My argument here should not be construed as an effort to categorically denigrate the Russian people, Russian culture, or even Russian politics, per se. It is simply a reflection on the current political environment of Russia and why the prospect of holding an Olympic games in Russia is wholly inconsistent with the conceptual spirit of the games, as an opportunity for athletes around the world to come together and compete but ultimately exalt our global collectivity as a species sharing one world in peace, community, and good sportsmanship. Ideally, the invitation to host an Olympic games should be demonstrative not only of a nation's wealth and economic developmental status but also its culturally cosmopolitan character, openness to the rest of the world (including its closest neighbors), and the exuberance and inclusiveness of its politically democratic values. In this sense, it is a reward to governments for pursuing the sorts of policies that not only enhance national wealth but create political and cultural environments welcoming to the rest of the world. This might be an ideal that has seldom perfectly matched the reality of politics within the International Olympic Committee, but it at least presents a vision compatible with the lofty principles of Olympism (see International Olympic Committee, Olympic Charter (especially "Fundamental Principles of Olympism," 11-12), at: http://www.olympic.org/documents/olympic_charter_en.pdf). In these terms, numerous reasons, which I intend to elaborate here, make Russia an inappropriate location to host an Olympic games at the present time, especially an Olympic games in the North Caucasus region.
1. Participation in an Olympic games in Russia, in general, and in the North Caucasus region, in particular, legitimizes the brutal repression inflicted against the self-determination of diverse North Caucasian ethnic groups by the Russian central government and, additionally, promotes an intensification of repressive, police/military violence against non-Russians in the North Caucasus in the name of securing the safety of international athletes and spectators at Sochi.
The selection of Sochi as a host city for the twenty-second Olympic Winter Games constitutes a paradoxical outcome in view of the history of the Russian Federation's engagement with ethnic groups in the North Caucasus region since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Sochi, on the Black Sea in the administrative region of Krasnodar, lies in close proximity to the Russian federation-level republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. Militants from both of these republics have been engaged in separatist conflict with Russia since 1991. In my understanding, the most intense fervor of separatist sentiments in the region were first evident in Chechnya, which openly declared its independence from the Russian Federation when the Soviet Union dissolved. Dagestan, by contrast, appears to have remained a silent bystander to the Chechen conflict until 1999, when Islamic militants of Dagestani origin began returning home to organize resistance to Russian rule in rural areas and engage in urban bombings. Beyond Russia's present conflicts with these two groups, there remains Russia's somewhat more tranquil domination of the Muslim Ingush, who seceded from Chechnya in 1991 in an attempt to spare themselves the wrath of Russian military coercion (after they had engaged in a vigorous, clandestine resistance to the Soviet KGB from the early postwar period through the 1970s).
I need not dwell on the longer history of ethnic conflict in this region since, say, the rise of Muscovite Russia in the 1500s, but it has been a hotbed of internecine clashes and shifting alliances with outside powers over the Twentieth century, framed by the overarching cultural hegemony and geographic expansiveness of ethnic Russians, even with the pretensions of ethnic harmony in a Marxian-inspired union of workers' republics. Since 1991, ethnic conflict appears to have erupted on roughly religious lines. This characterization reflects the predominant allegiance that Orthodox Christian-majority ethnic groups (e.g. the Ossetians) have shown toward Russia and a generalized opposition toward Russia exercised by Sunni Muslim-majority ethnic groups (e.g. Chechens, Dagestani, Ingush). Noting this pattern, none of the latter groups appear to have entered the post-Soviet period with any connections to traditions of radical militant Sunni Islam or displayed any meaningful alliance with Arab or Central Asian Islamist movements in their struggles against monarchical and secularist dictatorial regimes (e.g. the Sunni Arab Muslim Brotherhood, the various indigenous and foreign Afghan Mujahedeen). Since Russia's 1999 invasion of Chechnya, however, radical Islamist groups became dominant within the resistance to Russian rule of the Muslim North Caucasus. From this point, the rhetoric of ethnic resistance to Russian rule in the North Caucasus has featured generous allusions to the global Islamist struggle against the West, exemplified by Al Qaeda, and the militant (terrorist) tactics of Chechen and Dagestani rebels have integrated the sort of high-profile attacks against soft targets (e.g. 2010 attacks by two female suicide bombers on stations of the Moscow metro at rush hour) that have become, to a great extent, the hallmark of Sunni extremist militarism. The shift from a secularist separatist movement among Muslim North Caucasians toward militant Islam culminated with the declaration of the Islamic Caucasus Emirate in 2007, incorporating Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, the Krasnodar Black Sea coast (including Sochi), and even Christian North Ossetia, to be governed by Sharia law.
