Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

And this machine would have carried on working with regularly interspersed individual doping scandals. But then the Sochi Winter Olympics came along as the main image-making campaign of the decade for Vladimir Putin and became his pet project. After the poor showing of the Russian team at the previous Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010, only victory on home territory would be good enough. So now the FSB became involved in the sporting-medical machine, turning the Olympics into a special operation straight out of a cheap spy novel: a doping cocktail nicknamed ‘Dyushes’ [17] A popular Russian soft drink. masked by alcohol; the collection and preservation of the urine of athletes over the course of many months; drilling a hole in the wall of the anti-doping laboratory, hidden behind a cupboard; disguising FSB operatives as plumbers; opening up and switching urine samples; and carrying out other favourite spy tricks. As became clear, everything was done in a very clumsy way – it was a typical Russian cock-up (Rodchenkov’s diaries reveal only worries and cursing over the mixed-up test-tubes and samples – you couldn’t make it up!) It appears that even the FSB hasn’t managed to avoid the overall drop in professionalism and responsibility in government service which has come about as a result of the general corruption and fall in standards in the selection process.

As a result of this poorly organized and well-publicized special operation, the scandal over Russian doping became a serious political defeat, and the negative media reporting around it was on a par with the shooting-down of MH17 (although not, of course, comparable in terms of human tragedy). And this draws the boundaries of the hybrid war and special operations which in Putin’s time have taken the place in Russia of diplomacy, sport, mass media, administrative procedures and rules. In other words, the problem is much wider than doping. It is in the whole political system, where power has been usurped by the Chekists , who have plunged the state and society into a condition of permanent threat and hybrid warfare. And this is not only internally, but in foreign affairs, too, where all the normal bureaucratic procedures have been replaced by special operations. Procedures for reaching agreement, consulting experts and taking informed decisions; all the usual mechanisms of accountability, openness and audit. The siloviki have turned all these complex processes of public policy into a bad spy movie.

In reality, everything surrounding the Sochi Olympics became a special operation, from the lobbying for Sochi during the selection process in the IOC, to the construction of the facilities, thanks to which whole territories were put under a state of emergency, limiting constitutional rights for citizens, such as the right to property and freedom of movement. Another special operation was the long-planned annexation of Crimea, with its multilayered cover-ups and lies. The war in Ukraine is a special operation, too, with the separate episode of shooting down MH17. The war in Syria has been carried out in many ways according to the laws of a special operation, with disinformation about the scale and the aims of the military presence and the covering-up of Russian casualties. A huge special operation involved Russia’s meddling in elections and internal political discussions in Western countries, through an ever-expanding system of state propaganda, fake news and trolling on social media, the culmination of which was the Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections. And finally, it was the poisoning of the Russian former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, UK, in March 2018.

There are three problems with the special operations that have taken the place of Russia’s policies. First of all, they’re ineffective. The Sochi doping thriller not only saw Russia lose its Olympic medals and the right of the national team to compete in PyeongChang, but it also ruined the country’s position in world sport for many years ahead. The annexation of Crimea left Russia not only with a toxic asset on its hands and one for which it is paying with sanctions, but it cannot even get any use out of it: as well as the well-known problems with banks and the provision of electricity (see above, ‘A Sovereignty Full of Holes’, for the scandal about the turbines built by Siemens, which were taken to Crimea illegally, in contravention of sanctions), there is also the collapse of the tourist industry there and the criminalization of every level of authority on the peninsula. In the same way, the war in Eastern Ukraine has seen the final separation from Russia of a vital part of its former empire, exactly as the late Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted, and the irreversible drift of Ukraine into the bosom of Western institutions (precisely what the Kremlin tried to prevent). What’s more, Russia has been left with yet another toxic asset – the pirate republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, which are totally dependent on injections of Russian cash, military equipment and personnel, and on the economy of violence.

Finally, all the Russian special operations to support forces that are against the system in Western countries – from right-wing populist and proto-fascist parties, like the National Front in France and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (‘Alternative for Germany’), to the former hope of the Kremlin, the populist Donald Trump – have collapsed. The established parties proved to be more stable than the Kremlin thought, and Trump became a headache for the whole world, including Russia. So the Kremlin has ended up with a huge number of toxic assets on its hands: compromised Olympic medals; Crimea and the Donbass, not recognized by international law; Assad’s cannibalistic regime in Syria; radicals, separatists and quasi-fascists in Europe; accusations of staging a chemical weapons attack in Salisbury; and now even the unpredictable, poisonous Trump. These are all the fruits of special operations and hybrid wars in which Russia, as they say, has shot itself in the foot.

Here we have the second problem of the policy of special operations: they are highly toxic. Even in places where Russian interference went unnoticed and was merely symbolic, its policies and representatives are marked: the West is now looking for the Kremlin’s traces even in places where they may not exist. A very good example is Russia’s interference in the American elections. It appears that it was not so widespread as decisively to affect the outcome (some $50,000 was spent on creating fake accounts on Facebook, which is a mere drop in the ocean when you consider that around $2.5 billion was spent on the election campaign); but the mere fact of interference by an outside power in the holy of holies of American politics, the elections, so enraged the American establishment that a witch hunt has been opened the like of which has not been seen since the days of McCarthyism, and the heads of the Internet giants, from Google to Twitter, have been lining up to take part in hearings in Congress so as to demonstrate their loyalty and uncover the traces of Russian agents. And, to be honest, the influence of the Kremlin’s propaganda mouthpiece, the Russia Today (RT) television channel, was not so significant in America as to limit its activity there and, in so doing, place under threat of reprisals Western media in Russia. But the channel certainly deserves to be caught up in the storm that it has done so much to create. The toxicity of Russian influence is so great that the tiniest presence needs to be cleaned up. Any hint of even the most innocent contacts with Russians leads to scandal, and the ‘Russian infection’ could ultimately destroy Donald Trump, already weakened and embittered as he is.

All Russian sportsmen and women are also feeling this toxicity now, even those who were not named in the McLaren Report and who have nothing to do with the Sochi doping scam. Every Russian athlete is now, a priori, under suspicion; all Russian sportsmen and women are presumed to have taken drugs, and it is up to each one of them to prove their innocence. This is unfair and hurtful, but it’s the result of that same radioactive special operation, that Chekist polonium, which has infected everyone’s clothes. Russian holdings, capital, investments, businessmen, projects, real estate – all of these are now under suspicion, as the list of sanctions published by Washington in February 2018 illustrated. The world is now paranoid about Russian hackers, dopers, trolls or agents of influence. They are searching for Russians under the bed; and we will take with us this stigma, this radioactive background, wherever we go for many years hence, even after Putin is no longer in power.