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Last week, on December 29th and 30th, two suicide bombings in Volgograd, a Southern Russian city formerly known as Stalingrad, killed at least thirty-four people and sent at least fifty others to the hospital. The town of Volgograd is located 400 miles from Sochi, where next month’s Winter Olympics will be held. Although no group has taken responsibility for the attacks as of the time of this brief, Russian security forces and international experts believe that the suicide attacks are listen to terrorist groups in the North Caucasus region of Russia, whose Muslim population has long sought self-government. Considering that Doku Umarov, a Chechen terrorist leader, proclaimed in July that he wanted to disrupt the Olympics, there are concerns in the international community that the Sochi Olympics would become a 2014 version of the 1972 Munich Games, which were marred by the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. Russian President Vladimir Putin is also facing international condemnation for his nation’s policies regarding homosexuals and the gradual erosion of democratic safeguards that were put in place after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Due to these issues, it would not be surprising to encounter questions at tournaments over the next six weeks about the Sochi Olympics and whether Russia is capable of protecting the athletes and tourists attending the event and how it should respond to international criticisms of its domestic policies.
This topic brief will discuss three of the most prominent concerns and controversies of the Sochi Olympics so that extempers will be better prepared to talk about these issues. It will cover the security situation in Russia, the gay rights debate surrounding the Olympics, and Putin’s questionable human rights record.
Readers are also encouraged to use the links below and in the related R&D to bolster their files about this topic.
Securing the Olympics
Russia was awarded the 2014 Winter Olympics in July 2007, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) gave it the Games over South Korea, who wanted to host it at Pyeongchang, and Austria, who wished to host the Games at Salzburg. The decision vote was very chose, as Russia finished two ballots behind South Korea in the first round, but won the second round by a razor thin 51-47 margin. In preparing for the Games, Russia has spent $51 billion, which Business Week on January 2nd notes is the largest amount of money spent on an Olympics in history. In comparison, the Beijing Olympics cost $40 billion in 2008, but they hosted the Summer Olympics. Summer Olympics tend to cost more than Winter Olympics because there are more athletes to house, more events to hold, and more venues required. The high cost of the Games is due to having to construct almost everything needed from the Games from scratch since Sochi’s physical geography necessitated placing the Games in low lying valleys that were devoid of much of the needed infrastructure.
The winning of the Olympic Games was a major propaganda victory for Russia and Vladimir Putin has hoped to use the Olympics to illustrate that he is in control of his country. Putin hopes that the Games will showcase the stability of the Caucasus region and extempers should take note that the volatile region of Chechnya is located a mere 200 miles from where the Games are going to be held. The North Caucasus region, as The Los Angeles Times of December 30th points out, has been the site of centuries of ethnic and religious conflict. The region is populated by peoples like the Chechens, Ingush, and Ossetians who lack their own nations and the region is also populated by Muslim peoples who prior Russian regimes subjugated. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger makes clear in his book Diplomacy that Russia has traditionally been a land power and its expansion has been motivated by a desire to acquire sufficient buffer regions to protect its interests from other powers. During the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, Russia was locked in a geopolitical struggle with the Ottoman Empire, the world’s largest and most prestigious Muslim power, and many of their conflicts centered on the Caucasus region. The UK Telegraph of December 26th provides a very insightful and useful overview of the Caucasus region and the conflicts between its peoples and Russia and extempers are urged to cut this article for their files.
