Ústav mezinárodních vztahů

"Moscow has dodged a bullet with the International Olympic Committee’s decision not to impose a blanket ban on its athletes, but there is no doubt that the ongoing doping scandal has embarrassed the government – and offered some interesting insights into the state of the country under Vladimir Putin," writes Mark Galeotti in his article "What the Olympic doping scandal says about the decline of Putin's Russia" for The Guardian.

In Russia, sport and politics are inextricably mixed – from the use of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics as an exercise in soft power to the cultivation of non-western nations through the 2013 World Student Games in Kazan.

Now doping has come to be seen as a metaphor for the way Putin’s Russia operates; a place where the end justifies the means and winning is the only acceptable outcome.

But a closer look at the narrative behind the doping scandal and the national response to it – a narrative that also informs both foreign and domestic policy – suggests another metaphor; one that describes a country suffering under complacency and heading for stagnation.

1. The winner takes it all

Everyone likes to win and success in sport is a source of national pride at least, a powerful political instrument at best. For the Soviets, sport was a useful way of sublimating cold war rivalries and demonstrating the superiority of the Soviet system to a decadent and declining west.

For Putin’s Russia, however, the audience is primarily domestic. It may sound like a pedantic distinction, but it’s important to see that the point is not so much to beat the west as to win.

Just as Putin’s own political persona is built as much on his shirtless macho adventures as his acts of leadership and governance, so too today’s Russian state legitimises itself through success. The flip side, of course, is that it is hurt by failure.

The breast-beating outrage at the poor performance of the national football team in the 2016 European Championship very quickly became used as a wider metaphor for the state of the nation. The Communist party declared that the team was as soft as the ruling United Russia party, saying a “Stalinist mobilisation” was needed for future success.

And this is not just about sport. Under Putin there has been a resurgence in the traditional drive to prove that Russians did everything, discovered everything and knew everything earlier and better than anyone else.

There have been widespread claims of achievements from the suggestion that Russian Alexander Popov invented the radio before Guglielmo Marconi (he and others did indeed experiment, but Marconi built on prior research to create something reliably working), to the surreal fantasy that Russians founded Rome.

Beyond the potential damage to the regime when even trivial contests are lost, this points to another factor that fuels Russia’s confrontational stance in foreign affairs. If you believe not only that the world is against you but also that every contest has only winners and losers – no flabby, liberal, collaborative games here – then inevitably you seek to win, or at the very least ensure everyone else loses.

Part of the difficulty in finding common ground with Russia, whether over Syria or dealing with climate change, is precisely this mania for “winning” and the assumption that anything that is good for someone else is bad for Russia.

2. Rules are made to be broken

...Read more in the article published on 27 July by The Guardian.

Dr Mark Galeotti is an internationally recognized expert on transnational organized crime, security issues and modern Russia and he is joining our team as of September 2016.