Sunday, January 19, 2014

The Putin Olympics: Grotesque Corruption, Gay Bashing, and a Jihad Next Door


The 2014 Winter Games begin next month and numerous articles are increasing looking at the uncooperative weather, gross corruption, gay bashing and threats of terrorist attacks that make the idea of the Sochi Olympics look questionable at best.  Behind the whole endeavor is homophobe extraordinaire, Vladimir Putin.  As expressed previously, I wish the best to the athletes, but a stinging humiliation for Putin would be most welcome.  Politico Magazine has a long piece that looks at Putin's hubris and the challenges ahead as the Olympics get underway.  Here are highlights:

Who would hold the Winter Olympics in a summer resort? Vladimir Putin is who. In the triumph of what can only be called a preposterous idea, three short weeks from now the Russian president will draw the world’s attention to a grand legacy project of his own fantastic design. Nearly seven years ago, Putin personally pitched the International Olympic Committee to choose Sochi for these winter games. Sochi? Picture the Jersey Shore in the 1950s—plus palm trees and minus, until recently, the widespread luxury of indoor plumbing in the huts that locals rent to beachgoers. The place sits on the same latitude as the French Riviera, and until Putin fell in love with it, was best known for the packs of Soviets who used to sun themselves on the rocky shore of the Black Sea.

Sochi today is Putin’s personal pride, a project of such colossal authoritarian branding that it’s hard to think of a more recent example of a political leader so closely involved in such a grandiose building spree.

The overall price tag for the Games has now reached somewhere between $50 billion and $55 billion, a figure that makes this not only the most expensive Olympics in history, but also pricier than all previous Winter Olympiads put together. 

Putin’s Olympics are first and foremost political, a chance to project the image of the new, confident and rich Russia, one “risen off its knees” by the neo-authoritarian administration of the last 14 years.

And yet Putin’s expectations for a triumph may run into a stone wall of reality. Many are bracing for a disruption, even disaster. The Sochi games will be the first Winter Olympiad held in the subtropics and not unrelatedly, the gap between what has been needed by way of infrastructure and what was already available had never been as deep and wide. It is also beset with protest; it’s the first Olympics to be held in an area of mass expulsion of an indigenous people, whose descendants accuse Russia of genocide. Perhaps most hazardously of all, it is the first (and almost certainly the last) Olympiad to be held within a few hundred miles of a low-intensity but deadly jihad.

Of course, there are some things that Putin’s scrutiny may not be able to fix. Sochi is literally the warmest place in Russia and features daily high temperatures in February that occasionally peak at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. It will be colder in the mountains, where the open-air, snow-requiring events are hosted—but not by much and certainly not consistently enough to count on. Russian wits have begun calling the Putin Games “the first Spring Olympics in history.”

Last February, frustrated skiers and snowboarders were seen coming down from the mountains wearing raincoats over their parkas. And last year’s World Cup free-ski and snowboard competitions, which were to be a kind of test-run for the Olympic venue, had to be canceled “due to lack of snow and continuous warm and rainy weather conditions.”
Russia’s Audit Chamber, the parliament’s watchdog, has estimated that state-run companies misspent more than $500 million in Sochi. The government’s critics estimate the stolen and wasted funds at around $30 billion.

In addition to tapping the Kremlin’s habitual cash cow, the world’s largest natural gas company, Gazprom, the tab for all of this was supposed to be shared with some of Russia’s top billionaire oligarchs and their companies, such as metal tycoons Vladimir Potanin (the world’s nickel king) and Oleg Deripaska (his aluminum counterpart). The model was meant to evoke a kind noblesse oblige imposed by the modern-day tsar on the richest boyars, yet the wealthy investors have publicly and repeatedly complained about their financial burden and the dwindling prospects of ever earning their investments back. Apparently their whining has reached the right quarters and, in the end, reportedly, 90 percent of these “private” investments have been covered by loans from the state-owned bank Vnesheconombank.
In addition to human rights defenders, environmental activists, and disgruntled locals, two groups are thought especially likely to precipitate disruption. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists intend to draw attention to the 2013 Russian law that bans “propaganda of homosexuality to children.” The controversial piece of legislation, signed by Putin, defines “propaganda” so broadly that it effectively criminalizes the subject of homosexuality in mass media, online or at public events, such as gay pride parades. Russian LGBT activists plan to defy the law and hold a pride parade on Feb. 7, the opening day of the Games.

Protests could also come from Circassians, a North Caucasian people who claim Sochi as their historic capital. During the final phase of Russia’s conquest of the Muslim North Caucasus in 1864, 1.5 million Circassians were deported to Turkey. With the Olympiad held on the 150th anniversary of this expulsion—which they consider a genocide responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands—Circassian activists in Turkey, Syria, Jordan and the United States have called for Russia’s recognition of and apology for the 1864 expulsion and for the boycott of the Games.
Of course, all fears of protests are dwarfed by the threat of terrorist violence by Islamic militants seeking to detach the North Caucasus from Russia and establish a fundamentalist caliphate there. According to Russian experts, 98 percent of all terrorist acts in Russia occur in the North Caucasus, in the immediate proximity of Sochi. Between January and September 2013, the jihad left 375 people dead and 343 injured. Among those killed were more than 100 police and security troops and 200 terrorists.

Last summer, Doku Umarov, the self-proclaimed leader of the North Caucasian jihad and self-declared emir of the Caucasus Emirate, posted a YouTube video in which he called on fellow jihadists to “do their utmost to derail” the Olympiad.
In response to all of this, the Russian authorities have committed mammoth resources to minimize the danger. Building on the security experience of other Games, especially the 2012 London Summer Olympics, the Kremlin plans to deploy between 37,000 and 42,000 police, as well as at least 10,000 Ministry of Internal Affairs troops and an unspecified numbers of elite paratroopers and FSB agents. High-speed patrol boats and sonars to detect submarines will be guarding Sochi from the sea. A special detachment of veterans of the two Chechen wars and antiterrorist operations in the North Caucasus will patrol the wooded Caucasus Mountains, and an unknown number of FSB border troops will concentrate on routes that could to be used by fighters coming from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria.

The Sochi Games so far have epitomized the seamy underbelly of the Kremlin regime: corruption, incompetence, profligacy, lack of public input, secret police as the country’s most powerful institution, the stifling of debate by de facto censorship and no effective limits to the leader’s fiat.
Designed to legitimize the neoauthoritarian regime, could the Sochi Olympics instead become Russia’s moment of truth, prompting national soul-searching and spurring the movement for democratization? For Putin, the consequence of a failure could be more devastating still. With the oil-dependent national economy slowing down to a crawl and the specter of stagflation haunting a country used to 7 to 10 percent growth in real incomes in Putin’s first two terms, the Russians’ trust in him, which is the backbone of the regime’s legitimacy, has fallen to 30 percent (half of what it was in 2008), and support for his policies has dropped to its lowest point in 12 years. In the high-risk/high yield venture that is the Sochi Olympics, Putin may triumph despite the handicaps he’s facing. But, like with every once-popular autocrat, the Russian president’s hubris may also be tempting the gods in a style befitting the very Greeks who gave us the Games.

No comments: