The most banal and useless answer would be to blame the West for everything – which is exactly what the state propaganda did. They produced from up their sleeves a whole set of absurd excuses about an anti-Russian conspiracy: ‘Everyone’s involved in doping, it’s just that the Russians are the only ones they catch’; ‘They’ve done this to us because of Crimea’ (or even because we were victorious in the War in 1945, as was recently put forward in the Duma); ‘Sport can’t achieve the highest results without doping’; ‘Norwegians all take asthma medicine’, and so on. They can try all they like to take comfort in myths about an anti-Russian conspiracy in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) or the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and curse the whistle-blower, Russian doping guru and defector, Grigory Rodchenkov, who revealed all the details of the doping system. But none of this changes the principal, inconvenient question: were the facts that became known from Rodchenkov’s diaries, from Richard McLaren’s report about Russian doping, from the documentary films of the German ARD television channel, and from Bryan Fogel’s film Icarus, which won the Oscar for best documentary film, all actually true? By way of an answer, there was just an eloquent silence and conciliatory statements from our normally combative official spokespersons, which de facto served as an acknowledgement of the facts as presented. What’s more, the evidence was apparently so convincing that the Kremlin preferred to accept the IOC’s comparatively soft verdict so as not to threaten the Football World Cup, which took place in Russia in 2018.
The fact is that doping in Russia is a deeply systemic phenomenon, the logical result of the resource machine in Soviet and Russian sport, where plans and norms on the number of medals are handed down from above, and medals and results are expected to be produced from below. Every trainer in each of the sports schools answers with their head and their salary for the smooth production of leading athletes; every federation in each sport answers for the preparation of Olympic champions; and the Olympic Committee is responsible for victory in the medal table. The very pinnacle of this pyramid comes when, right outside the Kremlin, Olympic champions and prize winners are handed the keys to Mercedes and Audi cars, as well as being given flats and gifts worth millions of dollars from regional governors and oligarchs. In this administrative and bureaucratic machine, honed only so as to demonstrate the superiority of Russian sport, the bodies of these athletes are turned into a mere biological resource, and doping becomes an essential method for the solution of the state’s strategic tasks. This machine has been working for decades, from children’s sport to the Olympic level, in a process of Darwinian selection culling hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t pass selection, meaning that someone who has gone through many years of ruthless training to reach the level of ‘Master of Sport’, but who didn’t then make it into the Olympic reserve, will, as a rule, be thrown by the wayside, their health ruined, and be left with a deep disgust for sport.
And this machine would have carried on working with regularly interspersed individual doping scandals. But then the Sochi Winter Olympics came along as the main image-making campaign of the decade for Vladimir Putin and became his pet project. After the poor showing of the Russian team at the previous Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010, only victory on home territory would be good enough. So now the FSB became involved in the sporting-medical machine, turning the Olympics into a special operation straight out of a cheap spy noveclass="underline" a doping cocktail nicknamed ‘Dyushes’[17] masked by alcohol; the collection and preservation of the urine of athletes over the course of many months; drilling a hole in the wall of the anti-doping laboratory, hidden behind a cupboard; disguising FSB operatives as plumbers; opening up and switching urine samples; and carrying out other favourite spy tricks. As became clear, everything was done in a very clumsy way – it was a typical Russian cock-up (Rodchenkov’s diaries reveal only worries and cursing over the mixed-up test-tubes and samples – you couldn’t make it up!) It appears that even the FSB hasn’t managed to avoid the overall drop in professionalism and responsibility in government service which has come about as a result of the general corruption and fall in standards in the selection process.
As a result of this poorly organized and well-publicized special operation, the scandal over Russian doping became a serious political defeat, and the negative media reporting around it was on a par with the shooting-down of MH17 (although not, of course, comparable in terms of human tragedy). And this draws the boundaries of the hybrid war and special operations which in Putin’s time have taken the place in Russia of diplomacy, sport, mass media, administrative procedures and rules. In other words, the problem is much wider than doping. It is in the whole political system, where power has been usurped by the Chekists, who have plunged the state and society into a condition of permanent threat and hybrid warfare. And this is not only internally, but in foreign affairs, too, where all the normal bureaucratic procedures have been replaced by special operations. Procedures for reaching agreement, consulting experts and taking informed decisions; all the usual mechanisms of accountability, openness and audit. The siloviki have turned all these complex processes of public policy into a bad spy movie.
In reality, everything surrounding the Sochi Olympics became a special operation, from the lobbying for Sochi during the selection process in the IOC, to the construction of the facilities, thanks to which whole territories were put under a state of emergency, limiting constitutional rights for citizens, such as the right to property and freedom of movement. Another special operation was the long-planned annexation of Crimea, with its multilayered cover-ups and lies. The war in Ukraine is a special operation, too, with the separate episode of shooting down MH17. The war in Syria has been carried out in many ways according to the laws of a special operation, with disinformation about the scale and the aims of the military presence and the covering-up of Russian casualties. A huge special operation involved Russia’s meddling in elections and internal political discussions in Western countries, through an ever-expanding system of state propaganda, fake news and trolling on social media, the culmination of which was the Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections. And finally, it was the poisoning of the Russian former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, UK, in March 2018.
There are three problems with the special operations that have taken the place of Russia’s policies. First of all, they’re ineffective. The Sochi doping thriller not only saw Russia lose its Olympic medals and the right of the national team to compete in PyeongChang, but it also ruined the country’s position in world sport for many years ahead. The annexation of Crimea left Russia not only with a toxic asset on its hands and one for which it is paying with sanctions, but it cannot even get any use out of it: as well as the well-known problems with banks and the provision of electricity (see above, ‘A Sovereignty Full of Holes’, for the scandal about the turbines built by Siemens, which were taken to Crimea illegally, in contravention of sanctions), there is also the collapse of the tourist industry there and the criminalization of every level of authority on the peninsula. In the same way, the war in Eastern Ukraine has seen the final separation from Russia of a vital part of its former empire, exactly as the late Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted, and the irreversible drift of Ukraine into the bosom of Western institutions (precisely what the Kremlin tried to prevent). What’s more, Russia has been left with yet another toxic asset – the pirate republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, which are totally dependent on injections of Russian cash, military equipment and personnel, and on the economy of violence.