The other problem is much more serious: it is a crisis of belief in Russia’s future. Here, once again, it is not a question of Russia’s territorial integrity or of imaginary threats to sovereignty, but the fact that the raw, authoritarian model is worn out and it is impossible to conduct any long-term planning in our country. Today’s Russia has been robbed of any model for the future, any long-term perspective, or any economic or social model other than the export of raw materials and the plundering of the state budget. The elite compensates for fear of the future with ever more paranoid ideas of sovereignty. Instead of coming up with genuine ideas for strengthening the state, such as a strategy of development for the depressed regions and the single-industry towns, or investment in education, healthcare and culture, in human capital and the future of the country, all they propose is rhetoric, prison terms for thoughtcrime and fantastic ideas about renaming the Far East. Once upon a time we had a country that tried to patch up holes using mere words; but this country collapsed in 1991.
This is why religious rituals of sovereignty and the Olympic Torch Relay are so important for the state, and the Olympic Games as a model for the future and the medal count as a prototype for war: it is the containment of fear, an exorcism of the eternal Russian emptiness. This is where the seriousness of the state comes from and the extreme security measures, turning what should have been a jolly carnival procession into a special operation by the security forces.
But it didn’t turn out as it should have done. The faulty torches went out (the Olympic Flame was extinguished on more than fifty occasions) and the ungrateful public laughed and whistled. It became essential to have a member of the Federal Guard Service standing by with a Zippo lighter to relight the Olympic Flame, which is exactly what happened when the rally reached Red Square, right opposite Lenin’s Mausoleum. But where can we find enough guards who, with their Zippos, can reignite the dying belief in Russia’s future?
OLYMPIC SCHIZOPHRENIA
Everyone is asking whether the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics can be compared to Berlin in 1936. I decided to ride on the wave that this historical analogy has created and look again at the legendary film, Olympia, directed by Leni Riefenstahl. I saw masses of happy faces, a parade of muscular bodies and a whole host of ingenious camera angles and original editing techniques. Up in the stands, Hitler smiled in a rather embarrassed way, Goebbels and Goering appeared at his side, and the crowd threw up their arms in the Nazi salute. The spectators got excited, jumped out of their seats, supporting equally enthusiastically their own athletes and those from other countries; they were very friendly towards the American fans in their white hats. Flags were waved bearing laurel wreaths, the Olympic Flame burned brightly in the Temple of Light designed by Albert Speer and the sky overhead was full of aeroplanes.
The sensation never left me that everything taking place had a dual meaning. In just three years, these people would begin crushing each other with tanks. In nine years, the Americans would bomb Dresden and Hiroshima. In ten years, the Nuremberg Trials would be held. We would learn about Dachau and Auschwitz; about Khatyn and Babiy Yar.[19] Can we today watch Riefenstahl and not be burdened by this knowledge? Can we take the Olympics out of their historical context? How can we watch Ludwig Stubbendorf ride to victory in the equestrian event, knowing that he will be killed on the Eastern Front in 1941; or see the record shot-put of the great Hans Welke, who was to become a policeman and be captured and executed by partisans near Khatyn in 1943? And if we cast our net wider, how can we read the works of the philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and the ‘court lawyer of the Third Reich’, the political theorist Carl Schmitt? How can we listen to the works of genius that are the recordings of the conductors Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, knowing that they both served the Nazi regime, and that Karajan somehow managed to join the Nazi Party twice?
For seventy years now we have been trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, to separate politics from culture. Leni Riefenstahl was cleared by a postwar court, but still came up against a secret ban which prevented her from working in her chosen profession, and she went into photography instead. Nevertheless, at the 1948 Lausanne Film Festival, she was awarded an Olympic certificate; and in 1956 a Hollywood panel named Olympia one of the ten best films of all time. In 2001, the President of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, presented the ninety-nine-year-old Riefenstahl with a gold medal of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.
Sochi 2014 is not Berlin 1936. It is not worth comparing one of the most terrifying totalitarian regimes in history with the populist authoritarianism of modern Russia. A better comparison would probably be with Mexico in 1968 and Seoul in 1988. Mexico and South Korea in those years were each ruled by one-party dictatorships, just as, incidentally, Japan was in the decades after the Second World War, if we think back to the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 and the Winter Olympics in Sapporo in 1972. Even a comparison with the capital of what Reagan described as ‘the Evil Empire’, Moscow 1980, is a limp one; Beijing 2008 would be closer.
Nevertheless, in the Russian discussion the Sochi Olympics inevitably brings up moral dilemmas similar to 1936: we are used to thinking on a grand scale. The question stares one in the face: should someone who is in opposition to the regime wish for a successful Games and victory for the Russian team, if each triumph raises Putin’s rating? Can you join in a celebration if it is supported by billions of stolen dollars and the destruction of a region’s ecology, and every Russian medal is simply an indulgence to redeem evil?
But if we put extreme views to one side, a normal citizen, even one who is critical of the state (and, after all, isn’t that one of the usual human criteria for normality?) cannot actually not support his country and cannot actively wish for it to fail. A significant section of the reading and thinking public has developed Olympic schizophrenia: they are torn between typical Russian Schadenfreude about the incompetence of the managers, the thieving ways of the contractors and the crisis in many sports (such as in figure skating and biathlon), and pride in our sportsmen, the volunteers and the unusually amicable policemen as well as the inspirational opening ceremony. This is not about President Putin, or the Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, or the authorities; this is about Russia as a country testing itself before the whole world over the course of two weeks.
Schizophrenia is a peculiarly Russian characteristic. Power is separated from the country by the crenelated Kremlin Wall. And for centuries the educated class was not only alien to its own people but even became used to being ashamed of Russia, while at the same time surprisingly remaining Russian patriots. As the poet Alexander Pushkin said: ‘Of course, I despise my Fatherland with my whole being; but it annoys me when a foreigner shares this sentiment with me.’[20] Shame and pride, love and hatred, give rise to the typical Russian split personality. Russian patriotism has been schizophrenic from the time of the Russian philosopher of the first half of the nineteenth century, Pyotr Chaadaev. He was the author of the critical ‘Philosophical Letters’, who dared to love Russia warts and all, and for his ideas was declared mad by the authorities.
19
Khatyn is a Belarusian village where the entire population of more than 150 people was slaughtered, mostly burned alive, by the Nazis in retaliation for an attack by Soviet partisans. Eight people managed to survive. Babiy Yar is the site of the mass extermination of the Jews and other residents of Kiev by the Germans in 1941. It is believed that nearly 34,000 Jews were massacred in less than forty-eight hours.