For the last twenty years the peoples of the North Caucasus region have waged an armed struggle against Russian authorities for their independence, although some groups want autonomy. One of the areas of the region that receives the most attention is Chechnya. In 1993, Chechen groups that sought independence engaged in an armed struggle with the Russian army and had their capital Grozny laid to waste. However, The UK Telegraph article previously cited notes that Russian forces had to retreat in 1996. The Russians returned in 1999 and that produced a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and other major Russian cities. The Economist points out January 4th that the struggle against Chechen terrorists was a top priority of Vladimir Putin when he became Russian president on January 1, 2000 and he began his presidency by flying in a helicopter over Chechnya. By working with local authorities, notably Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin has managed to subdue much of the violence in Chechnya, but there have been notable terrorist attacks over the last decade, which include the horrific Beslan school massacre of 2004 where Chechen terrorists seized control of a school and killed 334 students and parents after Russian security forces botched the rescue attempt. Today, international experts are concerned that the terrorist groups operating in the North Caucasus are not concerned so much with local autonomy and self-rule as much as constructing a caliphate in the region that is devoid of ethnic Russians and non-Muslims. The leader of Chechnya’s terrorist forces, Doku Umarov, considers himself the emir of the North Caucasus and experts argue in The Economist article previously cited that moderate Islamists in the region are being isolated by Russian authorities who wish to eliminate all Islamist sentiment through force. It also does not help that Russian authorities have failed miserably at providing social services to the peoples of the North Caucasus, who are technically part of the Russian state, but receive very few of its benefits. The lack of economic development and education in the region has created an ideal situation that allows radical and armed separatist groups to recruit and act with relative impunity.
Extempers should also keep in mind that Muslim terrorists in the Caucasus view the Winter Olympics as a cultural affront. In condemning the Games and pledging to disrupt them in July, Umarov said that the Sochi Olympics were “satanic dances on the bones of our ancestors.” USA Today on December 30th writes that Sochi was conquered by Russian forces in the nineteenth century and Muslims in the Caucasus view it as part of their territory that was stolen by the Russian government. Some of the sites of the Games are also allegedly burial grounds for Muslims that died fighting Russian forces in nineteenth century battles, so those who oppose Russian interests in the region feel that Putin put the Games in Sochi as an affront to them.
Any questions about the security of the Sochi Olympics will likely ask you to discuss what Russia has done to secure the Games thus far and if those measures go far enough. While it is true that the Sochi Olympics are being held just 200 miles from Chechnya and that terrorists have successfully bombed targets in Volgograd, which is 400 miles from Sochi, the city itself is on virtual lockdown in the run-up to the Games. The Week on December 30th reports that starting January 7th only officially registered vehicles will be allowed to go into Sochi and the only people allowed to come into the area will be those who possess special passes. Russian security forces have also spent the last several months making sure neighborhoods are secure and Russia has a naval fleet in the Black Sea near Sochi to monitor what is taking place. Checkpoints have also been established on roads and railroads leading into Sochi and in the cities around it, which have created a very secure perimeter surrounding the area. Russia has also poured thousands of police and military forces into the region to provide adequate security. In fact, the recent bombings at Volgograd might be the closest that terrorists can get to the Sochi Olympics. What has to make Putin uneasy, though, is that no anti-terrorist measures are fail safe and even if terrorists do not attack Sochi, they could attack other cities like Moscow during the Olympics, which would likely receive as much media attention as the terrorists attacking some of the sites in Sochi.
Time on December 30th writes that after the Volgograd bombings the United States has offered to provide more assistance to the Russians to the secure the Games and it also issued a condemnation of the attacks. American officials are allegedly as nervous about the Sochi Olympics as they were about the Athens Summer Olympics in 2004, where there were concerns that some local Greek terrorist groups, as well as al-Qaeda groups, might use the Games to attack supporters of the ongoing war in Iraq. The security climate of the Athens Games was arguably higher than Sochi because the Madrid train bombings had happened less than six months prior to the Olympics and illustrated that terrorists could strike targets on European soil. The Olympics have had some security nightmares before, like the 1972 Munich Games and the 1996 Atlanta Games, where Eric Rudolph detonated a bomb that killed two and injured 111 others. The United States is worried about the safety of its athletes, but it has cooperated with the Russians closely to ensure the safety of the American delegation. Nevertheless, there are strained ties between Russian and American security forces, some of which date back to the Cold War. Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told the Council on Foreign Relations on December 31st that even after the Boston Marathon bombings showed the need for American and Russian intelligence forces to work closely together on anti-terrorism efforts both sides are still loathe to share information with each other. For extempers unaware about that situation, it was discovered after the Boston bombings that Russian security forces alerted their American counterparts to investigate Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who they found had spent six months in Dagestan in the North Caucasus. American authorities did sufficiently follow up on this lead and if they had the Boston bombings might have been averted. Russian authorities think the United States is to blame for some of the violence in the North Caucasus area and some American intelligence officials think Russian intelligence services are on the same level as al-Qaeda operatives, so closer cooperation between the two sides in the run-up to the Games may not quite take place. President Putin would probably publicly avoid stating the need for American assistance, even if he wanted it privately, because that would make it seem as if he could not handle the security of the Olympics.
