Poured concrete in Sochi…

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

The real danger of the Sochi Olympics is not what you think. In fact, everything we’ve been preaching about for months as all the impeding dangers – terrorism, human rights violations, shoddy construction, terrible service – is going to get thrown into one big basket called “politics” and thrown off a sliding track cliff – as we can already see from the way Yahoo Sports is enthusiastically covering the Games.

Oh, sure, there is good reason to fear going to the Sochi Olympics – if you aren’t made the victim of a terrorist attack (the State Department has issued a travel warning), the stadium you are sitting on may collapse from faulty construction. Or you could be bit by a rabid stray dog or get sick from drinking the poisoned water that results after years of environmental destruction of the Imeret Lowlands and Krasnaya Polyana’s delicate alpine meadows.

God forbid any more athletes are injured on some of the hastily-completed slopes and tracks built by Putin’s cronies with large pockets especially for kickbacks – already there has been at least one injury and concerns about the conditions.

Indeed, if you tune into the deeper back story of these outrageously costly Winter Games in the reports carefully prepared by the Russian opposition, you will see much to worry about –  criminal probes into corruption that have led either to oligarchs fleeing the country or the mysterious suspension of court cases; buildings that never passed inspection and still aren’t finished, villages where there has been no drinking water for years during the construction; festering land fills and polluted rivers. And then there’s the historic suffering of the Circassian people, who once inhabited this are and were massacred in large numbers – the kind of crime against humanity that has never been prosecuted in any era of Russia’s long, bloody history.

As if this litany of horrors were not enough, now the pampered Western press corps is landing and discovering that lights and elevators don’t work, strange personnel wander in and out of their rooms, and worst of all, the bars are closed and the Coke machine isn’t even working.

We could hope, then, that the culmination of all the work of human rights groups condemning deplorable conditions for workers (one man even sewed his mouth shut in protest when he didn’t receive back wages for three months); of the persistence of harassed opposition leaders Alexey Navalny and Boris Nemtsov documenting all the cronyist corruption and plundering of state coffers for Putin’s show; and of the LGBT rights movement finally getting deserved attention in Russia, bringing a spotlight to brutal beatings and oppressive laws – all of this would finally lead to a kind of “intervention” for Putin by the world community.

And surely, with all the world’s attention bearing down on the former KGB officer who has brutally ruled Russia for 13 years, with every possible resource invoked to tell the compelling stories of massive human rights abuses in the past and present, the current occupant of the Kremlin will be forced to change?

Surely he will be forced to back down – perhaps even further than he did with his token release of political prisoners on the eve of the Olympics, notably businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky,  the Pussy Riot punk rockers and some of the demonstrators from the anti-Putin Bolotnaya Square protests a year ago.

Surely the spectacular failure of Putin’s Potemkin Village in Sochi will bring about the kind of change that the Chernobyl disaster forced on Mikhail Gorbachev, who began his reforms with making workers speed up in his uskoreniye (acceleration) program before finally relenting and deciding that glasnost (airing of abuses) and then perestroika (economic restructuring) were needed – ultimately to his demise.

Yet it’s a lesson not lost on Putin, and that means realistically, no human rights epiphany for Putin is going to happen. All  the campaigners for exposure of his tyranny through the device of Sochi – along with their (so far) sympathetic press corps – are going to have to go back to the drawing board when it’s all over.

That’s because likely, no terrorist attacks will happen. Not only have the Russian authorities – really good at surveillance and hacking of targets in far larger swathes than anything the NSA does – locked the area down for hundreds of miles. Some suspect that the secret police themselves even staged or nudged some of the terrorist attacks that occurred in the region in recent months in order them to handily capture the suspects and display their strength.

As for building disasters, one thing the Soviets got pretty good at in 75 years of rule was pouring concrete. The massiveness of Russian construction – the 1970s-style totalitarian chic emblematic in Sochi — may skimp on cement or rods, but probably isn’t going to slide into the river.

