Barbara Kay: Russia’s feudal history hangs over these Games

Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s friend, saw his companies awarded Olympic contracts worth $7.4 billion — more than all costs for the 2010 Vancouver Games.

If you visit St. Petersburg and tour some of the tsarist palaces therein, you may, like me a few years ago, experience conflicting responses: wonderment at the opulence and scale of the palaces’ glories, and revulsion at the towering egoism and indifference to human suffering they represent.

I asked our guide why every tsar felt bound to erect his or her own palace, while English and European royalty simply hand(ed) down the same palaces from one generation to the next. She explained the phenomenon as evidence of both personal and national inferiority complexes. The tsars not only wanted to outdo their predecessors; they wanted to outdo Versailles. The palaces were in effect theatrical sets to dazzle other Russian aristocrats, but also to intimidate visiting Western royalty.

The tsars may be long gone, but Russian leaders’ vanity, insecurity and their accompanying edifice complex persist. Putin desperately wants the Sochi games to showcase Russia’s national resurgence to the West. He personally oversaw the bidding (going so far as to make the final presentation to the IOC in English, a language he hates speaking). Cost be damned. What’s $51-billion against the opportunity to impose his virile Russianosity on those snooty democracies?

It’s true that the investment has been divided between public and private funds. Russia’s plutocracy, willingly or not, chipped in for half the bill. “If you want to carry on doing business in Russia, here’s the tax you need to pay,” according to Mikhail Kasyanov, a former Prime Minister under Putin. Cronyism also was rampant, and is estimated by insiders to have accounted for about a third of the costs. Arkady Rotenberg alone, Putin’s friend and judo partner, saw his companies awarded contracts worth $7.4 billion (more than all costs for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics).

The tsars’ palaces now serve as fabulous tourism magnets, doubling as magnificent museums. But after the Games, what tourists will ever flock to the most troubled corner of Russia, next door to the North Caucasus, where several hundred soldiers and civilians have died in the fight against jihadists, and where three recent suicide bombings presage more flamboyant attempts to breach Sochi’s “ring of steel.” As one U.S. official told The Economist, “Imagine holding the games in Kabul.”

In fact, it’s surprising that people not actually compelled, in their role as athletes, their entourage or media, have actually booked to go. The terrorism threat is frighteningly realistic. But apart from that, just as knowledge of the virtual slave labour that constructed the tsars’ palaces takes the shine off one’s pleasure in visiting them, so knowledge of the corruption and human rights abuses that accompany this spectacle should give attendees pause.

Pussy Riot and gays would have suffered under Putin with or without an Olympics. But other human rights victims are specific to Sochi, like the migrant workers — latter day serfs — who have worked on the site for four years; Human Rights Watch found cases of workers’ passports and wages being withheld for months. And then there are local ethnic groups, who chafe under Russian domination.

 

One doesn’t hear much, for example, about the Circassians, whose ancestral home is at the mouth of the Sochi river. These Games mark the 150th anniversary of Circassian exile for the survivors of a pogrom perpetrated by Tsar Alexander II in 1864, in which it is estimated that between 300,000-400,000 people were killed. About a million Circassians were driven out of Russia and are today scattered amongst Turkey, Jordan, Israel, the Balkans and the U.S. Some of them will be at the Games to protest, and to publicize a demand that their historical trauma be acknowledged as a genocide.

A pall hangs over these hyper-politicized Games on so many fronts it is hard to imagine a celebratory mood emerging in the event.

The moment is therefore ripe for debate about the future of the winter Olympics, which began as a more modest and less politicized version of the summer Games, a model many people would love to see return. My own proposal would be a permanent, easily accessible venue with shared maintenance and training use, in a democratic country where winter conditions are usually ideal, tourism is well established and terrorism is unlikely. Utah? Whistler? Austria? It doesn’t matter to me.

I forgot to mention that on the bus ride from our St. Petersburg excursion back to our cruise ship, I exclaimed over the exquisite beauty of a palace, small by Russian standards, but still fit for any monarch. “Oh,” the tour guide said, “that one belongs to Mr. Putin.” Plus ça change …