Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Samoilova’s situation is similar to the Paralympic one in that the state draws vulnerable groups into its special propaganda operation, hiding behind their weakness like a living shield. In its clearest and most distilled way, this policy was evident in the passing of the Dima Yakovlev Law in December 2012: the state took as hostage orphaned children with disabilities, the most vulnerable group, completely lacking in rights, who were critically dependent on foreign adopters (as is well known, it is very rare for sick children to be taken into Russian families), and used them as a bargaining chip so as to ‘punish’ the West for the ‘Magnitsky List’. [16] The Magnitsky List includes officials shown to have profited from corruption or been guilty of human rights abuses, and prevents them from travelling to countries where this is enforced. It is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer for the Anglo-American businessman Bill Browder, who, after uncovering a multimillion-dollar fraud by senior Russian officials, was arrested on false charges and then murdered while in prison. Browder has made it his mission to try to have a Magnitsky Law adopted in as many countries as possible, thus preventing corrupt officials from travelling abroad to take advantage of their ill-gotten gains. In reality, what we are talking about here is the state’s right over the body of the individual, where even their disability is taken away from them and becomes a state resource. This is a specific type of biopolitics: the nationalization and politicization of disability, the creation of a medical exclusion space, which allows for no external criticism (‘they are insulting the weakest!’) and can be used to cover any special operations by the state, from the doping programme to the hybrid war against Ukraine and the West.

Yulia Samoilova is far from being the first contestant with particular features to take part in the Eurovision Song Contest. We had the Polish singer, Monika Kuszyńska, who is partially paralysed following a car crash; there was the blind Georgian woman, Diana Gurtskaya; a pregnant woman; the bearded Conchita Wurst; and the Russian grandmothers’ chorus: this competition long ago turned into a parade of variety and tolerance. It’s time we stopped paying attention to who is performing in front of us: a man or a woman; bearded or not; straight or gay; a cute-looking actress or a youthful old man; someone with one leg or two; standing up or sitting in a wheelchair. The only thing that matters is that he or she should perform best of all. But our lens is so configured that we pay special attention to, stigmatize and politicize these particularities, while Eurovision is a special kind of magnifying glass and a false mirror, a safari park of archaic and wounded national pride. Here the show is ruled by complicated coalitions and mutual back-scratching. Old historical scores and childish grudges are settled; national pride preens itself and defeat is taken very badly. No one could have guessed that, out of the forty-three countries, two would find themselves at war. It would have been far more honest for Russia to have boycotted the Eurovision final in Kiev from the start, bearing in mind the events in Crimea and the Donbass. But Moscow unexpectedly made the knight’s move (or, more exactly, the wheelchair move) and short-sightedly considers that it has had a propaganda victory; while in reality it is a moral defeat.

The Samoilova problem exists on two levels: the human and the political. From a human point of view, one could only wish that she had been able to take part in the competition, something she had dreamed about for years. It’s possible that the honorarium and the publicity she would have received may have helped her to pay for her operation in Finland, which would have allowed her to be able, in the future, to breathe, sing and perform normally. Perhaps her performance would have given support to all those who struggle with their traumas and their ills, so that they didn’t have to hide them, and so they could overcome their pain, isolation and anonymity. But on the political level, one is stunned by the cynicism of the producers of the show in nominating Samoilova to take part: they solve their own propaganda tasks by using the most vulnerable and dependent bodies. In reality, they have already had their consciences amputated, just as, for the rest of us, the ability to be surprised by anything has long ago atrophied.

Taking back the Olympic medals won at Sochi from Russian sportsmen and women as a result of the doping scandal, and the subsequent unprecedented ban on the national team from taking part in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in February 2018, became the greatest failure of Russian foreign policy in recent years. Victory in Sochi had been one of the main international achievements, a personal triumph for Vladimir Putin, who stood, emperor-like, on the podium of the Fisht Olympic Stadium and reviewed the parade of the victors. It was a symbolic prize, which remained in place even after Russia tore up the modern world order in 2014 and turned into a revanchist state.

And now there are no medals, nor victory in the medal table, where Russia had come out on top. There is a certain logic to all of this. The medals from Sochi were the final legacy of that old, pre-Crimea, Russia, which proudly showed the world its history and the masterpieces of the Russian avant-garde in the impressive opening ceremony; which triumphed in the snowy arenas and not in the back streets of hybrid wars; and which was a part of the global world. Now everything has been put in its place: the medals have been taken away and the last link with the previous era has been severed. It turns out that the 2014 Olympic Games were just a sham, a cover for doping, a special operation by the Federal Security Service, the FSB, all part of the hybrid war with the West.

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.