer organization and frolicked to bubble-gum pop music. A limousine of Soviet manufacture was driven round the set with its occupants leaning out of the windows and waving to all sides of the stadium. No hint appeared of the material privations in the late 1940s or of the political and social repression that outlasted Stalin’s death in 1953. The implicit message was that ordinary Russians had a gay old time once the war was over. Food, fun and prosperity were presented as the common experience of citizens of the USSR. Love – rather than Revolution or Cold War – was the motif that underpinned the whole montage and the word itself was shone up into the night air in enormous lettering. Communism was blanked from view and the final scene came to its boisterous, tuneful end as in a Broadway musical (or, indeed, a Stalinist musical of the late 1930s).
The evening as a whole told a story of Eternal Russia, the Russia whose continuities outweighed any temporary rupture. There was no allusion to the efforts needed to bring the communist era to a close and lay the foundations of a market economy. Smooth, gradual change was suggested as the key to happiness and progress. Though Putin was only an onlooker, he had signed off on a production in which every dance and melody expressed Russian dignity and Russian joy.
This was the prelude to a Games where Russia’s competitors won a sackful of medals. The victories were merrily reported by the country’s TV channels. Earlier there had been criticism in sections of Russia’s press about the awarding of construction contracts worth billions of dollars to Putin’s friends and associates. Abroad, there had been forecasts that foreign activists would carry out public protests against recent anti-gay-rights legislation, but these did not materialize. The games passed off peacefully. The Russian security forces had been put on the alert to prevent terrorist outrages – the Kremlin was nervous not just about the terrorism that had recently shaken other countries but also about the fact that Sochi is close to the Caucasus mountain range, where groups of Islamist terrorists continued to operate. Official precautions proved effective and the Olympics took place without serious incident either in the athletes’ residential quarters or on the ice rinks and ski slopes.
The biggest commotion at the games had nothing to do with sexual policy or bombs but with the refereeing of an ice hockey match between Russia and the United States. The tournament was still at the group stage on 15 February 2014, and Putin and prime minister Dmitri Medvedev had come to watch one of their favourite sports in hope of a Russian victory. The match came close to causing a diplomatic incident. With the score tied at 2–2, play went into extra time and the Russians hit the back of the American net to break the stalemate. But the referee disallowed the goal because the posts had been incorrectly positioned. The watching Russians might possibly not have minded so much if the referee had not been an American – an extraordinary mistake on the part of the international authorities. As the partisan crowd booed with gusto, TV commentators asked how an American referee had received charge of a contest involving the United States. When the Americans won the penalty shoot-out, uproar broke out in the stadium.5
The next day Putin expressed regret that the goalpost problem had not been noticed earlier and left it at that. He must have realized that he would ruin his purposes at Sochi if dispute supplanted enjoyment, and he chose to ignore Obama’s tactlessly hearty note of congratulation to the American hockey squad.6 By the end of the Olympics, the Russian competitors had carried off thirteen gold medals, eleven silvers and nine bronzes. The Moscow media boasted that this put the country at the top of the rankings and well ahead of its nearest competitors, Norway, Canada and the United States. Less was said about the way that the Russian Olympic Committee had helped to achieve this result by securing the naturalization of Korean-born speed-skater Ahn Hyun-Soo and American-born snowboarder Vic Wild – between them they won five golds and one bronze. But no rule was broken in recruiting them and the Russian Olympic Committee was behaving no differently from several other national committees.