USA Today on December 31st points out that IOC President Thomas Bach has expressed confidence in Russia’s ability to deliver “a safe and secure Games in Sochi,” but there are definite questions about whether terrorist groups will try to score a propaganda victory at the Games. Extempers can probably rest assured that there will not be a terrorist attack within Sochi, but they should not discount the possibility of an attack elsewhere, since security forces will be moved to Sochi and that will leave other areas of Russia more vulnerable.
The Gay Rights Fight with Russia
Russia created an international political firestorm in June of this year when it passed a law that forbid “gay propaganda” toward minors. Gay rights activists around the globe condemned the Russian policy as a violation of human rights and gay rights groups called for an Olympic boycott of Russia. The United States boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow due to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, so there was a precedent for taking this step, but President Obama ruled it out. Russia has been the site of several anti-gay attacks in recent years, as neo-Nazi and nationalist groups have taken the “gay propaganda” law and a Russian decision to bar gay foreign couples from adopting Russian children as a state endorsement of their actions. The Globe and Mail explained on December 20th that Russian sitcom actor and Orthodox priest Ivan Okhlobystin recently called for Russian gays to be rounded up and incinerated in ovens and the Russian government failed to condemn the remarks. The Dallas Morning News on December 22nd writes that violence in Russia against the LGBT community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) has increased to such a degree that American visitors to Russia should be very careful about their behavior. There have been concerns about how gay athletes and gay tourists may be treated at the Olympics and where Russian laws will apply to them. Conservative Russian authorities want the laws strictly enforced, but Putin is likely aware of the negative fallout that would result from the arrest of prominent gay athletes at the Olympics. The Guardian on December 17th explains that Russia has agreed to establish public protest zones in Sochi during the Olympics where those who oppose its legislation towards homosexuals will be allowed to make their voices head. Still, the IOC has told athletes that the Olympics are not meant to be politicized and that they will not tolerate making the Games a beacon of political, religious, or racial propaganda.
Putin’s endorsement of laws against homosexuality reflect his close alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, which has very conservative views and supported Putin’s presidency. Some international commentators speculate that Russia is becoming more fascist in character, as the central government takes more authority from Russia’s regions and Putin creates a cult of personality around his rule. Extempers love to crack jokes about Putin taking pictures in the wilderness with his shirt off or riding horses, but these are meant to communicate a message of masculinity to Russian voters. Extempers should be aware that when Putin took power for the first time in January 1, 2000 that Russia was not in a good place domestically or internationally. As indicated in the previous section, Chechnya was pushing for independence and the Russian economy was suffering the ill-effects of an economic crisis that saw the collapse of the Russian rubble. Russians saw political dysfunction and economic devastation in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, which has caused many of them to yearn for the days of the old Soviet Union and made them sympathetic to Putin’s claim that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the worst events that took place in the modern world. Putin has made it a key element of his presidency to rebuild Russia’s international power and image and this has been framed in a conservative, authoritarian political ideology.
