SOCHI, RUSSIA – Under the façade of the glamour and extravagance of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, a plethora of controversies have emerged ever since Sochi was selected to host the Olympics. These controversies, including human rights violations, safety breaches, unfinished Olympic construction, threats of terrorist attacks, and stray dog abuse, have undermined the progressive political image the Russian government has tried to portray.
One of the major concerns circulating even before the Olympics was the Gay Propaganda Law, passed in June of 2013. The law bans what Russia’s Parliament calls, “the propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” to minors. In effect, the law makes it illegal to state that gay relationships are tantamount to heterosexual relationships, to hold events that defend homosexuality, and to advocate for gay rights. The penalties for individual Russians include fines up to 100,000 rubles, while organizations can be fined up to 1 million rubles and shut down for up to 90 days. Lastly, foreigners can be detained in Russia up to 15 days and then deported, as well as being fined up to 100,000 rubles.
Intransigent Russian officials argue that the law is to protect the children from harmful content. In addition, the law is written very broadly. It does not clearly define to what extent the laws are applied, which leaves room for unfair treatment and unreasonable arrests. Simply put, it is a total prohibition on the movement for gay rights. On January 30th, nine Amnesty International European directors delivered a petition to the offices of President Vladimir Putin. This petition called for him to revoke laws that severely limited freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of assembly.
Since 2009, the Human Rights Watch has recorded the abuses reported at the construction sites for the Olympics. Some of the issues they have documented include the forced evictions of Russian families to create room for construction. Not all of the roughly 2,000 families were given compensation that they were promised, and some people did not receive any form of compensation. Also, the construction workers in Sochi have faced delayed or unpaid wages, vicious abuse, and awful working conditions. Moreover, there has been the destruction of the environment, which not only harms the environment and wildlife, but threatens the safety of local residents. An example would be the illegal dumping of construction waste and power lines. These dumpings have caused landslides, which has resulted in homes partly collapsing.
Russia attempted rather unscuessfully to clean up its image before the games. The release of Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the releases of two members of the Pussy Riot protest band, however, failed to appease world leaders. President Obama boycotted going to the Olympics along with Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor Angela Merkel. Furthermore, the United States delegation to the Winter Olympics included openly gay athletes, such as the ice hockey player Caitlin Cahow, in response to the Gay Propaganda law passed recently. Lastly, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) took a démarche to convince the Russian government to thoroughly investigate the abuses and lack of wages Olympic construction workers have been paid.
Another issue was the patent concern of corruption. The estimated bill for the games is at $50 billion. Putin told television anchors in January that Russia spent around $7 billion to create the sporting venues and less than half of the money was from the spending of the government. Many believe that those figures are significantly understated. Aleksei A. Navalny, an anticorruption blogger and leader of the Foundation for the Fight Against Corruption, which has created a detailed report of Russia’s spending on the Olympics. The organization has posted their work on an interactive site.
When the games began, Sochi was still not finished with their accomodations for the Olympians. Only six of the nine hotels booked for journalists in the mountain area were fully operational when they arrived. CNN booked 11 rooms in the hotel designated for reporters, but when they arrived they found just one room available for use. Athletes also faced problems, as shown in the picture below:
Tweet from Stephan Whyno, Credit: Twitter
The methodical killings of stray dogs in Sochi by a government-hired pest removal company has angered and horrified animal rights activists. Most of the stray dogs were the pets or offspring of pets left by families who were evicted to make room for Olympic sites, according to local animal rights activists. Some of these families were given new apartments, which made keeping a pet difficult or impossible. There have been numerous efforts to save these stray dogs. Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska has built shelters for the strays outside of Sochi. Even Olympians have took action; some even adopted stray dogs. For example, Gus Kenworthy, an American freestyle skier, brought some of the stray dogs food and has made vaccination appointments for them. The compassionate Olympian said, “I’ve been around animals all my life. It’s hard to watch.”
When Sochi was designated the place for the 2014 Winter Olympics, President Vladimir Putin made sure security was the top priority of law enforcement since terrorist groups had explicitly threatened to carry out attacks. Moreover, the Olympics was near a war zone, where increasingly radicalized militants battle against Russian authorities in bloody, fierce combats.
The 2014 Sochi Olympics served as a chance for Putin to secure Russia’s political legacy, as well as his own. The Sochi Olympics had become, as Steven Lee Meyers said in his New York Times article, “an unaffordable personal vanity project, intended to cement Mr. Putin’s legacy as the driving force of the country’s restoration after the collapse of the Soviet Union more than two decades ago.”
Earlier last month, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website said, “The Russian Federation, as the organiser and facilitator of these Winter Olympics, insistently appeals to all parties involved in armed conflicts, irrespective of country and continent, to announce the Olympic Truce for this period. The primary addressees of our appeal are the parties involved in the bloody conflict in Syria which seriously destabilises not only the situation in this country, but in the entire region.” The Russian Foreign Ministry added that the Olympic Truce would “fully comply with UN General Assembly resolution 68/9, “Building a Peaceful, Better World through Sport and the Olympic Ideal,” adopted at Russia’s initiative on the 6 November 2013, which contains a call for all member states to observe the Olympic Truce, both individually and collectively, as part of the UN Charter.”
The question is, how will these controversies affect Russia’s political legacy in the near and long term future? As the Russian saying goes, “As you cooked the porridge, so must you eat it.”