Victorious Russian competitors were granted a reception at the Kremlin, where they were given magnificent cars and large cheques. Millions of rubles were reserved for those who had brought honour to Russia. Defence Minister Shoigu presented Ahn Hyun-Soo with a medal ‘for strengthening the fighting commonwealth’. Somehow the skater’s athletic prowess was seen to exemplify the militancy that the authorities wished to promote in every corner of the country. The vehicles were from the top of the German Audi range – a concession to the idea of foreign superiority that was out of joint with the leadership’s patriotic preoccupation.7
Opposition politicians, abetted by newspapers such as Novaya gazeta, exposed the waste and fraud that accompanied the Sochi games contracts.8 They were disappointed because most Russians remained pleased with the image of their country that the games had spread round the world. But at the end of the year, a scandal erupted about systematic doping practices throughout Russian elite sport. Regulations had been flouted in preparation for the Sochi Olympics. The political establishment had put such pressure on the organizers to produce an all-conquering team that they had introduced performance-enhancing drugs for their athletes. The Russian Ministry of Sport at first denied the allegations, but after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) activated its investigations, the evidence became compelling and laid bare the scope of Russian official connivance. WADA employees recounted that the FSB had threatened them during work at Russia’s drug-testing laboratories. As more abuses came to light, the Russian whistle-blower, Grigori Rodchenkov, director of Russia’s main anti-doping lab, fled the country and went into permanent hiding in the United States. The quest for sporting triumph ended in turmoil and, in 2016, Russia’s entire squad was suspended from the Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics. Russians could compete only as individuals and after securing personal drug-free accreditation from independent authorities.
Putin was furious. This public shaming of Russian athletes was yet another operation in the West’s propaganda war. But the facts of the case were ultimately undeniable, and the Russian authorities agreed to remove from office those individuals whom WADA implicated in doping activity. Putin declared there to be no place for performance-enhancing drugs in sport, but he still managed to put this in his own defiant fashion:
At the moment we are facing a relapse into political interference in sport. Yes, the forms of such interference have changed but the essence remains the same: to turn sport into a tool of geopolitical pressure and use it to shape a negative image of countries and peoples. The Olympic movement, which plays a colossal role in unifying humanity, yet again could be on the brink of a split.9
Russia’s self-respect would be salvaged by an athletics competition in Moscow at the same time as the Rio Olympics. Even individuals who had been banned for doping offences were allowed to take part. Putin again attended to present the prizes. But it was not until September 2018 that WADA lifted its ban on Russian participation in the Olympic movement, and even then the decision to reinstate Russia incurred much international criticism. The mud still stuck.
Formula One motor racing, however, caused Putin no problem, and a grand prix was held at the new Sochi Autodrome in October 2014. As with the Winter Olympics earlier in the year, no expense was spared to put on a great Russian show for the visitors from abroad, another feather in Putin’s cap. Britain’s Lewis Hamilton won the race in a Mercedes, after which Putin appeared on television chatting with the drivers in the changing room and congratulating Hamilton at the prize-giving. The event was a triumph for Russia even though no Russian driver won a podium place. It was a hundred years since Russia had hosted an international grand prix, at a St Petersburg track. Global motor sport was returning to Russia, with all the pizzazz of super-expensive cars, global brand advertising, leggy models and international celebrities. And Formula One’s organizers compliantly avoided drawing anyone’s attention to events a few miles away in recently annexed Crimea.
FIFA’s decision to hold the summer 2018 Football World Cup competition in Russia was also a political victory for the Putin administration. The government supplied lavish funds to renovate the Luzhniki stadium in Moscow, where the final would be held. New stadiums were designated for construction in cities as far apart as Kaliningrad on the western Baltic and Yekaterinburg in the Urals. As host nation, Russia – which saw itself as an old ‘soccer power’, automatically qualified for the group stage. Despite standing at seventieth in the global rankings, hope grew that the Russian team would show its prowess on the pitch. Ministers in Moscow were eager to bring credit to the country by being seen to look after the visiting teams and their supporters. TV shows prepared public opinion in Russia for a summer of sporting excitement.
The tournament yielded many surprises, including the progress of the home team beyond the group stage into the quarter finals. Their muscular and unhistrionic playing style appealed not only to Russian fans but also to television viewers around the world. The stadium cities gave the foreign supporters a friendly reception and in Moscow a gigantic screen was erected on Red Square for the benefit of both Russians and visitors from abroad who lacked match tickets. And, unlike 2014, Putin did not subsequently invade a foreign country.
