Russia is about to host the most expensive Olympics in history but the image that’s now defining the whole show is two toilets side-by-side in one stall. The photo of the twin toilets at the cross-country skiing and biathlon center in Sochi, tweeted by a BBC reporter, has gone viral.
Americans were just puzzled, but in Russia the toilets became an unfunny joke about the rampant corruption of the Olympics and the country in general. Bloggers added photos of President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev above the potties, mocking their ruling “in tandem” and have called the photo an “international embarrassment.”
No sooner had the laughter over the toilets started to fade than Anatoly Pakhomov, the mayor of Sochi, announced that there are no gay people in his city. It was an echo of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad telling a Columbia University audience in 2007 that Iran didn’t have homosexuals — except that, while the world generally acknowledges that Iran is led by a bunch of crazy people, Russia didn’t have that image.
But Pakhomov’s comments came just days after Putin said Russia needs to “cleanse” itself of homosexuality to increase its birth rate, and in the wake of the ongoing furor over Russia’s new anti-gay law, which has many boycotting the Olympics.
Not that there aren’t other embarrassing-to-Russia reasons to stay away. In travel magazines, stories on the Olympics focus on how not to get scammed in Russia, while many a general news article wonders, “Should Americans go to Sochi?”
And that’s before the very real safety concerns: A photo of the “black widow” released several weeks ago suggested the possible bomber was already in Sochi, and last month’s bombings in the region were widely seen as an expression of jihadi intent to stage a massacre at the Olympics. Many analysts are not wondering if an attack will happen but when. Nobody trusts the brutal Russian security services to prevent it.
Is the former superpower now a Third World country?
Russia spent an estimated $51 billion to bring the winter games to its famous summer resort city. Aleksei Navalny, an anti-corruption watchdog in Russia, called Putin’s spending on the event obscene, “like some small, spiteful pharaoh is building himself the greatest pyramid in the world.”
To those who might root for the Russian people to prosper and finally shake off their troubled history, all these events have been discouraging. Since the fall of Communism, Russians in America have been able to point to progress in their old country. Industry was growing, Moscow was becoming a world-class city and there was even a brief period of time when Putin wasn’t president.
But the Sochi Olympics have become a microcosm of everything truly dysfunctional in Russia.
The most telling quote came from Medvedev when he tried to dispute the rampant Olympics corruption in an interview with CNN: “There is no data on whether the corruption related to the Olympics is much higher than the average level of corruption in the country.”
Business as usual in Russia.