Peter Pomerantsev
"It’s possible the US is behind
it all,” claimed the head of the Russian Duma Sports Committee as the World Anti-Doping Agency found Kremlin state
agencies guilty of concealing hundreds of Russian doping tests during the
Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014.
Vladimir Putin, the president
of Russia, called the investigation “political”. This is “part
of the policy of sanctions against Russia”, said the Soviet Sport newspaper.
“It’s some sort of sporting Nazism,” argued boxer-turned-politician Nikolai
Valuev, saying other teams could be trying to get rid of Russian competition.
Vitaly Mutko, the sports minister, called doping “not just a Russian but a
global problem”.
As the Kremlin reacts to what
the International Olympic Committee has called “a shocking and unprecedented
attack on the integrity of sport and on the Olympic Games”, it falls back on
tropes and techniques that are essential to Mr Putin’s hold on power.
The first is to convince
Russians there is no alternative to Mr Putin. The Soviet Union tried to claim
superiority over the west. Putinism, by contrast, argues that everywhere is
just as rotten as Russia. Over the past few months Russian television has been
running stories about doping problems in the US. It is the same tactic that the
Kremlin adopts when accused of propaganda or corruption: the west is as bad.
As Ivan Krastev, the Bulgarian
political scientist, has pointed out, when Mr Putin went on international TV in
2014 and insisted that there were no Russian soldiers in Crimea when anyone could see that there were, he was
provoking western leaders to blurt out “hey, you’re lying”, so he could point
back and say: “Well, you lie too!”
The second trope is
conspiracy. Conspiracy is emotionally seductive, explaining away not only the
Kremlin’s failures but also those of the public: if the whole world is a
conspiracy then it is not your fault your business failed or your wife left
you.
Simultaneously, it saps
citizens’ sense that they could ever change anything in Russia: what could one
little person possibly achieve in the face of vast conspiracies?
Daily life in Russia is full
of small humiliations inflicted by the state. On the way to work you get pulled
over by traffic cops who demand bribes for fictitious parking misdemeanours.
Then you sit in a jam while bureaucrats drive past you down the middle of the
road. But when you return home and switch on the TV, it turns out it is not the
Kremlin who has been humiliating you all day — it is the perfidious west.
The conspiratorial world view
also legitimises the Kremlin’s methods. In a crooked world, the Kremlin has no
choice but to use covert forces and disinformation to take Crimea or to feed
its athletes steroids. Here Mr Putin is subtly channelling a Russian’s daily
experiences. In the Russian system, ordinary people often have to break the
rules to survive. It is a badge of honour to find a way round the law. Mr Putin
positions himself as doing the same in relation to international law.
When the whole world is
against you it is OK to lose your temper. Many countries have football
hooligans, and usually officials are ashamed of them. But as Russian hooligans indulged in ultraviolence
during the recent European Championships in France, Igor Lebedev, the deputy
chairman of the Russian parliament, tweeted: “I don’t see anything wrong with
the fans fighting. Quite the opposite: well done lads, keep it up!”
Once violence is officially
sanctioned, the audience can finally release all its viciousness. If, during
the Putin boom years, the “contract” with Russia was the exchange of economic
prosperity for the ceding of political power to the Kremlin, the new deal is far
more emotionally manipulative.
The writer is author of
‘Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia’,
winner of the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize
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