In this respect, the blame for the rise of militant Sunni Islamism in the North Caucasus region rests largely in the hands of the Kremlin and, most especially, in the political leadership of United Russia led by President Putin. Prior to the Russian invasion of 1999, Chechen secular moderates, supported by a relatively irreligious majority, struggled with a militant Islamist minority, determined to institute Sharia. When Islamic militants became active against Russian forces in Dagestan in 1999 and a wave of bombings against civilian targets occurred in several Russian cities, the Russian federal government was quick to lay the blame entirely on Chechnya and to squash Chechen independence with aerial bombardments, ground assaults, and occupation. With this history in mind, I want to argue that circumstances in the present could have been much different if cooler heads had prevailed in Moscow and if secularists in Grozny had been more adequately supported by Russia to develop a truly sovereign regime, with the capacity to keep militants in check and a good understanding of the stakes involved for all parties in ethnic harmony for the region. In place of a stable North Caucasus region, governed by indigenous secular ethno-nationalist parties under relatively detached stewardship from the Kremlin, the muscularity of Russian aggression against Chechnya has created dual regimes of militant, intolerant cultural absolutism. To one side, we have the ethnocentric, imperialist militarism of Putin's United Russia, appealing to Russian hyper-nationalism in seeking to exercise control or influence over the entire geography of the former Soviet Union in an era when Russia's stature as a global power appears less certain. To the other, the global movement of Sunni Islamist extremism and all its disperate, weakly networked parts, including the diverse elements of Al Qaeda, the Central Asian Taliban, and, apparently, the Caucasus Emirate, which would, no doubt, exercise the full brutality of Sharia against North Caucasian Muslims and non-Muslims alike if it had the capacity to do so.
Taking full account of the underlying political drama being played out on the doorstep of Sochi, participation by any nation in the Sochi Olympic games must, in my view, legitimize what Russia has done in the North Caucasus. If, as a nation, the U.S. presumes to exercise a certain degree of moral obligation to condemn ethnic violence and support national self-determination of repressed populations, then it would seem imperative that we not passively participate in an event that will, for all intents and purposes, tell Russia that it was OK to go ahead and shell Grozny into submission at the expense of creating an aggressive, militant Islamist resistance in the process.
2. Russian security forces cannot adequately defend athletes and foreign spectators in Sochi from militant actions by North Caucasian Islamists, and, if the U.S. renders assistance to Russian security forces, we will implicate ourselves in the larger conflict that is inciting terrorist activity.
Last week, militants, apparently of Chechnian or Dagestani origin, connected to the Islamist Caucasus Emirate, detonated suicide bombs in Volgograd, the main accessable rail hub for trains destined from central Russia to Sochi. Volgograd is around 425 miles from Sochi. By contrast, Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, is less than 300 miles distant. A map of incidents in the North Caucasus region since the 2007 announcement of the Sochi Olympics, created by Russian journalist Ilya Mouzykantskii, presents the geography of the problem presented by the Sochi games (see "Map of all terrorist attacks near Sochi since Russia awarded Winter Olympics (Jun '07)," at: http://imgur.com/n13C32b). Sochi's location, on the outer edge of the North Caucasus, places it in close proximity to the main battlefield of resistance to Russian rule. Judging, moreover, from Mouzykantskii's map, attacks have already occurred in the recent past in other areas on the Krasnodar coastal area near Sochi.
The obvious concern, in this respect, is that, logistically speaking, the Caucasus Emirate doesn't have far to go in order to inflict casualties at the Olympics - they are practically on scene. Furthermore, given the logistical complexity of the games, energy, food, water, and a wide range of other materials will need to find its way to Sochi from outside locations. The same concern obviously applies to land based human transit into and out of Sochi. The overwhelming majority of foreign athletes and spectators going to Sochi will travel overland because the local airport of Sochi-Adler apparently does not possess the logistical capacity to handle more than a restricted quantity of air traffic from destinations in the former Soviet Union (see Carol Matlack, "The Biggest Olympic Security Risk may not be at Sochi," in Bloomberg BusinessWeek (30 Dec 13), at: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-12-30/the-biggest-olympic-security-risk-may-not-be-at-sochi). From descriptions on the security preparations already made by the Russian federal government for Sochi, the Olympic games are liable to be one of the most heavily secured events in recent history - effectively, the policing of competition sites, outside corporate-sponsored events, athlete villages, and concentrated lodging for international spectators may take the appearances of an armed camp interspersed with security checkpoints. On the other hand, however well Russian security forces can establish a secure perimeter around the games and clear the interior of a militant presence, there must be transmission corridors leading into and out of Sochi that cannot be cleared over their entire length and present obvious targets for the Caucasian Emirate (i.e. either for attacks on the transmission technologies/pathways (rail, road, pipelines, cables, vehicles) or for compromise of materials in transit (food poisoning)).