Although President Obama opted not to boycott the Sochi Olympics over the gay rights issue, he did announce several weeks ago that the official American delegation to the Sochi Olympics will be composed of several gay athletes. These include tennis star and thirty-nine-time grand slam winner Billie Jean King, hockey medalist Caitlin Cahow, and former Olympic figure skating champion Brian Boitano. The move was warmly received by America’s LGBT community, which the Pew Research Center on December 26th explains gives President Obama higher approval ratings than the rest of the public. For example, in the 2012 presidential election, President Obama won 76% of the LGBT vote compared with Mitt Romney’s 22%. Furthermore, the Sochi Olympics will not feature a prominent American political official. Politico on December 18th writes that President Obama, his wife Michelle, Vice-President Joe Biden, and all of his cabinet officials will not be attending the Sochi Olympics, which is the first time since 2000 that this will occur. The highest ranking American that is attending the games will be the Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns and the American delegation will be led by Janet Napolitano, the former homeland security secretary that is currently in charge of California’s public university system. While the Obama administration argues that it is not attending the Games because of a scheduling conflict, pundits have noted that his decision not to attend is likely grounded in opposition to Russia’s policies regarding homosexuals and other human rights. President Obama is not the only global leader not attending the Games as Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and French President Francois Hollande are also not attending the event. Politico also argues that President Obama’s policy is a political stroke of genius because it gives him credibility with left-wing forces that oppose Russia’s anti-gay policies and right-wing forces that have traditionally perceived Russia as a foreign policy opponent.
However, there are some gay activists that argue that President Obama’s steps do not go far enough. The Guardian on December 18th argues that the global leaders who are not attending the Games are not being vocal enough regarding their opposition to Russia’s policies toward homosexuals. It notes that only Viviane Reding, the European Union Commissioner for Justice, Citizenship, and Fundamental Rights has said that she is not attending the Games because of Russia’s anti-gay legislation and that the silence of global leaders illustrates that they are merely paying lip service to LGBT concerns.
By this point it is highly unlikely that any surprising news will come out of Russia regarding gay rights that will cause Western nations to decide to avoid attending the Olympic Games. However, extempers should monitor how protesters and athletes that support gay rights are treated at the Games because if they are not treated fairly or well that could create a political embarrassment for President Putin in the international press. It will also be interesting to see if any gay athletes win their events and turn the Sochi Olympics into the twenty-first century equivalent of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where Jesse Owens won four gold medals and illustrated the weakness of Nazi views regarding racial superiority.
Poor Human Rights in Russia
Aside from the gay rights debate, there are other human rights concerns that could overwhelm any positive coverage of the Sochi Olympics. Under Putin’s presidencies, Russia has become increasingly anti-democratic and opposition activists have been beaten, arrested, and jailed. Freedom of the press has been curtailed as Putin and his allies have harassed opposition newspapers and television networks and the Russian government has targeted businesses that oppose the Kremlin’s political agenda. The elections that Russia has held, like its parliamentary elections in December 2011, were marred by fraud. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are also not required under Russian law to register as “foreign agents.” Putin’s victory in the March 2012 presidential elections was endorsed by the Russian people, who have tended to favor his conservative, authoritarian, and nationalist message and who typically see Russian liberals as snobby and out of touch, but there are concerns that he has used his popularity to cement his rule at the expense of making Russia a true democratic state.
Putin made headlines several weeks ago by supporting an amnesty law, which the Russian Duma approved of. The amnesty released thousands of prisoners, including some of the most prominent critics of Putin’s regime. The Guardian on December 18th notes that these included thirty Greenpeace activists that were arrested for boarding a Russian oil rig and charged with hooliganism. It also included two members of the punk band Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, which The Christian Science Monitor on December 27th reports sang a forty second song calling for the Virgin Mary to “drive Putin out” at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former Russian oil tycoon who was jailed on trumped up tax evasion charges in 2003, was also released as was Maria Baronova, who was on trial for her role in launching a large rally against Putin’s regime in 2012. CNN reports on January 2nd that Putin’s amnesty fits in nicely with Russian tradition, as old tsarist regimes and Soviet leaders issued amnesties on the eve of major anniversaries. The justification gives for the recent amnesty wave was that Russia was getting ready to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of its 1993 constitution, but it is very likely that other political considerations were at work.
