Putin carried the day in Guatemala. Sochi overtook the front-runner, Pyeongchang, South Korea, and won a slim 51–47 majority in the second round of voting. “Russia has risen from its knees,” exclaimed Putin’s economic development and trade minister on hearing the news. The Russian president, The Guardian later reported, had “wowed the International Olympic Committee in Guatemala with a speech in English and French.”
Vladimir Putin kept his eye on the prize in the years of preparation that followed. “From the very beginning until this day the president controlled everything,” the long-suffering mayor of Sochi told the New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers a couple of months before the opening of the Games. “He follows the course of construction. He watches how all the state bodies, the financial organs, spend each ruble….Personally, I am always very tense and nervous when I’m invited to present a report to the president. He sets the tasks, but he never says you did a good job. He always says simply that everything has to be finished.”
There were plenty of serious public relations bumps in the new roads leading to the Sochi Games. Human rights groups around the world were calling foul on Putin’s increasingly harsh crackdowns on political dissidents and his vicious new law criminalizing the advocacy of gay rights. His treatment of the homegrown Russian protest band Pussy Riot made for a particularly attention-getting example. Members of the band, renowned for performing in brightly colored minidresses, tights, and ski masks, had been arrested, fined, and let go in early 2012, after a badass rendition in Moscow’s Red Square of their newest ditty—“Putin Zassal” (Putin Has Pissed Himself). But the Russian courts had shown less leniency after the band entered the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour of the Russian Orthodox Church later that year for the introductory performance of their original psalm begging the Virgin Mary to help them remove the evil Putin from power. The women were arrested and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”
The Kremlin suspected the protest band was actually the tool of Western governments—hello, United States, hello, dreaded secretary of state Hillary Clinton—trying to tear down Putin. “Pussy Riot’s act inside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is not the stupidity of young girls, but part of the global conspiracy against Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church,” said the nationalist Russian pol and political scientist Sergey Markov. “Putin isn’t obliged to just punish three idiots in a fatherly way, but also protect Russia from this conspiracy with all possible severity.” Putin lived up to that obligation. For the song in the cathedral, three Pussy Riot members were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. One band member’s husband released to reporters their four-year-old daughter’s most recent artwork—a vivid, Xena-like rescue scene. “For her it has been very emotional,” said the father. “She breaks down the prison walls and helps [her mother] escape.”
Putin’s old friend Paul McCartney wrote a letter protesting the imprisonment. Other musicians including Sting, Pete Townshend, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Yoko Ono were busting Putin’s balls, too. “I thank Pussy Riot for standing firmly in their belief of Freedom of Expression, and making women proud to be women,” said Ono. In the months before the opening of Putin’s Winter Olympics, the governments of Great Britain, Germany, and France let it be known they would not be sending any high-level officials to Sochi. President Barack Obama and the First Lady announced they would be sitting it out, as did Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill.
On top of all that, a group of Putin’s long-standing and most effective critics in Russia published a detailed report on Vladimir’s spectacular profligacy during the preparations for Sochi. The main author of this report, Boris Nemtsov, was a brilliant Russian physicist and mathematician and a true believer in democracy and government transparency. He had been a rising political star in post-Soviet Russia—even appeared to be Yeltsin’s heir apparent—until the economic crash in 1998 laid waste to the Kremlin hierarchy. Nemtsov watched the rise of Putin from the sidelines after that and was increasingly alarmed by the KGB-trained president’s crackdown on the free press, by the extrajudicial way Putin and Sechin manhandled Yukos and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, among others, and by Putin’s updated and upgraded Grabification 2.0. Nemtsov became one of the president’s most vocal and most popular opponents, and a relentless burr under Putin’s saddle. He co-authored a no-holds-barred study of the Kremlin’s venality and mismanagement in its running of Gazprom in 2008. And in 2012, he publicly praised the Magnitsky Act, which permitted the U.S. Congress to mete out real economic punishment on specific individuals in Russia who committed gross human rights violations. Unlike Carter Page, who decried the Magnitsky Act as latter-day McCarthyism, Nemtsov hailed it as the way to finally nick the “crooks and abusers” among Russian businessmen and officials.