But it was not just great sporting events that revived national pride. In 2008 Russia won the Eurovision Song Contest, held that year in Belgrade. Full-voiced and emotional, Dima Bilan performed ‘Believe’ with panache and his victory was the climax of several previous contributions – along with Sweden, Russia has had more top-five finishes in the twenty-first century than any other country. The annual event is popular with the public, and Russian television refrains from using the tone of mild ridicule in its presentation that has become conventional on live television in Britain and Scandinavia. In 2012 the Russian broadcasting authorities chose a group that had all Europe talking since every member was a grandmother. Hailing from the village of Buranovo in the Udmurtian republic, they dressed as the ordinary rural women that they were. They had formed a breezy ensemble whose song ‘Party for Everybody’ was designed to raise funds to repair the local church. The Buranovo Grannies won the hearts of millions, despite being pipped for victory by the Swedish entry, and showed European viewers that Russian society was more diverse and attractive than most of them had assumed.
Putin and the leadership also celebrate science and the arts. On Russia Day in June 2014, he awarded State Prizes to a number of worthy citizens for careers that had enhanced national well-being, among them Mikhail Piotrovski, Hermitage Museum director in St Petersburg, Gennadi Krasnikov for his company’s semiconductor technology, the writer Valentin Rasputin for his stories that kept alive the flame of Russian peasant traditions, and Viktor Zakharchenko, director of the Kuban Cossack Choir. The leading ethnographer Valeri Tishkov, whom Kremlin rulers from Gorbachëv onwards have consulted about the country’s complex ethnic relations, was also recognized.
It is rare for State Prizes to go to Russian politicians. Putin is wary of praising any of them unless they are safely dead, and even then he is sparing with eulogies. In 2014, however, he made an exception for Yevgeni Primakov, who at various times had served under Yeltsin as head of the foreign intelligence service, Foreign Affairs Minister and prime minister. Primakov had made his peace with Putin despite the fact that Putin’s presidential campaign team had used dirty tricks to jostle him into withdrawing from the 2000 election. He was in declining health, and Putin wanted to honour him while there was still time. In 2016, two years after Primakov’s death Putin paid tribute to the part he had played in shaping Russian foreign policy.10 It was Primakov’s concept of multipolarity – the idea that the world was essentially multipolar, not unipolar – that Yeltsin had referred to in a meeting with China’s President Jiang Zemin in April 1997. Yeltsin and Jiang had subsequently agreed to work towards ‘multipolarization’.11
Putin had himself consulted Primakov before meeting Henry Kissinger in 2009. Primakov explained that while a multipolar world was already a reality, the difficulty was that many US leaders thought and acted as if it was a unipolar one.12 At the same time Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski were urging the American political establishment to abandon the triumphalism that had underpinned the assumptions of some policy-makers in Washington since the 1990s. Both Brzezinski and Kissinger argued that the other great powers would insist on reserving the right to protect perceived interests in the countries on their borders.13 Putin celebrated Primakov as an original Russian thinker and inaugurated the annual Primakov Readings, which are intended to foster the kind of discussion of international affairs that he and Primakov endorsed.14
Patriotic pleasure in Russian achievements and Russia’s potential brought the two politicians together. In discussing the notion of a multipolar world, Putin stresses the right of all countries to freedom from American control. But there is a sleight of hand in the way that he handles these ideas. He fails to mention that the multipolarity notion implies that the small number of great powers in the world dominate the multitude of weaker adjacent states. Putin is implicitly philosophizing about Russia’s right to dominate. While accepting that Russia lacks the capacity to compete with the United States as a global superpower, Putin wants acceptance of Russia’s right to a dominant regional influence. He focuses on the fact that many of the countries that claim to be free are not free at all. As allies of one great power or another, they find themselves treated as ‘vassals’. Alliances, he maintains, are a fig leaf covering the subordination of the several to the single mighty power. Russia has broken away from any such subservience and is one of the few states round the world that is genuinely sovereign and independent.15
When Putin puts on a swagger, he wants to encourage Russians to believe that the days of national resurgence have begun. He increasingly insists that Russia’s interests and preferences should be considered in global deliberations. Russia has a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council and will use its veto powers whenever America seeks decisions at variance with the Kremlin’s orientation.