Another thing that Soviets – and Russians – have been very good at is low-grade mass entertainment. Large stadiums for soccer and other sports abound all over Russia, and while the games sometimes erupt in nationalist hate fests in which Central Asian migrants are killed, they persist as a cheap pastime. The authorities know how to keep most people happy; that’s why they are still in charge.

Mass control is what Russia is all about – and it works. We are about to see how well it works, even when you can chip around the edges. Putin long ago took over all the airwaves, and has even been persecuting one lone independent cable station on the eve of the Olympics. And the message of Putin’s “managed democracy” – pseudo-civil society — has a lot of help not only with the Kremlin’s propaganda RT.com but with the many fellow travelers in the Western media and political communities now indulging in “what aboutism.” .

Now those playing the favourite East-West came of moral equivalency of very different systems are comparing apples and oranges like the multi-billion-dollar poisoning of Sochi’s rivers and water tables with a spill in West Virginia – a spill that unlike Russian corruption and its ensuing financial and environmental devastation is covered in our free domestic media, and has many NGO and government agencies coping with, eliminating, prosecuting and preventing such a disaster –  all institutional responses absent in the Russian context.

Russians are also very good at playing host, laying on copious amounts of starchy food and vodka – and trafficking in all the women and men needed to serve as friendly bar-tenders – or prostitutes. Lots and lots of people – the kind of masses of people who go to mass sports events—will have a very good time in Sochi. They will be able party wildly in ways that they can’t at home – and they can rely on the corrupt Russian police to look the other way, especially for a gift. How many Instagrams will we see of foreign tourists posing with Russian cops in a karaoke of “Get Lucky”?

Athletes – the spotlight will be on them, after all – will get over the discomforts of Russian lodging and sub-standard facilities and get into the game – and the winners may only feel a vague sense of gratitude toward Putin, understandably.

To be sure, there will likely be scandals having to do with suppression of speech (bureaucrats had the idea they were going to make fans write all their signs in Russian and clear them through an agency); no doubt there will be harassment of gays; arrests of demonstrators; or even worse, injuries or deaths that always occur in any large festival with hundreds of thousands of people.

But none of it will be enough to effect the kind of “intervention” with Russia’s tyrant that so many are hoping for. Many, many people, instead, will come away scratching their heads. “Why, that wasn’t so bad,” they’ll say. “We had a good time.” “It was fun.” “The Russian people are really kind, and it’s just the media stuck in old Cold War stereotypes that gives them a bad name.”

Masses and masses of ordinary people who go to sports events  — or watch them on TV –  will come away impressed with the competitions and their breath-taking backgrounds, even if made up of manufactured snow.

The gay movement had a really great run with the hook of Sochi, getting many hipsters and progressives who normally don’t bother with Russia’s oppressive system to start speaking out. But even some gay people will no doubt wind up saying they never experienced any problems and even went to a gay club in Sochi – and then what? After it’s over , how will we keep getting attention to this issue?

The day after the Olympics, all the campaigners will be deprived of a hook for their grievances – still very legitimate – that they have grown used to expecting to “work” not only to showcase abuses, but end them.

That won’t happen. Putin, sadly, is too big, his rich cronies at home and abroad too many, and the weight of the masses affected by RT.com and sports entertainment media too great.

I’d like to think that the many scorching embarrassments that Putin should feel over Sochi – and may get to feel at least in part – will change the nature of the Kremlin’s regime. Long experience in this field tells me it won’t.

We will have to go back to doing what we have always tried to do with this enemy of freedom and human rights – documenting, publicizing, and hoping to turn the consciences of people who are indifferent, if not hostile. Let’s hope that some of the press corps, moved to indignation by the absence of door handles and the presence of dirty water will stick with us, and keep covering the devastating wars of the Caucasus that have led to terrorist attacks as well as massive human rights violations; the further turning of the screws on civil society; the persecution of gays, minorities, migrants and dissidents. We will still be watching after the crowd turns away.