My reaction is not only due to Snowden’s first statement from Russia, while he was still in legal limbo at Sheremetyevo airport, in which he included Putin’s Russia—a police state and patron of despotism worldwide—on his list of nations that “stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless.” Excuse me? Putin’s many political prisoners would disagree quite strongly, as would the many opposition members who have had their emails hacked and their phone calls recorded by the KGB in attempts to discredit them. And Snowden could have been more respectful of the many injured and dead among journalists and his fellow whistleblowers in Russia.
One note on Snowden’s NSA revelations, however, speaking as someone who grew up under the all-seeing eye of the KGB and who is fighting its modern rebirth under Vladimir Putin: it is exasperating to hear blithe comparisons between the NSA, and other Western spy or law enforcement organizations, and the vicious internal security regimes of the USSR and East Germany. The NSA is to the Stasi what a bad hotel is to a maximum security prison. It is not what a government does with data that defines it; it is what it does to human beings.
Any encroachment on the personal freedoms and rights of individuals by a government should be protested and debated, absolutely. The mechanisms to protest such abuses must be exercised regularly or they will be lost. But citizens behind the Iron Curtain were not terrified of the intelligence services because of data collection. We lived in fear because we knew what would happen to us if we gave any hint of dissent against the regime. And, as often as not, no data at all was required to persecute, disappear, torture, and murder potential enemies. If a court actually was involved, and evidence desired, it would simply be fabricated. And no, to take on the next argument I often hear, brutal totalitarianism does not begin with surveillance by a liberal democratic state. It begins with terror, it begins with violence, and it begins with the knowledge that your thoughts and words can end your career or your life.
Snowden’s acts and his appearance in Moscow had some impact in Russia, but it should not be exaggerated. I’ve heard claims that Putin learned of Snowden’s leaks, then passed his draconian new laws further restricting free speech as a way of “keeping up with the Joneses” at the NSA; it should go without saying that such claims are absurd. Dozens of those laws have been put into effect over Putin’s fifteen-year reign, gradually vandalizing the Russian constitution beyond recognition. Putin is always quick to exploit any opportunity to justify his authoritarian ways, but in many cases it is Western leaders and press looking to make excuses for Putin and to avoid calling him a dictator. This is a genetic strength and weakness of the free world, the desire to be “fair and balanced” and to “show both sides of the story” even when it means giving the benefit of the doubt to someone who hasn’t deserved it in over a decade. The Western press that never hesitated to refer to Pinochet as a dictator, and with good reason, somehow always finds more polite titles or euphemisms for Putin, the Castros, al-Assad, and even Kim Jong-un.
As for the estimation of Snowden among the Russian opposition, you must realize what his journey looked like in our eyes. The idea that an individual could carry out this espionage mission and then flee to China and take refuge in Russia without any involvement by the KGB is incredibly hard to believe. Combine these logical suspicions with his asylum claim and the aforementioned false equivalency between dictatorships and democracies and Snowden is hardly cut out to be a sympathetic figure among those who respect the universal nature of human rights.
All the attention for Snowden had a parallel in the sudden outburst of international condemnation of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games that were held in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi in February. Numerous protests, both online and in crowds in the United States, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere, were largely in response to the harsh anti-gay law passed in Russia in June 2013, a law with broad and open-ended powers to punish and discriminate against gays and anyone who would defend or even talk publicly about homosexuality. Its passage was of a piece with the constant encroachment on free speech and other constitutional rights in Putin’s Russia, and also in keeping with the Kremlin’s politically convenient, and quite unholy, alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church.
This “homosexual propaganda” law was only the broadest and most recent of many similar ones in a Russia where gays were the routine victims of both official and unofficial discrimination, harassment, and violence. That Russia is a signatory to various European and international conventions that forbid this sort of discrimination had been largely ignored by the European Union and its so-called leadership. So it was welcome to see artists, activists, and regular citizens stepping into the gap to stand up for Russian human rights, which of course is what gay rights are. Celebrities like Lady Gaga and Stephen Fry made public statements, including Fry’s eloquent letter to the International Olympic Committee and Prime Minister David Cameron to propose moving or boycotting the Sochi Games.
I was pleasantly surprised by this sudden rush of attention to a matter many of us in the opposition had been protesting since Sochi won the bid in 2007. Suddenly my Twitter mentions were full of LGBT-activism accounts sharing my scorn for hosting the Olympic Games in Putin’s bigoted autocracy. This was the mercurial power of social media in action. Serious comments about Russian democracy might be shared a few hundred times, but a photo of a rainbow over Sochi could go viral in ten minutes. As long as it helped raise awareness about the nature of Putin’s Russia, both methods were fine with me.
There were already many reasons Sochi should never have been awarded the Olympics. Its character as a subtropical summer resort with weather rarely nearing the freezing point is the most obvious. That Sochi was entirely without the required facilities when the Games were awarded on July 4, 2007, over Salzburg and Pyeongchang, added to the surprise. It was clear from the start that it would be a human and environmental catastrophe for the delicate region. Sochi also borders the North Caucasus, a hotbed of both Islamist terror and Russian military brutality, infamous for terror attacks in Ingushetia, regular bombings in Dagestan, and the horrific Chechen wars.
Many Sochi citizens had their homes and businesses destroyed, and the surrounding area was turned into an ecological disaster zone that only got worse after the area was abandoned a few minutes after the torch was extinguished.
The Putin regime is and always has been about one thing: money. Specifically, about how to move it into the bank accounts of Putin’s allies. Hosting the Olympic Games, a first for Russia, as Moscow 1980 was in the USSR, was a perfect way to shift tens of billions of dollars from the treasury and state-owned banks into private hands. Everything from infrastructure to venues and hotels to catering was done by companies hand-picked by the Kremlin, and it was no surprise to find the names of many of Putin’s closest pals “going for the gold” a bit early in Sochi. The price tag soared far beyond the promised $12 billion (already a record) to an estimated $50 billion, more costly even than the lavish 2008 Beijing Summer Games. According to the Economist, the companies of Putin’s old judo buddy Arkady Rotenberg alone received $7.4 billion in contracts. The entire 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympiad cost $6 billion.