But the newest report on Sochi, updated just two months before the opening of the Games, topped all of Nemtsov’s previous broadsides against Putin. It was designed to hit when and where it would most hurt. The numbers were startling. Putin’s record $12 billion Winter Games budget had ballooned to $50 billion, according to the report. This made the final price tag for Sochi the biggest ever for an Olympic Games, winter or summer. Almost ten times the cost of the immediately previous 2010 Vancouver Games. More than the cost of the previous twenty-one Winter Olympics combined. Nemtsov generously pointed out that major budgetary overruns are the rule in these projects. Vancouver’s final bill, for instance, was a little more than double the original estimate. But that was nothing like what happened in Sochi. The cost of constructing the new thirty-mile highway and rail line leading from the Black Sea into the snowy mountains had run to more than three times the cost of the recent American space program to send a rover to the planet Mars (which is thirty-four million miles away). A new natural gas pipeline, built by the same Kremlin-favored Russian company that had built the inexplicably expensive Russian side of the Nord Stream pipeline, came in at five times the average cost of a European pipeline. This was an impressive feat, given that the Russian half of Nord Stream had been completed at only triple the cost of the European half—Putin was getting even better!
Labor costs did not account for any markups. Pay was lousy and spotty on every project. Workers who complained aloud were silenced with firings or even beatings. One worker sewed his lips together in a gruesome protest against unpaid wages, to no avail. Kremlin contractors simply imported foreigners who were willing to work eighty-hour weeks and didn’t whine when their lousy, $2-an-hour wages were delayed or never paid.
Nemtsov reached a conclusion on the actual cause of the Sochi overruns. “This is a festival of corruption,” he said. And, ever the scientist and mathematician, he produced the evidence to back it up. The report ran two distinct comparative analyses—budget overruns of Winter Olympics past and the actual costs of facilities at previous Olympics—and emerged with the same basic answer: Putin’s builders had pocketed somewhere between $25 billion and $30 billion in “embezzlement and kickbacks.” A few of the suspect, old Yeltsin-sponsored oligarchs had been strong-armed into investing in Sochi (at a loss), but more than 90 percent of the money spent on the Games came right out of the Russian Federation’s government accounts. “The money stolen,” read the report, “could have paid for 3,000 high-quality roads, housing for 800,000 people or thousands of ice palaces and soccer fields all over Russia.”
State-owned Russian Railways—which mounted in its Sochi-area offices a framed portrait of the Soviet cosmonaut-hero Yuri Gagarin as a can-do morale booster—ripped off much of the $9.4 billion in Russian taxpayer money handed over to build that more-than-a-trip-to-Mars concrete and steel pathway into the mountains. Much of that money ended up in the pocket of the Russian Railways president, Vladimir Yakunin, one of Putin’s St. Petersburg–bred siloviki. The most impressive takers, though, were Putin’s old friends from his school days—the Rotenberg brothers. Arkady and Boris Rotenberg were Putin’s youth judo partners, his curr
ent judo trainers, and fixtures in Putin’s pickup hockey games. Imagine baseball-mad George W. Bush entrusting serious Department of Defense contracts to retired stars like Pete Rose and Jose Canseco. By about 2010, the Rotenbergs had amassed a billion-dollar fortune through Putin’s good offices—much of it from the proceeds looted during construction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline.
But the Sochi Olympics put the Rotenbergs on a whole new level. Putin graced the brothers with twenty-one separate construction contracts, which paid out a total of more than $7 billion in the years leading up to the Games. They built a series of new bypass roadways and thoroughfares, a thermal electrical station, pipelines for natural gas, and the media center. They also upgraded the airport and the seaport. Along the way, the Rotenbergs slurped up rubles with athletic abandon. You couldn’t call it reckless. The Rotenbergs, according to the Nemtsov report, “gained this profit while having their risk reduced to zero…because the facilities they are building will be turned over to the government.” By showtime in Sochi, according to the annual Forbes list of richest humans, Arkady Rotenberg’s net worth had tripled to $3.3 billion. “Friendship,” Arkady Rotenberg once admitted, “never hurt anyone.”