Finally, ideologically speaking, the grievances advanced by the Caucasus Emirate against Russia are two centuries old and allude, at least in part, to the conquest of the larger region by ethnic Russians over the 1850s and 1860s and the subsequent forcible expulsion of much of the region's indigenous ethnic population, which was overwhelmingly Muslim. In particular, the area around Sochi (the Krasnodar administrative district) had been the ethnic homeland of Muslim Abkhazians, most of whom were either forcibly deported or killed by Russian forces after the area was subdued in the 1860s. Doku Umarov, the "Emir" of the Caucasus, has, in this regard, called on his forces to concentrate their attacks on the "satanist games" at Sochi to avenge the insult of holding the spectacle on the bones of so many dead Muslims of the conquest on the Black Sea coast (see Michael Weiss, "The Return of Big Terror to Russia," in The Daily Beast (2 Jan 14), at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/02/the-volgograd-bombings-and-the-return-of-big-terror-to-russia.html#url=/articles/2014/01/02/the-volgograd-bombings-and-the-return-of-big-terror-to-russia.html).
In response to the bombings in Volgograd, the U.S. National Security Council submitted a public release condemning the attack, extending condolences to the families of victims, and offering "our full support to the Russian government in security preparations for the Sochi Olympic Games" (see "Statement by NSC Spokesperson Caitlin Hayden on Attacks in Russia," at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/12/30/statement-nsc-spokesperson-caitlin-hayden-attacks-russia). For reasons that I have already noted in this post, I think the extension of support for the anti-terrorism objectives of the Russian government is a mistake on our part. The source of a terrorist threat at Sochi emanates from legitimate grievances by a repressed ethnic group seeking rights to national self-determination. Stepping into the middle of this conflict in the name of securing our athletes and our citizen spectators actively renders the U.S. a participant to a conflict to which we are already too deeply embroiled for no good reason! In May of 2011, the U.S. State Department issued a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture of Doku Umarov, almost two years before two immigrant Chechen brothers set off bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon (an attack for which the Caucasus Emirate, in any case, vigorously disavowed any association or connection). The linkages between Russia's conflict in the North Caucasus and the global Islamist war against the West, waged by the Al Qaeda networks, are extremely complex and liable to be overstated. With this in mind, the importance of a ransom on the head of a North Caucasian Islamist leader by the U.S. is extremely questionable. The U.S. has no reason and no business sticking its head into Chechnya, Dagestan, and the larger conflict over the North Caucasus of which Russia is more than capable of controlling over time by means of superior firepower and a willingness on the part of Putin and his political allies to exercise brutal, ruthless physical state political violence.
3. In the post-Soviet period, Russian culture is descending into abject intolerance, marked by the presence of ethnic anti-immigrant pogroms and support for vicious homophobic governmental legislative enactments, wholly inconsistent with the contemporary direction of Western cultural values and the broader spirit of toleration embodied in the Enlightenment. If we Americans truly believe, as a basic element of our character as the inheritors of our revolution, in political liberty, cultural tolerance, and harmonious social and economic development, then we cannot malign our values by accepting the invitation to an event that will exalt a nation that seems, at this moment in its history, intent on denigrating them.
