Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

For seventy years now we have been trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, to separate politics from culture. Leni Riefenstahl was cleared by a postwar court, but still came up against a secret ban which prevented her from working in her chosen profession, and she went into photography instead. Nevertheless, at the 1948 Lausanne Film Festival, she was awarded an Olympic certificate; and in 1956 a Hollywood panel named Olympia one of the ten best films of all time. In 2001, the President of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, presented the ninety-nine-year-old Riefenstahl with a gold medal of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.

Sochi 2014 is not Berlin 1936. It is not worth comparing one of the most terrifying totalitarian regimes in history with the populist authoritarianism of modern Russia. A better comparison would probably be with Mexico in 1968 and Seoul in 1988. Mexico and South Korea in those years were each ruled by one-party dictatorships, just as, incidentally, Japan was in the decades after the Second World War, if we think back to the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 and the Winter Olympics in Sapporo in 1972. Even a comparison with the capital of what Reagan described as ‘the Evil Empire’, Moscow 1980, is a limp one; Beijing 2008 would be closer.

Nevertheless, in the Russian discussion the Sochi Olympics inevitably brings up moral dilemmas similar to 1936: we are used to thinking on a grand scale. The question stares one in the face: should someone who is in opposition to the regime wish for a successful Games and victory for the Russian team, if each triumph raises Putin’s rating? Can you join in a celebration if it is supported by billions of stolen dollars and the destruction of a region’s ecology, and every Russian medal is simply an indulgence to redeem evil?

But if we put extreme views to one side, a normal citizen, even one who is critical of the state (and, after all, isn’t that one of the usual human criteria for normality?) cannot actually not support his country and cannot actively wish for it to fail. A significant section of the reading and thinking public has developed Olympic schizophrenia: they are torn between typical Russian Schadenfreude about the incompetence of the managers, the thieving ways of the contractors and the crisis in many sports (such as in figure skating and biathlon), and pride in our sportsmen, the volunteers and the unusually amicable policemen as well as the inspirational opening ceremony. This is not about President Putin, or the Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, or the authorities; this is about Russia as a country testing itself before the whole world over the course of two weeks.

Schizophrenia is a peculiarly Russian characteristic. Power is separated from the country by the crenelated Kremlin Wall. And for centuries the educated class was not only alien to its own people but even became used to being ashamed of Russia, while at the same time surprisingly remaining Russian patriots. As the poet Alexander Pushkin said: ‘Of course, I despise my Fatherland with my whole being; but it annoys me when a foreigner shares this sentiment with me.’ [20] Alexander Pushkin, Letter to Pyotr Vyazemsky (8 June 1827). Shame and pride, love and hatred, give rise to the typical Russian split personality. Russian patriotism has been schizophrenic from the time of the Russian philosopher of the first half of the nineteenth century, Pyotr Chaadaev. He was the author of the critical ‘Philosophical Letters’, who dared to love Russia warts and all, and for his ideas was declared mad by the authorities.

The problem, clearly, lies in the binary nature of Russian thinking, noted by the late twentieth-century philologist and semiotician, Yury Lotman. In one of his later works, Culture and Explosion , Lotman talks about the typical black and white Russian view of the world: ‘He who is not with us is against us’; it’s us and them; Russia versus the outside world. A war rages between these two positions – for the Olympics, for social networks, history, faith, memory. In this battle, the state tries to claim all the significant national symbols: the Great Patriotic War and the Victory in 1945, spaceflights and sporting achievements. Any alternative point of view is dismissed as traitorous: either you accept these events with all the glory of the state or you are condemned as a slanderer: there can be no spots on the Sun. It is impossible to honour the Victory in the Second World War, but at the same time cast doubts on the role of Stalin; it is impossible to revel in the Olympics, yet at the same time to speak about theft, the destruction of homes, the forced resettlement of local residents and the destruction of homeless dogs in Sochi ahead of the Olympics. War is war.

Here we should remember Lotman’s warning that binary structures are doomed to lead to a catastrophic resolution of conflicts, to self-destruction and to a total explosion. We will collapse as a country if we do not put a stop to this spiral of hatred and polarization; it is a civil war in the making. We need to look for a way out in an acceptance of a multilayered reality. As Lotman wrote, European culture is resistant because it is ternary. It rests on the idea of overcoming binary structures, of allowing for a third position that accepts both of the others. It’s like in the joke about the wise rabbi, who says to the two men who are arguing: ‘You are right; and you are right, too.’ And when a third man asks, ‘How can that be, rabbi?’, he replies: ‘And you are right as well.’

The Olympics is a gigantic carnival where Russia appears in all its greatness and its provinciality, where fifty or sixty billion dollars are turned into a giant hecatomb, like the Great Pyramid of Giza, rebuilt in the spirit of the eternal Russian desire to prove something to the world. It is a combination of the work of world-class producers of mass spectacles and Asiatic Gastarbeiter who have no rights; wonderful architecture but poor finishing; selfless volunteers and indifferent bureaucrats; a mix of global ambitions and parochial bluff. In this schizophrenia, no doubt, there is also the essence of the Russian soul, which is capricious and paradoxical; just like holding the Winter Olympics in the subtropics.

They’re celebrating yet another victory in Russia. On the eve of the first match in the European Football Championship 2016, a couple of dozen Russian fans chased away a much larger group of English fans in the Old Port in Marseilles. The next day, immediately after the match, they started a pogrom in the stands where the English fans were, beating everyone they could get their hands on, including families and elderly people. The results were upsetting. At least thirty-five people were injured, and one fifty-year-old English fan was hit over the head with a crowbar and died. By way of punishment UEFA threatened the Russian team with expulsion from the tournament and fined the Russian Football Union 150,000 Euros, taking into account also the racist behaviour of the Russian fans during the match. The Russian fans were the first item in world news; but wasn’t that exactly what they wanted?

Perhaps this disgraceful episode did not deserve such attention: ‘The thugs’ game’, [21] The Russian term is ‘ okolofutbol ’, literally meaning ‘around football’. It suggests that the hooligan movement is based on football without really being a part of it. ‘The thugs’ game’ conveys the idea, without, perhaps, the irony of the Russian. as the movement of football thugs has become known, long ago turned into a safari park of violence and a close relative of world war; fans of all countries fight and cause trouble. This can even lead to carnage, such as the tragedy at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, when thirty-nine people died. That led to all English clubs being excluded from UEFA competitions for five years. Indeed, Marseilles remembers only too well the English fans at the World Cup in 1998, when they started a fight against Tunisian fans, which smashed up half the city. But here’s the difference: whereas in England society and politicians alike condemn such outrageous behaviour by the fans, in Russia these football hooligans are presented almost like national heroes. The correspondent of the newspaper Sovietsky Sport , Dmitry Yegorov, carried out a live transmission of the carnage on Twitter, commentating on it as if it were a football match, lauding the organization and physical fitness of the Russians. Social networks were full of praise for the Russian fans ‘slapping’ the English softies and standing up for Russia like the three hundred Spartans; one sports journalist even put out on Twitter that he was ashamed of the Russian fans who didn’t take part in the beatings.