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The Nemtsov report got a lot of pickup in the Western press in the weeks leading up to the Games and offered energetic journalists plenty of new leads. According to Vanity Fair’s Brett Forrest—who had earlier chased the Illegals heartthrob Anna Chapman through a series of Moscow nightclubs—the flow of goods and cash into Sochi set off a full-on organized crime war that left a trail of dead gangsters. Oh, and Russian Railways’ boss, Yakunin, had siphoned off sufficient cash to construct a triple-château, 170-acre estate that had, among other things, an “immense” refrigerated room dedicated to the care and comfort of the family’s fur coats. Putin was the proud owner of a new compound as well, this one in the mountains outside Sochi. “It is called Lunnaya Polyana, or Moon Field, a reference to the barren landscape upon which it sits,” wrote Forrest. “It is protected by some of the 30,000 Spetsnaz special-forces troops that Russian military has dispersed into the mountains, there to live in tents until the Olympics are over. Putin has built himself two massive chalets, two helipads, a power station, and two ski lifts, servicing surrounding peaks.” Smack in the middle of what was supposed to be a protected national park, “the Russian state built a private dacha on a UNESCO site under the guise of conducting meteorological research.”
The Telegraph, out of London, reported that the few locals in Sochi who had tried to call out the corruption and the environmental damage—toxic sludge flowing into the mountain river—were “likely to find themselves de-housed, dragged through the courts, or even arrested.”
If Putin and his government were at all bothered by the international press sniggering at their alleged and well-documented corruption, they were careful not to show it. Putin did not lash out at Nemtsov. His famously combative foreign minister Sergei Lavrov gave a lengthy interview to the editor in chief of Foreign Policy, the veteran U.S. journalist Susan B. Glasser. He told her, “As for the changes in the Russian foreign policy, yes, we have more domestic strength, if you wish….And we feel the change. And Russia feels more assertive—not aggressive, but assertive….And of course we can now pay more attention to looking after our legitimate interests in the areas where we were absent for quite some time after the demise of the Soviet Union.” To Glasser, it was an echo—“clear, if chilling”—of one of Lavrov’s nineteenth-century predecessors: Russia is not sulking, she is composing herself. The Sochi Olympics would be a coming-out party for that newly assertive Russia. However snooty and dismissive the world press liked to be about Putin and whatever it was he was building in this post-Soviet gangster kleptocracy, it was time for the world to respect the reemergence of a confident Russia intent on recapturing its old Soviet superpower mojo.
Part of that confidence was Putin’s own growing sense of self. He was Russia personified, with no checks on his power or person. And in the run-up to the Sochi Olympics, Putin—and by extension Russia—appeared confident enough to ramp up the project of rapport building with its historic enemies and current antagonists. President Putin had just that previous summer bestowed the Russian Order of Friendship on his new bestie from the West, the American who was going to help him conquer the Arctic and keep afloat the one-export, one-industry Russian petro-economy: Rex Tillerson. Putin was also granting ExxonMobil a hefty (though not majority!) 49 percent stake in another brand-new partnership with Rosneft—this one to frack shale deposits in western Siberia. “This ushers in a new era of cooperation,” said Putin, just before pinning the handsome new medal on Rex’s lapel. In November 2013, Putin even gifted a traditional miniature lacquered box to an oddball American businessman who brought the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow that year. What could it hurt? This guy Trump might prove useful.
As the Sochi opening ceremonies drew near, Russia’s third-term president appeared committed to playing the good host on the world stage. In fact, he appeared near magnanimous. About six weeks before the Games kicked off, Putin’s government issued a surprise announcement. It had decided to release the sacrilegious Pussy Riot “hooligans” from prison. A few days later a newly sprung Mikhail Khodorkovsky stepped off a charter flight in Germany, a man blinking in the new light of freedom for the first time in ten years. Putin had granted the former Yukos boss’s long-standing plea for release from prison just a few days before Christmas. “He committed a very serious crime but he has served a very serious sentence for it,” the Kremlin spokesman explained of Khodorkovsky. The spokesman also asserted, somewhat laughably, that President Putin had acted “on humanitarian grounds.”