One of those considerations was that the amnesty announcement took place days after the United States announced that it would not be sending high profile political players to the Sochi Olympics. The amnesties allowed Putin to regain ground in the international press and portray himself as a sympathetic leader. As the CNN article previously cited notes, the United States passed the Magnitsky Act last year that imposed financial and travel sanctions on Russian officials that were accused of human rights abuses and some wanted to expand the act to more prominent Russian officials after Russia’s “gay propaganda” law was passed in June. Putin realizes that not having prominent global leaders attend his Olympics is a slap in the face and even though he cannot convince them to change their minds, he can try to shape how his regime is perceived in the press, so the amnesties help to accomplish part of that goal. It is also possible that Putin may have been moved to grant the amnesties after seeing Nelson Mandela’s funeral. This theory, discussed in The Diplomat on December 28th, explains that Russia has an image problem that in need of fixing since its human rights record is not on the same level as its European counterparts and it is possible that Putin is becoming more sensitive to his historical legacy and does not want to appear as an unsympathetic, authoritarian leader.
Another consideration for Putin is that the release of several of these figures does not immediately threaten his political position. Der Spiegel explains on December 23rd that Khodorkovsky, while championed by elements of the Russian opposition as a potential leader, does not have the political skills to threaten Putin. First, Khodorkovsky is of Jewish ancestry and a large majority of the Russian people still harbor nationalist feelings that center on the interests of ethnic Russians over other groups. And second, Khodorkovsky made his wealth during the 1990s when state-owned assets were privatized. These privatization auctions were very corrupt and state assets were literally sold for pennies on the dollar to get them into private hands. The Russian people largely consider people like Khodorkovsky as thieves and people who did not generate their wealth in the right way. They also associate Khodorkovksky and his fellow “oligarchs” with the economic problems Russia experienced in the late 1990s, which is another strike against his political ambitions. There are also questions over whether the members of Pussy Riot are really going to be a political force to oppose Putin because they are seen as unsophisticated and uneducated in the nuances of Russian politics.
By issuing an amnesty, Putin gets several of his opponents out of prison and robs his opponents of part of their message on the eve of the Olympics. The Christian Science Monitor speculates on December 20th that Putin may be ready to issue a reform package as well, since Russian amnesties have traditionally been used as a prelude to reformist policies. For example, Nikita Khrushchev released many of the prisoners in Joseph Stalin’s gulags after assuming power and Mikhail Gorbachev released prisoners before enacting his perestroika and glasnost reforms. However, Putin’s track record is one of a conservative, authoritarian leader and not a liberal reformer. He is a leader that is more in the image of a Leonid Brezhnev than a Khrushchev or Gorbachev and that does not bode well for Russian reformists.
When extempers address the human rights of Putin’s Russia they need to make sure that they explain the motivations of Putin’s actions to their audience. Putin values his relationship with established Russian institutions like the Orthodox Church, who condemned Pussy Riot’s anti-Putin protest, and he values his ties to Russian nationalists. Putin would like to rebuild a strong Russian state, but to do so he has little toleration for opposition groups that he think poison national unity and he also has little tolerance for ethnic separatist that want to further breakup the mammoth Russian state. It is easy for those of us in a Western country to value freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and democratic safeguards, but Russia has a more tumultuous history than the United States and these are still relatively foreign concepts for it. When these ideas were introduced after the fall of the Soviet Union they were arguably enacted far too quickly and Russians developed an aversion to some of them because of the problems the post-Soviet era Russian state experienced.
The Sochi Olympics will be a time for Putin to show the world that he has rebuilt Russia into a strong world power that is worthy of holding one of the most prestigious sports events in the world. However, if Russian authorities fail to secure the Games, fail to deter terrorist attacks elsewhere in the country during the Games, and abuse the rights of political opponents and foreign visitors it could embarrass itself and ruin Putin’s dream of making the Olympics a core piece of his historical legacy.