Defending Gold and Ourselves: Terrorism and Putin’s Strained Olympic Games

A hum of activity pulls two cities together.  In one, the shuffle of feet and the rush of cars compose the soundtrack to a morning rush hour.  In the other we hear the excited bustling of a town nearing the end of long preparations for a shining, global sporting event.  From afar, the buzz that fills the air above both makes them sound the same.  But on the final Monday of 2013, an almighty roar pulls them apart again.   That morning, the Russian city of Volgograd saw the second of two transportation terror attacks in as many days.  Russia mourned a combined casualty count of thirty-four and the outside world grasped for reassurances about security during the Winter Olympics in Sochi.  It is but the latest in an ever-expanding list of reasons for pause over Putin’s Games.

Violence in Volgograd

The industrial city of Volgograd sits atop a fifty-mile stretch of the Volga River in Southwestern Russia.  It is perhaps better known to the 20^th century as Stalingrad, the site of a famed World War II Nazi resistance battle that reduced the city nearly to dust and claimed the lives of over a million people (a number roughly equal to its contemporary population).  In recent months, the city has not been spared from a resurgence of political and cultural violence.  In October of last year, a suicide explosion on a city trolleybus killed six people.  On Sunday, December, 29, another bomber targeted the city’s primary train station, followed the next morning by a suicide attack aboard a second trolleybus.

Russian authorities braced for the almost inevitable self-reveal of its engineering parties.  This unmasking came in the form of a video released this month by the North Caucasus group Vilayat Dagestan, claiming responsibility for the train and trolley attacks and making open threats about additional offenses at the upcoming Olympics.

Six hundred miles from Volgograd, Sochi hardly needed a tape to elevate alert.  Geography was not on its side.  Seated closely to the tumultuous North Caucasus region, just about everyone already smelled danger.  It was already well known that the leader of a Chechen terror group, Doku Umarov, lifted a moratorium on civilian targets throughout Russia in his bid to see harm done to the city’s mammoth gig.

Two of the women appearing in the Vilayat Dagestan footage are feared to be lying in wait for the final leg of the torch relay while another is thought to already be in Sochi.  The city is blanketed with Wanted flyers for the three sensationally named “Black Widows” and the world’s media is paying full attention.

A massive security movement was already well underway by the time the film surfaced.  A week after the bombings, Russian security forces swarmed the city as that former buzz turned to nerves.  The Russian Army and Navy descended on the city as part of a 37,000-strong force to secure the Olympic zone.  Putin’s policing effort constitutes the largest security scheme in the history of the Games.  Access to the Olympic Village will be highly restricted, with highways shut down and enforced permitting to cap the flow of acceptable traffic.

The security story for Sochi will also include digging into the past with an announcement on Monday that the Cossacks, an ancient order of soldiers largely regarded as henchman, will be called to service at the Games.  It’s an uncomfortable prospect for many locals who are all too aware of their connection to eras of extreme xenophobia.  But the Russian president is putting on quite a show, and he plans to make an equal spectacle of the measures to protect it.

So much of Russian security folklore revolves around what happens in the shadows.  And yet, this Olympiad will entail an extraordinarily visible show of defensive force.  It has to for a number of reasons.  For one, even if an equal number of invisible means of security will be at play, this will not be comforting to those who simply cannot see it and are unsteady about taking the state at its word. For another, the Games are an exceedingly photographed event and its images are beamed across the expanse of the planet.  If just one can say a thousand words, none of them had better include “lax” and “law enforcement” in close proximity.  And then there is, as it should be, the highly practical reason of putting as many trained eyes on the ground as Putin can muster for the next few weeks.

The Olympic community felt an all too familiar shudder over these developments.  A shudder not just for its own traumatic terror history in Munich and Atlanta, but also for what it means in combination with other questions surrounding Sochi — questions that have spurned calls for boycott all year over Putin’s support for Syria’s tyrannical Bashir government, the harboring of NSA fugitive Edward Snowden, and the latest round of legal marginalization aimed at Russia’s gay community.

Baying for Boycott

Boycotting the Olympics is an altogether different animal than refusing to attend any number of international political summits.  Leveraging a political position as a reason to stay away from, say, the G20 is a game between politicians.  Hold your nation’s Olympic team back from competition in the grandest arena of amateur sport and the only ones truly punished are your athletes and their audience.

