Sochi Winter Olympics kick off as the Games of Hate

(Business New Europe – Moscow blog – bne.eu – Ben Aris – February 7, 2014)

The Sochi Winter Olympics kick off today February 7, but they have already turned from being a trial of human endeavour into a celebration of the hatemongering that pervades the coverage of Russia.

Radio Liberty has published a useful page on its website that simply displays the covers of several of the world’s leading magazines that all are featuring some version of the theme.

bne has already rubbished The Economist’s rant against Russia ahead of the Games as being fundamentally flawed and biased, but the view that Russia is ‘evil’ in the way that Hitler’s Germany was evil, is becoming wide spread.

The newly re-launched Newsweek print issue went with what is probably the most blatant cover ‘Hate on ice’ playing on one of the most divisive memes surround the games: homosexuality. Google got into the game too, replacing its usual banner with a rainbow flag-coloured banner that depicts various sport disciplines.

I won’t go into the whole debate over Russia’s ‘gay propaganda’ law other than to say it is clearly wrong-headed. However, these games have become politicised to the point where once again emotions have overtaken rationality and the only game being played in Sochi at the moment is to hunt out any flaw you can find.

There is a lot wrong with Russia, but the criticism is going too far and the reporting is in itself becoming a cause of the problems, rather than an observer of it. Commentators closer to the story keep making the point that Uganda has just imposed the death penalty for being gay and you can now get up to 14 years in jail just for hanging out with gay people there. Or that the human rights record of Saudi Arabia, that staunch US ally, is far worse than Russia’s. (Try and image what would have happened to punk group Pussy Riot if they had performed the same song in front of the Black Stone in Mecca instead of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow.)

Much fun was has with the now-famous ‘double toilets’ in the hotel for the biathlon competitors (now removed). The criticism have ranged from the The Times leader on Sochi as the Torremolinos of Russia (which is probably a fairly fair assessment) to a Daily Mail story this morning that has an (unsubstantiated) claim that the taps in some hotels produce raw sewage when turned on. In short the hash tag #SochiProblems now has more followers than the official #Sochi2014 hash tag on Twitter.

And many of these stories are valid. I holidayed in Spain in the 70s and you can find many things that are reminiscent of the start of Spain’s long process of catch up with the rest of Europe, epitomised by the awful hotels in Torremolinos then for the same reasons.

But nothing epitomises the one sided reporting as the widely quoted figure of the $51bn that was spent on getting Sochi ready. The games have been in effect dubbed ‘the most corrupt ever’ and the assumption is virtually all this money was stolen as the implication is all this money was spent on games-related things.

And that is demonstrably false. The point with these games is the Kremlin has used them to develop the infrastructure of the entire region so that it will be a more pleasant and prosperous place after the games have finished. Indeed, the entire country needs this sort of investment — which is part of the reason Russia made such an effort to win the bid to host the Fifa 2018 World Cup where 11 more regions will get the same treatment as Sochi, also at huge expense.

The Kremlin’s spokesman came out again with a statement that spending on Games-related infrastructure (such as new stadiums which didn’t exist before) was on the order of $5bn-$7bn.

This number is backed up by Lilit Gevorgyan of IHS Global Insight, one of the best observers of the Russian scene in a comment released on February 6.

‘According to various reports, up to $44bn has been invested in non-sports related infrastructure,’ says Gevorgyan, going on to argue that the issue at Sochi is not the corruption but the security issues.

However, in justifying the corruption at most reports cite vague “security experts” who claim that a third of the money was stolen ($16bn), ‘but Russia’s political opposition say the figure is much higher,’ — and leave it at that.

Corruption is a huge problem for Russia. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin in his state of the nation speech said for the first time that Russia’s current economic woes are due to ‘internal’ causes, not external. And in 2008 Russia launched its first serious anti-corruption drive that is gathering pace and lead to the sacking of a sitting minister, not to mention the thousands of other cases that have lead to sackings and jail time for state officials. Yet none of this is mention in the vast majority of the articles that intimate most of the $50bn spent on Sochi was stolen.

Spain struggled with its infrastructure and corruption in the 1970s, but most of those problems were overcome. However, Spain’s current economic problems show that the process is a long one and is not over yet. The same can be said of the newer members of the EU such as Romania and Bulgaria, which aren’t even through this first phase of transformation. And Russia is even further behind having wasted the boom years of the naughties. What is needed is a bit more objectivity and context when covering this process, rather than willfully inciting hate and focusing only on the toilets as that can only increase the misunderstanding between east and west and make things worse.

But don’t give up hope. The Economist’s may have been a bridge too far as the New Republic’s Julia Ioffe, a former Moscow resident and one of the few Russians actually working for the leading US media came out with a piece on the Sochi cover this week subtitled ‘Russians Think We’re Engaging in Olympic Schadenfreude. They’re Right’ that is a rare crack in the dam. So there is hope yet. Perhaps better to focus on the fact that today the hotels in Torremolinos are pretty much like those everywhere else.