In the end, the Ukrainian Security Service did ban Samoilova from entering Ukraine for three years, and Russia was not represented at Eurovision 2017; but, at the same time, it made Ukraine look like a miserable host that had politicized the song contest. This was a masterful propaganda stroke from Moscow’s point of view, which had been prepared to send its singer deep into the rear of the enemy as a diversionary tactic in its hybrid war against Ukraine and the West.
However, the main problem with nominating Yulia Samoilova to take part in Eurovision 2017 was that Russia did not have the moral right to send someone in a wheelchair from a country that does not provide its disabled people with equal rights for treatment, mobility or work opportunities. There are huge problems with medication for the disabled and with the provision of ramps in housing blocks. As a result, the vast majority of disabled people are confined to their apartments. It is impossible to live on the miserly disability benefits provided, or to look after a disabled child, even in the poorest Russian regions. As has always been the case, Russia has a shortage of quality protheses, wheelchairs and spare parts for them; furthermore, virtually none of these items is produced in Russia itself. Yulia, who suffers from spinal amyotrophy (an inherited disorder, exacerbated following a polio vaccination as a child), is hoping to go to Finland for an operation, and is collecting money for this via crowdfunding. As they joked bitterly on Twitter: ‘It’s only in Russia that a disabled person could go to Eurovision, but can’t go to the shop next door.’
Our Paralympic sport is also just such a Potemkin Village, if not more so: first and foremost, it is a shop window for national pride, and only after that is it a humanitarian project. When there is no infrastructure, nor any tradition of people with restricted abilities taking part in sport (it would be a great rarity in Russia for a blind runner or skier to take part in a mass marathon accompanied by a specially trained sportsman), all that exists is a state system for choosing people with disabilities to take part in top-level sports. They identify gifted people with restricted abilities – for example, former sportspeople who have been in a car accident – and suggest to them a professional career that would be the envy of any disabled Russian person: everything is paid for by the state, they travel abroad and, if they are victorious, there are generous prizes. Paralympic sportspeople are a part of the elite Russian sporting machine, and huge financial and administrative resources are thrown at their success; but it’s no coincidence (judging by the unprecedented sanctions imposed by the International Paralympic Committee) that they were drawn into the massive doping programme. And, as dependent people, they couldn’t refuse. Then, when they were caught out, the moralizing machinery of state propaganda went into overdrive, blaring out about the ‘unheard-of cynicism’ of the international sporting organizations, which had decided ‘to take revenge on Russia’ and ‘make an example of disabled sportsmen’.
Samoilova’s situation is similar to the Paralympic one in that the state draws vulnerable groups into its special propaganda operation, hiding behind their weakness like a living shield. In its clearest and most distilled way, this policy was evident in the passing of the Dima Yakovlev Law in December 2012: the state took as hostage orphaned children with disabilities, the most vulnerable group, completely lacking in rights, who were critically dependent on foreign adopters (as is well known, it is very rare for sick children to be taken into Russian families), and used them as a bargaining chip so as to ‘punish’ the West for the ‘Magnitsky List’.[16] In reality, what we are talking about here is the state’s right over the body of the individual, where even their disability is taken away from them and becomes a state resource. This is a specific type of biopolitics: the nationalization and politicization of disability, the creation of a medical exclusion space, which allows for no external criticism (‘they are insulting the weakest!’) and can be used to cover any special operations by the state, from the doping programme to the hybrid war against Ukraine and the West.
Yulia Samoilova is far from being the first contestant with particular features to take part in the Eurovision Song Contest. We had the Polish singer, Monika Kuszyńska, who is partially paralysed following a car crash; there was the blind Georgian woman, Diana Gurtskaya; a pregnant woman; the bearded Conchita Wurst; and the Russian grandmothers’ chorus: this competition long ago turned into a parade of variety and tolerance. It’s time we stopped paying attention to who is performing in front of us: a man or a woman; bearded or not; straight or gay; a cute-looking actress or a youthful old man; someone with one leg or two; standing up or sitting in a wheelchair. The only thing that matters is that he or she should perform best of all. But our lens is so configured that we pay special attention to, stigmatize and politicize these particularities, while Eurovision is a special kind of magnifying glass and a false mirror, a safari park of archaic and wounded national pride. Here the show is ruled by complicated coalitions and mutual back-scratching. Old historical scores and childish grudges are settled; national pride preens itself and defeat is taken very badly. No one could have guessed that, out of the forty-three countries, two would find themselves at war. It would have been far more honest for Russia to have boycotted the Eurovision final in Kiev from the start, bearing in mind the events in Crimea and the Donbass. But Moscow unexpectedly made the knight’s move (or, more exactly, the wheelchair move) and short-sightedly considers that it has had a propaganda victory; while in reality it is a moral defeat.
The Samoilova problem exists on two levels: the human and the political. From a human point of view, one could only wish that she had been able to take part in the competition, something she had dreamed about for years. It’s possible that the honorarium and the publicity she would have received may have helped her to pay for her operation in Finland, which would have allowed her to be able, in the future, to breathe, sing and perform normally. Perhaps her performance would have given support to all those who struggle with their traumas and their ills, so that they didn’t have to hide them, and so they could overcome their pain, isolation and anonymity. But on the political level, one is stunned by the cynicism of the producers of the show in nominating Samoilova to take part: they solve their own propaganda tasks by using the most vulnerable and dependent bodies. In reality, they have already had their consciences amputated, just as, for the rest of us, the ability to be surprised by anything has long ago atrophied.
THE FIASCO OF ‘OPERATION SOCHI’
Taking back the Olympic medals won at Sochi from Russian sportsmen and women as a result of the doping scandal, and the subsequent unprecedented ban on the national team from taking part in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in February 2018, became the greatest failure of Russian foreign policy in recent years. Victory in Sochi had been one of the main international achievements, a personal triumph for Vladimir Putin, who stood, emperor-like, on the podium of the Fisht Olympic Stadium and reviewed the parade of the victors. It was a symbolic prize, which remained in place even after Russia tore up the modern world order in 2014 and turned into a revanchist state.
And now there are no medals, nor victory in the medal table, where Russia had come out on top. There is a certain logic to all of this. The medals from Sochi were the final legacy of that old, pre-Crimea, Russia, which proudly showed the world its history and the masterpieces of the Russian avant-garde in the impressive opening ceremony; which triumphed in the snowy arenas and not in the back streets of hybrid wars; and which was a part of the global world. Now everything has been put in its place: the medals have been taken away and the last link with the previous era has been severed. It turns out that the 2014 Olympic Games were just a sham, a cover for doping, a special operation by the Federal Security Service, the FSB, all part of the hybrid war with the West.
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The Magnitsky List includes officials shown to have profited from corruption or been guilty of human rights abuses, and prevents them from travelling to countries where this is enforced. It is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer for the Anglo-American businessman Bill Browder, who, after uncovering a multimillion-dollar fraud by senior Russian officials, was arrested on false charges and then murdered while in prison. Browder has made it his mission to try to have a Magnitsky Law adopted in as many countries as possible, thus preventing corrupt officials from travelling abroad to take advantage of their ill-gotten gains.