One cannot divorce a country’s Olympic team from the national body it’s designed to represent – a peaceful meeting of the best athletes each has to offer.  That symbolism is more about pride than politics.  This distinction makes it difficult to execute political maneuvers without alienating your own constituency in the process.  Boycotting a governance summit may be explained away by the ideological leanings of a party in power, but that’s harder to justify here.   A great many at home may not regard these issues as reasons to forego Sochi. Dropping the hammer on Olympic competition would have risked taking on more domestic backlash than that which would be directed at Moscow.

Several western leaders are choosing to stay away from the Games even if they’ve pledged their team’s attendance.  President Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and embattled French president François Hollande all declined to show, with none offering explicit explanations for their choice.  German president Joachim Gauck has all but said that Putin’s human rights record will keep him away.

For his part, President Obama will send a delegation of acclaimed former Olympians in his place.  The group is set to include tennis legend Billie Jean King, hockey medalist Caitlin Cahow, and figure skating champion Brian Boitano – three high profile, hand-picked sports personalities who are openly homosexual who might act as kinds of athlete-diplomats.

Why are calls for boycotts important to a security and defense discussion?  Because the controversies swirling around the Games carry huge implications for athletes and visitors who might want to make political statements while performing in Sochi.  Putin has previously claimed that anyone speaking out against Russia’s “gay propaganda” laws could see the inside of a Russian jailhouse.  He has since tried to assuage these concerns, to mixed reception.  Nevertheless, fears mount that any number of our people could require high-level intervention for advocacy on behalf of any of these issues.

If I were to hazard a guess, though, I’d suspect this was presidential posturing.  In these outbursts, Putin is appealing to supporters within Russia and looking to appear firm in his positions amid enormous external pressure. This is unlikely to have teeth during the Games, though.  We are set to witness a spectacularly glossed-over version of Russian politic-ing from its own Mt. Olympus come February 7.  An occasion marred in arrests and deportations would make Moscow look worthy of the West’s negative image of the Kremlin.  By way of a faux-friendly consolation gesture, Putin backtracked on a ban on protests during the Games.  Demonstrations will be permitted, but in selected areas far from those recognized as part of the Olympics, to mimic the setup in place during the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.

Away We Go

The Games begin in little more than a week and there is simply too little time to second-guess ourselves over the Games.  We’re going to Sochi.

In truth, that statement comes with a twinge and some questions of its own – why is it so easy to declare that little stands in the way of our trip to the Olympics with so much left unanswered about what might lurk in the dark?  And at what point do safety fears for an unknown terror event trump that of the financial and political fallout for not attending?   It’s a complicated calculus.  If Russian security agencies thwart any real terror movements and the Games carry on unharmed, staying away will have made for a huge loss.  Not just in the disappointments attached to the missed opportunity at elite competition, but because in some way — perhaps the most clichéd way — the terror groups responsible will have won a partial victory by achieving a change in political behavior even without the use of death and destruction.  If the unthinkable slips through the hands of Putin’s police though, we might all be asking ourselves if it was right to ignore the warnings of Volgograd at such enormous cost.

Some of the complexity here exists in what this all means for the athletes and spectators comprising the in-between.  They are choosing to face potential danger for the hope of victory and are placing their trust in a foreign government’s capacity to protect them, but the tangibility of Volgograd’s sadness and anger makes that leap of chance much more palpable, too.

One can only hope that our ability to so plainly argue against a last minute buckle says less about what has already been invested and more about a defiant stance in the name of peaceful fun and fancy.

The world is watching Russia and Putin knows it.  He has no room for error in the accommodation of his guests next month (objectors included) or he’ll risk a historic stain to the legacy he holds so dear.  The threat from those looking to use the event as a mechanism for fear is a real one, and the next thirty days will test the state’s capacity to identify and fill its security discrepancies.  If Putin really wants to highlight his reign at the top, he’ll have to show no restraint toward terror and the softer side of the strongman to the rest of us. The winners must be crowned in gold, silver and bronze with the dungeon keys set aside and the drawbridge elevated.

Let the Games begin.