{"id":42,"date":"2022-01-18T18:23:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-18T15:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/?p=42"},"modified":"2022-05-30T13:45:12","modified_gmt":"2022-05-30T10:45:12","slug":"putin-plus-authoritarians-on-skates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/new-nobility\/putin-plus-authoritarians-on-skates\/","title":{"rendered":"Putin Plus Authoritarians on Skates"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The February of 2014, that bright winter for most Russians,\u202ffelt very gloomy for us.\u202fIt seemed that every one of our compatriots \u2014 bar us \u2014 was glued to their TV screens for two weeks: the\u202fnation was in a cheerful mood, for the first time in many years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sochi Winter Games united the nation. That may sound like the words of a Kremlin propagandist, but on this occasion, it rang true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The call from a close relative was the final straw. Irina\u2019s aunt lived by herself in a small provincial town and had little reason to love the KGB and Putin since her parents had been expelled from their house in the 1930s and had barely survived. She called in the second week of the Games: \u201cI don\u2019t like Putin, but I am ready to praise him for the Olympics. I feel so happy to see our athletes winning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as Russian athletes kept winning, one event after another, we felt like we were losing. And we were: our alienation from the majority was now complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before the games, the country adopted many repressive laws, but public attention was elsewhere, despite the free media\u2019s best efforts. While athletes competed at the gigantic Bolshoy Ice Dome and at the spectacular Iceberg Skating Palace, the Cossacks attacked the all-woman Pussy Riot<\/a> group with whips, and environmentalists were kicked out of Sochi where the games were due to take place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most Russians and the global media barely noticed. The result is well-known: Russia took the most medals (later 67 Russian athletes were disqualified and 13 medals were rescinded<\/a> after a major state-run doping program was exposed<\/a>), Putin regaled himself as the victor, and soon after the unbadged \u201cgreen men\u201d invaded Crimea, which led us to today with the possibility of full-scale war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was it possible to predict that outcome before the games?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the third day of the Sochi Olympics, Viktor Shenderovich, Russia\u2019s most prominent and intransigent\u202fpolitical satirist, published an opinion piece entitled \u201cPutin and a Girl on Skates.\u201d He described his mixed feelings about the games and why he didn\u2019t share the\u202fexcitement of\u202fhis\u202ffellow\u202fcompatriots\u202fat the successes\u202fof\u202fthe country\u2019s athletes. He could not forget about the repressive regime the athletes represented and questioned the supposed lack of politics at the games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To make the column work, Shenderovich, never afraid to raise the stakes, mentioned Russia\u2019s most cherished athlete Yulia Lipnitskaya<\/a>, the figure skater then 15 years old \u2014\u202falong with Hans-Otto Woellke, a handsome and smiling\u202fGerman shot putter who\u202f won a gold medal at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSomething, however, prevents us today from rejoicing at his victory,\u201d Shenderovich\u202fwrote, \u201cMaybe it is the fact we are aware of the final price of this sporting deed \u2014 a price which included Dachau, Coventry, Katyn<\/a>, and Leningrad . . .\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unsurprisingly, Shenderovich came under a fierce attack in pro-Kremlin media, and the ruling party United Russia demanded an apology. The writer refused. Eight years later, this January, Shenderovich joined the growing community of Russian political exiles: he left the country after the criminal prosecution was initiated with a very possible final option of a jail term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the main lessons we learned after Sochi 2014 was that reality would exceed our worst expectations of the aftermath of the games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we investigated\u202f Russian preparations for the Games\u202f\u2014 the FSB used the Olympics as a pretext to expand surveillance powers, introduce advanced spying technology, and test new restrictive measures under the pretext of spectator safety \u2014 we\u202funderstood that\u202fmost would remain after the games. We knew that this was exactly what had happened after the Olympics in Moscow in 1980, which was used to bolster the KGB\u2019s more power, both technically and operationally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were not mistaken. We expected the FSB to spy and collect data on visitors and it did; we expected the surveillance measures introduced for the Olympics to stay and be used everywhere, and it did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For instance, a \u201cspectator pass\u201d \u2014 an obligatory\u202fID\u202fapp\u202fthat could be obtained only through advance screening by the security services\u202fand which spies on the visitor \u2014 has been adapted for entry to soccer matches. Impressed, China has adopted the technology and its use will be obligatory for all visitors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But our projections were linear. We expected the expansion of security services\u2019 powers, and we sure as hell got that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But we didn\u2019t expect that patriotism pumped up by Sochi, and the intelligentsia\u2019s fall out with the rest of the society, would make the annexation of Crimea go so smoothly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how can we guess what might happen after Beijing 2022?<\/p>\n\n\n

Agentura.ru 2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Authoritarian Olympics, like the Beijing Winter games starting on February 4, are an exercise in feel-good nationalism. Until the final payment demand arrives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-nobility"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions\/85"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}