This was to be the time Vladimir Putin reintroduced Russia to the world: A confident, economically booming power whose influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East is coming back; whose ability to block and counter the United States is re-established; and which offers, through Putin, a new model of conservatism for those disenchanted with the liberal West.
Yet that is not how it is turning out. The Sochi Olympics more likely are becoming a forum for the demonstration of how and why Putin’s rule of Russia has failed — and how his power is ebbing both abroad and at home.
Start with the scene in Sochi. Putin recently said that he “would like the participants, fans, journalists and all those who watch the Games on television to see a new Russia, see its face and possibilities.” Here’s the storylines the games so far have created: the Stalinist excess of a record $50 billion spent, of which most may have been stolen; the hate speech directed by Putin at the gay community and the protests that has engendered; and, most ominously, the “black widows” and other terrorists who may stalk the games.
The civilized world will pray that the terrorists don’t succeed. But they may also have cause to reflect on how, exactly, Russia came to have some of the world’s most virulent homegrown Islamic jihadists. The simple answer is that Putin launched his career in 1999 by invading the then-autonomous Caucasian republic of Chechnya. He crushed its secular and democratically elected government, destroyed its capital with indiscriminate artillery fire, and then claimed that anyone who resisted was a terrorist whom he would “rub out in the outhouse.” His propaganda proved self-fulfilling, and the extremists he created have endured.