The whole magnanimous humanitarian vibe seemed to work, too. Putin appeared vaguely content with his current standing in the world when the Sochi Games opened on February 7, 2014. The big machers of the Western governments could steer clear of the Sochi Games if they so chose; this just cleared more room on the stage for Putin to shine. The 2014 Winter Olympics were every bit the triumph Russia had imagined. First off, Putin’s security forces made sure the Games were incident-free. Drones armed with surveillance cameras whirred overhead; warships patrolled the Black Sea nearby; surface-to-air missile batteries were locked and loaded; 100,000 soldiers and police officers secured a generous perimeter. The feared terrorist attacks—from Chechens or Georgians or ISIS—never materialized. And Russia turned out to be the big winner in the various pricey sports arenas its taxpayers had financed. Putin’s countrymen dominated the glamorous figure-skating competitions and took home the most medals overall, including the most golds. The doping scandals and the unceremonious medal stripping would come later, but the short-term glory was, well, glorious.
The only hitch in President Putin’s giddy-up happened in the waning days of Sochi, well off-site, in the main square of Kyiv, Ukraine. Putin’s longtime man in Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovych, was losing control. A tense three-month standoff between pro-democracy protesters and Yanukovych’s armed security forces had escalated from rock throwing and potshots into a murderous forty-eight-hour festival of violence. By the end of February 20, 2014—the day Canada’s women were beating the pants off the Swedes in the curling final in Sochi—more than a hundred people were dead in the streets near Kyiv’s Maidan Square. Hundreds more were wounded. Many of the dead had been gunned down by Yanukovych’s rooftop snipers. Parts of the city were aflame, and angry Ukrainian citizens appeared ready to breach the manned barricades surrounding Yanukovych’s presidential offices. Putin’s triumph in Sochi was suddenly drenched in Ukrainian blood. And vociferous condemnation from the West.
The Russian president remained silent at first as diplomats from Germany, France, and Poland raced to Kyiv to find some plausible way out of the unfolding disaster. When the Ukrainian president called Putin to explain the deal he was willing to make with the international envoys, it sounded to Pu
tin like full-on capitulation. Yanukovych was prepared to call for a new election and to step down from office in the interim. He was even ready to tell his security force (including the snipers) to stand down.
Putin nearly pissed himself.
He was sure this entire protest in Kyiv was instigated and fueled by the United States. This Kremlin party line seeped well down into the Russian government and even into Russophile defenders in the West. “The U.S. government, particularly [Assistant Secretary of State] Victoria Nuland, who is in close affiliation with Mrs. Clinton as well. You talk about influence on the democratic process over there,” Carter Page was still saying four years after the fact. “She’s in the streets during this big revolution, kind of encouraging the protesters, the revolutionaries. Handing out cookies. Which started this big chaos in the country to begin with.” The cookies started this chaos?
The question of U.S. involvement was front and center at the Kremlin and the Russian Federation security services: Had the Obama administration carefully orchestrated this violent convulsion in the Maidan for the express purpose of embarrassing Putin at the height of his Sochi triumph? Not gonna happen, said Vlad. Russia was done sulking. So his man in Ukraine was done sulking too. Putin told Yanukovych to stand firm. He warned him, “You will have anarchy [if you show weakness].”
Ukraine has been a colorful but tattered ribbon in the middle of a long tug-of-war between Russia and the West since sometime back around World War I. And a century into the tug, neither side has ever been willing to let go of its end of the rope. Vladimir Putin, for one, had expended a lot of time and money and energy (literally energy) to keep Ukraine within the Russian sphere of influence. He did not mean to let all that effort go to waste. “No Russian leader,” the Pussy Riot paranoid Sergey Markov once said, “wanted to go down in history as the one who lost Ukraine.”
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