As someone on the radical Marxian left, I have this whistful imagery in my mind of the first decade after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, before the horrors of Stalinism had fully set in, as a moment in which every conservative cultural rigidity of Orthodox Tsarist Russia was thrown aside in the name of permanently transforming human development to make the Russian people ready for communism. In a sense, though I do not believe the term was ever applied or even contemplated except in a few isolated writings by Lenin and, later, possibly, by Trotsky, the Bolsheviks were lauching a cultural revolution as ambitious as that contemplated four decades later by Mao and the Chinese Communists. For complex reasons, rooted, in part, in the universalistic assumptions of Marxian theory regarding the structural positionalities of workers in (globalizing) capitalism and, in part, from the peculiar, multi-ethnic character of pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia, this generation of Russian Communists possessed an extremely open sense of multi-ethnic cultural tolerance. In this sense, historian Liliana Riga has argued, the intensive cultural Russification of the pre-revolutionary Tsarist state contributed in important ways in forging connections between Russian and non-Russian Bolsheviks wholly transcending ethnic boundaries in ways that made the Bolshevism an inclusive, universalistic movement (see Riga (2012), The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire, 261-264. New York: Cambridge University Press). Moreover, almost immediately in the aftermath of their seizure of power, the Bolsheviks moved to transform the institution of civil marriage (while contemplating its full abolition) and establish institutions of no-fault divorce, paid maternity leave and provisions to facilitate nursing and care of infants for mothers returning to the workplace, and access to information on birth control and legal availability of abortion on demand. Finally, under the influence of such theorists and party activists as Alexandra Kollontai, the Bolsheviks transformed legal restrictions on sexual practices, including abolition of restrictions on homosexuality, unheard of in Western contexts of the period (see Thomas Harrison, "Socialism and Homosexuality," in New Politics (Winter 2009, XII-2, No. 46, at: http://newpol.org/content/socialism-and-homosexuality).
This was a fleeting moment orchestrated by ideologically committed people who were palpably flawed (and indisputably hostile to a range of Western liberal institutions like free speech, which they regarded as irretrievably bourgeois!), and there are adequate reasons to question particular elements of the corpus of policies introduced in early Soviet Russia (especially, coming out of a background in Roman Catholicism, such institutions as unrestricted abortion on demand). This historical reference point is not offered as much in order to celebrate the brief opening decade of revolutionary Bolshevism as it is to point out how far the contemporary Russia of Putin and his political allies has descended into sad, regretful culturally reactionary conservatism! Of course, it need not have fallen in this direction. The collapse of the Soviet Union, orchestrated or otherwise supported by forces committed to the political and economic liberalization of Russia, could have veered the country in a direction leading it closer to the social democratic institutions of Western Europe. In important ways, the U.S. is at least partly to blame for the course of Russia's post-Soviet political evolution by promoting, at least passively, the continued isolation of Russia from Europe (e.g. by insisting on the continued existence and expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe against the wishes of Moscow). As a result, instead of being fully integrated within Europe as a full-fledged partner in a post-Cold War/post-Soviet future, Russia was abandoned to be master of a constantly shrinking sphere of influence. The larger point, however, is that Russia's relative decline in political stature, even in its own traditional geographic zones of control, has nutured poisonous tendencies inciting ethnocentric Russian nationalism, militaristic engagement with minority ethnic groups, and rabid cultural bigotry, exercised demonstratively as much through fascistic mob violence as through reactionary legislation.
Last year, on Russia's National Unity Day (Nov. 4), groups of Russian ultra-nationalists, waving flags with fascistic symbols, numbering between 8,000 and 20,000 in total, paraded around streets in various districts of Moscow, chanting nationalist slogans and voicing racial slurs against non-Russia immigrants and, in particular, against Muslims (see Anna Nemtsova, "Neo-nationalist Violence Targets Central Asians in Russia," on The Daily Beast (6 Nov 13), at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/06/neo-nationalist-violence-targets-central-asians-in-russia.html#url=/articles/2013/11/06/neo-nationalist-violence-targets-central-asians-in-russia.html). In addition to such demonstrations of the burgeoning strength of an intolerant racist right wing in Moscow, the past year has witnessed an increasing prevalence of violence against non-Russian migrant workers from the Caucasus (Chechens, Dagestanis, Azerbaijanis) and former Soviet Central Asian republics (Kazaks, Uzbeks). Attacks by gangs of Neo-fascist Russian youths against bystanders who appear non-Russian (i.e. non-White), loosely coordinated violence by mobs attacking migrant laborers in open air markets, and more highly organized activities by vigilante citizens' militias appear, in part, to be motivated by the fear of economic competition from non-Russian workers or by reactions to the perception of criminal activity, including drug activity and violent street crime, committed by illegal immigrants. More succinctly, they reflect a growing perception and fear among ethnic Russians, even in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, that, especially in view of the decline in birth rates among Russians, non-Russian migrants, incapable of assimilating within the Russian population and adopting Russian cultural values, will overrun their country, undermine their capacity for self-rule, and destroy Russian culture (see video, "Race & Hate: Russia's Rising Nationalism" By Journal Reporters, at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm1qvh2z058).
