Russians by Gregory Feifer

Author:Gregory Feifer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science / Political Ideologies / Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism, Political Science / World / Russian & Former Soviet Union, Political Science / World / General, History / Europe / Russia & The Former Soviet Union
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

Since 1991, Russia has defied countless predictions and heartfelt hopes that its dominant way of doing things would change. Although travel abroad, the influx of foreigners, the freedom to read, the advent of the Internet and a new consumer culture have combined with other very powerful agents to produce some change, so far their influence hasn’t been powerful enough. Under the Soviet Union, the Communist Party’s monopoly on power enabled its leaders to embark upon, and often later abandon, grandiosely wasteful projects such as a railway through the largely unpopulated far east. Now vast income from the energy sector has replaced Soviet control and enables a less authoritarian regime to undertake similarly wasteful projects, such as funding the auto industry, for the sake of shoring up its power and glorifying itself.

Among the new initiatives was Putin’s most audacious effort to present Russia as a modern place: his successful bid to stage the 2014 Winter Olympics in the popular Black Sea resort of Sochi, where the president spends much of the summer. Tens of thousands of mostly migrant workers toiled for miserly pay to rebuild the town’s rickety Soviet-era infrastructure on a scale reminiscent of the old communist developments. The defiance of logic also approached Soviet levels, and not just because the city’s subtropical climate necessitated hoarding the previous year’s snow under thermal blankets on the surrounding Caucasus Mountains. Staging the world’s premier international sporting event within a half day’s drive of North Caucasus regions where Islamist militants carry out almost daily attacks did more to defy reason.

Sochi has become synonymous with Putin’s crony capitalism because it enabled his associates at the top of Russian industry to reap billions of mostly taxpayer funds by helping build what have turned out to be some of the world’s most expensive sporting facilities. Companies belonging to one man alone, Putin’s childhood friend and former judo sparring partner Arkady Rotenberg, earned more than seven billion dollars, more than the entire budget for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.22 Much of the work was shoddy, polluting and wasteful. The ski jump had to be rebuilt numerous times, until Putin himself fired the Russian Olympic Committee’s vice president, whose brother happened to own the responsible construction company. The final cost estimate for the seventeen-day event surpassed fifty billion dollars, almost four times the proposed amount, making it the most expensive Olympic Games in history.

Nevertheless, the corruption and lethargy that come with Putin’s system and its suppression of genuine enterprise may well continue sustaining the old way of doing things until the oil wells run dry.

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