He repeatedly declares that no other country’s citizens are as free as they are in Russia. To foreign criticism of government interference in the media, he simply notes the vast number of TV stations and asks whether it would be possible for the authorities to control the content of their programmes.16 Putin deals with reports of political repression by declining to discuss them. In his view, conditions in Russia ought to be the object of universal envy. When noting the troubles unleashed worldwide by Muslim jihadi terrorists, he maintains, overlooking the many periods of armed conflict, that Russia has cohabited peacefully with Islam for centuries. The vast majority of Russian Muslims are neither immigrants nor the offspring of immigrants but belong to long-established communities. He boasts that the country’s Muslims know no other motherland than Russia.17 Although there is a grain of truth in this suggestion, it ignores the fact that Russia’s Muslim citizens have memories of official persecution of their religion. But in his mission to convince everyone that Russia deserves plaudits, not disparagement, this does not bother President Putin.
Faced with criticism, Putin is generally quick to defy global, or at least Western, opinion. Film director Oliver Stone counselled him that if he wanted foreigners to believe in the then forthcoming 2018 elections, he should permit the activity of international monitors. This was the nearest that Stone got to criticizing systematic political fraud and Putin’s part in it. Putin was unimpressed. It was not for the Russians, he snapped, to justify themselves before the world’s gaze and he had no intention of submitting his country to the indignity of such inspection.18
Turning to Russian progress, he talks of a reduction of the national debt from a high of 92 per cent of gross domestic product to under 13 per cent in 2017. He contrasts Russia with the United States, where the debt is 100 per cent.19 He recalls that when as prime minister in 1999 he restarted the Chechen war, Russia was still in economic difficulties and he had to discuss ways to relieve the financial pressures with the International Monetary Fund, which would only postpone the Russian loan repayments if he agreed to halt the military operation. For Putin, this was a step too far. He was pacifying Chechnya by armed force, and no foreign agency was going to hold him to ransom.20 The surge in hydrocarbon prices that started at the very end of the twentieth century enabled Russia to pay off its huge foreign obligations as well as those of the other ex-Soviet republics, including even the $16 million that Ukraine owed. Agreeable relations were later resumed between Russia and the International Monetary Fund, and Putin expressed pleasure in the Fund’s activities in several Russian regions. But the breakdown of political trust between Russia and the Western powers that followed led to the withdrawal of the Fund’s assistance. Putin regretted the turnabout but denied that it crippled Russian prospects.21
He and his fellow rulers also show off about the gigantic projects that they have undertaken. The national rail network, essential to hold this vast country together, has undergone substantial modernization. One recent achievement is the new Sapsan high-speed line built in collaboration with the Siemens company between Moscow and St Petersburg. It now takes less than four hours to travel the four hundred miles, and a further link has been added to the Volga city of Nizhni Novgorod. The government has allocated funds to raise at least five Russian universities into the world’s top hundred in the global ratings. There is fierce competition for official backing for the so-called 5-100 Project. In 2012 Putin announced the Kremlin’s determination to see this through to fulfilment, and already the leading academic institutions in Moscow and the provinces have recovered from the sorry condition that characterized them in the 1990s. Huge hotels have sprung up in all the big cities. In Skolkovo, a town to the south-east of Moscow, sumptuous research facilities have been established to foster Russia’s advance into the new age of information technology.
TV channels join in the refrain that the country is achieving feats of global wonder. Every daily schedule tells the Russian people that they are lucky to be alive today and that even greater accomplishments lie ahead. They themselves will be the engine of continuing national success and should be proud of themselves.