As for the rise of Russian homophobia, Putin's United Russia Party apparently has a long history of using the enforcement of regional laws through the courts to outlaw gay and lesbian organizations and prohibit demonstrations of gay pride and for gay rights. In June of 2013, Putin signed into law article 6.21 of the Russian Code of Administrative Offenses, an article prohibiting the distribution of information to minors advocating ambiguously characterized "non-traditional sexual lifestyles" (see Innokenty (Kes) Grekov, "Russia's Anti-Gay Law, Spelled Out in Plain English," on PolicyMic (8 Aug 2013), at: http://www.policymic.com/articles/58649/russia-s-anti-gay-law-spelled-out-in-plain-english). Beyond the ambiguity and capacity for flagrant abuse of such legal standards, the presence of a political/legal atmosphere supportive of homophobic attitudes within the general population has been conducive to the growth of violence against gays, lesbians, and transgendered individuals, in some cases by organizations seeking to "reform" homosexuals (see Alec Luhn, "Russian anti-gay law prompts rise in homophobic violence," in The Guardian (1 Sep 13), at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/01/russia-rise-homophobic-violence).
In many ways, the extreme character of culturally-driven ethnic and homophobic bigotry evident in contemporary Russia is mirrored within the U.S. population. Against Russian citizens' anti-immigrant militias, we, of course, can offer the Minutemen Movement, policing the Mexican border against illegal crossings of Latino migrants seeking a better life in the U.S. In important ways, Mexicans have occupied the same place in the U.S. context as Uzbeks, Tajiks, and other Central Asians and Caucasian groups in Russia, and large sections of the U.S. population (e.g. within the Tea Parties) continue to locate a fundamental threat to American culture from Latino migrants. Further, the history of private violence by individuals and mobs against gays, lesbians, and transgendered individuals in the U.S. is too substantial to adequately recount. It was, likewise, a violence reinforced in the past by a significant infrastructure of state laws against sodomy, intended both to criminalize "non-traditional" sexual practice and to culturally marginalize prohibited practices in order to encapsulate a vision of legally enforceable public morality.
In these respects, my criticisms of contemporary Russian ethnic culture might be taken to embody a certain degree of hypocrisy. I am willing to accept such a criticism, but I think the larger point is that Russia and the U.S. are, at least at this moment in our histories, moving in opposite directions in relation to the lofty cultural ideals embodied in the Enlightenment. Tolerance, if not outright acceptance, of difference is a difficult, continuously unfinished project of Western civilization, one in which the U.S. has only ever imperfectly stood as an example. The patchwork of states accepting marriage equality for heterosexual and homosexual unions is evidence that, as a society, we have a long way to go. Moreover, the response of states like Arizona to Latino immigrants points to the contentious nature of immigration policy within the U.S. as a whole and widespread fear Anglo-White culture will be overrun by non-White, non-Anglo populations, refusing to accept assimilation. Divergent political perspectives are engaged here in struggles over the contours of public policies that will both shape and be shaped by the degree of cultural tolerance exhibited by the American polity as a whole. In that respect, I hope that we, as a society, are veering in the direction of toleration.
By contrast, I am convinced that Russia is, by and large, moving in the opposite direction, reinforced by the policies enacted by a corrupt, culturally reactionary central government, headed by a former KGB thug. As I suggested above, if the invitation to hold an Olympic Games implicitly expresses the national character of a host country to the rest of the world, then it was wholly inappropriate for the International Olympic Committee to grant the 2014 Winter Olympics to a city in a country mired in cultural xenophobia against migrants, persecuting sexual minorities, and waging aggressive war against ethnic and religious minorities seeking the promise of national self-determination. For these reasons, I would advocate the idea that the U.S. Olympic Committee should actively boycott the Sochi Winter Games. I would, likewise, advocate the idea that Americans who take the values of cultural toleration and the right of national self-determination seriously as elements in our political and cultural heritage as Americans should go a step further to identify American corporate sponsors of the Sochi Games to engage in an active boycott of goods and services marketed by such entities, and, further, to contact our local NBC affiliates to let them know that we will not watch any of their broadcasts if they participate in broadcasting events from Sochi. I do not know how many U.S. athletes who would otherwise be competing have declined an invitation to compete because of Russia's homophobic legal enactments, but if such a cause is worth engaging in such a sacrifice on their parts, then it should at least be worth the time for other Americans to understand what is at stake in the cause for which they are acting.
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