Hosting the Games in Sochi was a dubious effort even if the classic old resort town were being turned into Xanadu with Putin as Kubla Khan. But due to epic levels of corruption, most of the money never even made it to Sochi. The construction was shoddy and many of the ambitious projects weren’t even scheduled to be built until after the Games. That is, they were never built at all, and they never will be. It is fair to say that Switzerland won the most gold from Sochi regardless of the success of their team.
The International Olympic Committee members must have possessed tremendous faith to entrust the Games to Sochi in the face of such obstacles. Many of my colleagues in the opposition and I protested the bid from the start. When the degree of the chaos and corruption became evident, we petitioned the IOC to move the Games to a different site, even to a less fragile one in Russia. That didn’t happen, of course, but the new wave of Sochi protests over the anti-gay law turned a bad situation into an opportunity to turn Putin’s showcase into a spotlight that exposed his cruel regime on a global stage.
As a lifelong professional sportsman, first for the Soviet Union and then for Russia, I could not endorse a boycott of Sochi by the Olympic teams. Such maneuvers unfairly punish athletes with no regard for their personal views. I was nearly a victim of “sports politics” myself more than once as a young man. In 1983, I was told I could not travel to Pasadena, California, to play a world championship candidates match against Soviet defector Viktor Korchnoi. The Soviet Sports Committee was already planning to boycott the 1984 Summer Games in nearby Los Angeles in retaliation for the US boycott of the 1980 Games in Moscow. I was initially forfeited for failing to appear and I was fortunate that eventually the match was relocated to London, where I won and continued my ascent to winning the crown in 1985. It is impossible to know what might have happened to my career had the forfeit stood and I had been forced to wait another three years to challenge Karpov.
I believe strongly in the power of sport to break down barriers and to cross borders. The focus should be on sport and the athletes, first and foremost. But sport is part of culture, of life, and there was an opportunity for the athletes and visiting fans and media to have a real impact on human rights in Russia. Everyone remembers the Black Power salutes raised by American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the medal podium in Mexico City in 1968. Sochi was ripe for similar gestures, although after a few minor incidents (for example, rainbow-painted fingernails) the teams received stern warnings.
The Sochi boycott that I demanded was a boycott by world leaders, by celebrities and sponsors, by CEOs and fans. It was a revolting spectacle for any head of state to come to Sochi and to sit next to Putin in his stately pleasure dome, pretending it was a world apart from the police state he created. As Stephen Fry’s letter pointed out, the world’s embrace of the 1936 Berlin Games gave Adolf Hitler a huge boost of confidence. It is politically incorrect to speak of today, but the entire French Olympic team raised their arms in a stiff salute as they passed by the Fuhrer during the 1936 opening ceremony. Debating as some do whether or not it was a Nazi salute or the similar Olympic salute is definitely beside the point. Hitler and the Germans were delighted by the show of deference. (Many teams, including the British and American, refused to salute.) Putin sought similar adulation and validation in Sochi.
By 1936, Hitler’s government had already spent years persecuting Germany’s Jews. The Nazis also attacked homosexuals, the handicapped, gypsies, and political opponents, a model of oppressing the most vulnerable that Putin is following by going after immigrants, gays, and the opposition. It’s a tragedy that the free world always refuses to learn from past mistakes where dictators and would-be dictators are concerned.
The autocrats, in contrast, are eager students of their predecessors. They make careful study of how to gradually remove rights without allowing rebellion, how to crush dissent and hold sham elections while keeping favorable travel and trade status in the West, and how to talk peace while waging war. The motives of dictators vary, it is true—communism, fascism, conquest, larceny—but the drive for total control never changes and their methods are painfully repetitive. In contrast, the idea that free nations have a responsibility to defend innocents from murder and oppression is repeatedly allowed to approach extinction. We only revive it when the latest crisis has already occurred.
Ukraine is the latest victim of this dynamic. Sochi was a Potemkin village and it turned out that the Sochi Games were themselves used as a smokescreen for bigger things. When the EU declined to offer improved terms to enhance Ukraine’s integration into Europe in 2013, Putin was quick to step in with his usual mix of threats and bribes, a language his flunky Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych spoke fluently. Here is one place where democracy has trouble competing with a wealthy dictatorship. Europe offers committees and vague timelines and in exchange requires transparency and painful reforms. Putin offers hard cash and all he wants is your freedom and your soul.
Unfortunately for Putin and Yanukovych, the Ukrainian people had something to say about this betrayal. When Yanukovych declared that he would suspend preparation to sign Ukraine’s EU Association Agreement, Ukrainians came in huge numbers to Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kyiv’s central Independence Square, to protest Yanukovych’s attempt to move Ukraine away from Europe and into cold Putin’s embrace. “Euromaidan” was born on November 21, 2013, with a few thousand protesters that surged into the tens and even hundreds of thousands over the next few days. The protesters quickly moved from demanding European integration to demanding Yanukovych’s resignation. Ukraine was not Russia, they were saying, and they would fight to keep it that way. Tragically, they would have to fight, and die.
In the middle of the night on November 30, Ukrainian special police forces, Berkut, attacked the Kyiv protesters and drove them from the square, injuring dozens. Amazingly, the protest not only regrouped, but was reinforced to greater numbers in response to the attacks. In the first week of December, the protesters organized and set up barricades and a camp in Maidan Nezalezhnosti. They occupied the Kyiv city council building and demanded that Yanukovych’s government resign. Yanukovych went to Sochi on December 6 for an unscheduled meeting with Putin to receive instructions. They did not sign anything to enter Ukraine into Putin’s “Soviet Union-lite” customs union trade bloc as feared, but the Ukrainian prime minister announced there would be a major agreement signed on December 17.
December 8 saw the largest protests yet, upward of half a million people in Kyiv according to most media reports. Negotiations by the Yanukovych government went on with visiting EU groups, former Ukrainian presidents, and popular leaders like Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxing champion and member of parliament. (His younger brother Wladimir is the current champion. They are both enthusiastic chess players.) There were more clashes between the police and protesters on the eleventh but the protesters proved resilient despite the freezing conditions and the government was still wary of using overwhelming force with the world watching. Yanukovych met with Catherine Ashton of the EU and US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, whose support for the protests is still used by Russian propaganda to “prove” the entire Euromaidan was a coup plot run by the CIA.