Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

The mind boggles at the scale of this gigantic performance. Ever since the first Torch Relay took place – the idea of Josef Goebbels before the Berlin Olympics of 1936 – this one became the longest, the biggest and the most technologically accomplished relay ever. It lasted 123 days, covered 65,000 kilometres, involved 14,000 torch bearers and used every form of transport possible: from atomic ice-breakers and spacecraft to dog-sledges and teams of reindeer. When it travelled by railway, the Flame was transported by a Russian Railways staff train, made up of eleven carriages, including two restaurant cars, and accompanied by five hundred people. The Olympic Flame went to the North Pole, into outer space and on the International Space Station (ISS). There followed a trip to the bottom of Lake Baikal; it was taken down a coalmine and to the summit of Mount Elbrus. The Olympic Torch Relay even became a religious ceremony: in the railway carriage and on the ice-breaker, the Flame travelled in a special sacred case; and when he sent the Torch on its way from Vladivostok to Khabarovsk, the Head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin (who also happens to be a patron of the Orthodox Church, and who has experience of transporting the Blessed Easter Flame from Jerusalem to Moscow), made the sign of the cross over the Flame.

Like an animal in the forest, Russia was marking out its territory. With precise points, here we had Kaliningrad (Russia’s outpost inside the European Union); Sakhalin (a message to the Japanese: don’t even think about the Kurile Islands); the North Pole (relevant for the dispute over the territorial ownership of the Lomonosov underwater ridge, where the polar explorer, Artur Chilingarov, hoisted the titanium flag of Russia in 2007). Most important of all, though, was the parade of Russian sovereignty in the North Caucasus, where the last two weeks of the Torch Relay took place before it reached its final destination in Sochi. The true meaning of the holding of the Olympics in this troubled region was that it conclusively confirmed Russian sovereignty over the North Caucasus – the final victory of the two-hundred-year Caucasian war.

And it was no coincidence that the Olympic Torch Relay took place against the background of a discussion of the sovereignty of the Russian Federation. In the State Duma a draft law was being considered that would make the propagation of separatism a criminal offence: ‘The spreading in any form of views, ideas, or calls for action that would question the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.’ It was proposed that the punishment should be severe: for the thoughtcrime against sovereignty, a twenty-year prison term was suggested – much longer than for murder! However, in Russia crimes against the state were always punished more harshly than crimes against individuals. The Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin, even proposed renaming the Russian Far East ‘Our Own East’ in order to prevent it from moving even further away.

Oh, this childish belief in the power of the word – that if you forbid people from speaking about a problem, it will disappear all by itself! The taboo about having any conversations about the territorial make-up of Russia brings on a generic trauma in our political elite. There is a phantom pain after the collapse of the USSR – ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’, as Vladimir Putin called it – and a panic attack about the threat of further disintegration.

Where does this fear come from? Why has ‘sovereignty’ suddenly become such a painful place for the regime? There are two problems here, neither of which is caused by external (and, indeed, imaginary) threats to sovereignty, but by Russia’s own internal psychological hang-ups. The first is the deepening post-Soviet identity crisis of trying to understand what Russia is: a country for the Russians or a multinational empire? And where do its borders lie? In the Baltic States? In the North Caucasus? In Crimea? In Eastern Ukraine? In Northern Kazakhstan? It is not the separatists who want to dismember Russia, but the Russians themselves who cannot understand where the borders are; this is where the paranoia and hypersensitivity springs from whenever the issue is raised of sovereignty or of Russia’s borders.

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?

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] 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. 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?