Last week, 34 people died after two bombs — one in a rail station, the other on a trolleybus — exploded in Volgograd. Terrorist attacks are, sadly, nothing new for Russia. But these murders had a particular motive behind them: Vladimir Putin’s arrogance.
Six hundred miles to the southwest is Sochi, the location of next month’s Winter Olympics.
The official line behind Sochi’s nomination as host city is that it has everything: mountains, snow, the sea, all wrapped around a comfortable resort city.
But its choice had more to do about politics than location, and its selection will have deadly consequences for Russia and possibly the entire world.
Russians have been distrustful and envious of the west ever since the pope didn’t come to Kingdom of Rus’ aide against Khan and the Golden Horde centuries ago. The Christian West refused to help in order to teach the breakaway Orthodox Church a lesson, as well as to weaken Rus’ power. The invasion created a 200-year lag in Russian development compared to Renaissance Europe.
Since then, Russians have felt the need to top the West. From wanting Moscow to be the new Rome after the fall of Byzantium (hence the adopted royal name Romanov) or the materialistic worship you now see in Moscow and other cities, Russians want to show they are just as good or better as Europe and America.
Putin has spent a staggering $51 billion — the most ever for an Olympics, even topping the much larger 2008 Summer Games in Beijing — to prove Sochi and his nation. Bloomberg Businessweek calculated the cost at $520 million an event.
But why Sochi? It would seem a bad location, just a short hop from Georgia and Chechnya.
In a short but decisive conflict in 2008, the South Ossetia War, Russia invaded its former satellite Georgia in order to teach the newly independent country a lesson; you will not oppress your ethnic Russian population. Nor will you leave our sphere of influence and join the West. Russian troops remain in the contested areas.
Russia also fought two recent, brutal wars in Chechnya in which they used slash-and-burn techniques to overcome the independence movement. The conflict there between the Islamist population and the Tsarist Christian or Soviet occupations has been raging for several centuries.
The Chechen Islamist leader, Doku Umarov, threatened in July to use maximum force to destroy the Sochi Olympics and the infidel invaders “dancing on our ancestors graves.” Umarov and his disciples want to kill civilians for maximum effect. These are the terrorists who had no qualm killing 400 woman and children at the Beslan school massacre in 2004. Not to mention the airport bombing at Domodedovo, the Moscow theater bombing, and many other attacks. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston bombers, supposedly visited a region of Chechnya and possibly received terrorist training prior to the Boston Marathon attack.
With Sochi, Putin spit in the faces of rebels in Georgia and Chechnya. He wanted to show the world that Russia is all-powerful in the region. He wanted to show that he is not worried about the West’s concern over the Russian occupation of Georgia. He wanted to show the Russian empire is being reborn and that he has conquered Chechnya and pacified the area; the former Soviet Republics should take heed! He wanted to show he is not concerned about terrorism.
It was a political decision — the consequences to the Olympics be damned.
Now the world is stuck with it. Security around the Olympic venue may be strong enough to prevent a terrorist incident inside the compound or the sports facilities themselves. But Putin cannot effectively secure all of the transportation networks leading to Sochi, hence the attacks on Volgograd, a major connecting hub into the Olympic area.
Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, also holds a special place in the heart of the Russian people as the place where the Nazi advance into Russia was halted. This terrorist target selection was a definite finger in the eye of Putin.
Putin has worked hard to soften the Russian government’s image prior to these games. He has released political prisoners, including Pussy Riot and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He released the Greenpeace activists who had been jailed for months for storming a Russian oil rig in the Arctic.
But by placing the Olympics at Sochi, he has given the terrorists a world stage to rage against his policies, to show that the nation isn’t as stable as he wants to admit. And if the terrorists are successful, it won’t just be Russia that pays the price.
L. Todd Wood, a former special-operations helicopter pilot and Wall Street trader, is the author of the thriller “Currency” and a contributor to the Moscow Times; LToddWood.com