Russia's Sore Losers

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Friday, Mar. 1, 2002
As soon as I saw the furious face of Leonid Tyagachev on TV, I knew that we had lost the game miserably once again. And I don't mean just the Olympic Games either.

Tyagachev — chairman of the Russian Olympic Committee, ski coach of the Russian First Family and a frequent tamada (table chairman) at the First Family's parties — lashed out at Igor Poroshin, the Izvestia newspaper's Olympic correspondent. Poroshin wondered whether Russia's Olympic troubles occurred through Russia's own faults and deficiencies, rather than through a sinister world conspiracy, as Moscow had suggested. "What country you belong to?" raved Tyagachev by way of an answer. "Turn over your mike to someone else! My wish is that you never show up at such briefings again!"

The Putin era officials affect European airs. Ever eager to be treated as equal, if no longer superior, they strive to prove sophistication by their looks, manner and command of languages. But, once enraged, they let the mask slip — and the so familiar mug breaks through all the polish. Welcome back to the U.S.S.R.

The real cause both of Tyagachev's fury and the ugly tantrum that the political élite were throwing in Moscow last week was none other than Putin's phone call to Tyagachev, demanding action after the Russian women ski team had been disqualified for for failing a doping control test. Once the President struck a chord, the officials launched an Olympic competition of their own to be the most inventive in toadying up to the Boss. As the Russian Olympic team at Salt Lake City increasingly had to fight to keep their medals rather than just win them, the Duma (the lower house of the Russian Parliament) lead the way in jingoist, cold-war-style histrionics not seen in Moscow since the NATO bombings of Serbia back in 1999.

Said Deputy Speaker Lyubov Sliska: "The United States seeks to prove its world superiority, now through sports. I personally feel not just irritated, but disgusted." Deputy Alexei Mitrophanov cried for the good old days, when the U.S.S.R. could have answered the mistreatment of its athletes by deploying its military might along American shores. Fumed Chairman of the Duma's Foreign Relations Committee Dmitri Rogozin: "It's time we remembered that the Russian Federation has only two allies — our Army and our Navy! We must not permit anybody to wipe their feet on us." Though Rogozin neglected to cite the source, he was paraphrasing the famous dictum of Emperor Alexander III. The Emperor, indeed, built strong and reliable armed forces. However, he never invoked the threat of using them lightly. Nor did he imagine that his heirs' best submarines would blow up from their own torpedoes, or that the air force would suffer up to six fatal crashes a month caused by obsolete matériel and negligence.

The Duma voted 421 to zero (with one abstention) to demand that Russia ignore the Games closing ceremony and that the executive branch defend the abused Russian athletes. The executive branch picked up the relay. Said Alexei Volin, Russia's cabinet spokesman: "They're set to oust Russian athletes from the world sport arena. These are wild Olympics, held in the Wild West." Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov prepared a formal protest to the IOC. Said Deputy Premier Victor Khristenko: "There is no limit to indignation. Our reaction must be tough ... we must seek reliable allies." Russian Sports Minister Pavel Rozhkov threatened that Russia could "set up games of our own. We have the experience of the Goodwill Games." The last riposte obviously referred to the Moscow Friendship Games that later grew into the Goodwill games of 1986, launched as an alternative to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, ignored by the Soviet government to avenge the Western boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, when the West rotested the U.S.S.R.'s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

Maybe it was at this point that Putin started having second thoughts about his underlings' sycophancy. As if by a movement of the magic wand, the hysteria diminished. The Russian team showed up at the closing ceremony. The Olympic Games "highlighted the whole complex of problems that had piled up in Russian sports," said Volin. Tyagachev thanked the media for drawing attention to "all the sides of the Olympic games." The Federation Council (the upper house of the Russian parliament) changed its collective mind on holding a special session to prepare its official protest to the IOC. "We appeared at the Games in the lampooned Russian Bear image," commented Poroshin in Izvestia. "The Bear has been manicured. He does not have his claws. He is capable of raving only ... but his ravings ... do not make any sense."

But the name of the game is to keep the Russians worried — either with alleged Western perfidy at the Olympics or the U.S. presence in Georgia, rather than with their bosses' failures in economics and diplomacy. This is where Russia really loses, and this is where it really hurts.