My friend Vladimir Putin is getting a bum rap for the cost of his Winter Olympics, £30 billon and counting.
This isn’t to say that Volodia (I call him by the Russian diminutive of his name, as friends do) doesn’t deserve to have his bum rapped, kicked or – if you’d rather – blown away. (Scratch that last one – I’d rather not expand my diet to include polonium, if it’s all the same to you.)
He does. Yet at the same time Volodia has to be complimented. It has taken a titanic effort to convert Russia from one contiguous prison camp into a giant crime syndicate – while keeping the downscaled elements of the prison camp firmly in place.
Volodia rightly feels he doesn’t need too many prison camps. Such facilities, with their guards, transportation, Alsatians and barbed wire, impose a heavy burden on the state budget. So do even sham legal proceedings serving as the intermediate stage between Volodia’s ire and the culprit’s incarceration.
At the same time a small-calibre bullet strategically placed into a vital organ in a dark alley costs only 20p. Just a few of those judiciously utilised keep malcontents on their toes, especially since the implicit promise of using a few more looks eminently credible.
Volodia thus has to be commended for being careful with public funds, an accolade that makes him even more deserving of Peter Hitchens’s admiration. Not only is Volodia the strong leader Peter wishes we had in Britain, but he’s also more parsimonious than any of our profligate lot.
So much more unfair it is to rebuke Volodia for frittering away £30 billion of public funds on the emetic extravaganza going by the name of the Sochi Olympics.
Volodia’s accusers ought to check their facts before slinging mud. It’s absolutely not true that the Olympics has cost more than any other Games in history, and more than all winter Olympics combined.
That is, it would be true if we indeed believed that all those sports facilities, lavatories with two bowls in one cubicle, pillowless hotels rooms and vast amounts of snow artificially created (natural snow is scarce in the subtropics) did cost £30 billion. They didn’t.
Neither did the 50,000-strong security detail making sure that none of the 2,900 competitors is blown up into that great ski jump in the sky. Nor did the cull of dissidents and the silencing of stray dogs add appreciable amounts to the balance… oops, sorry, getting dyslexic in my old age. It’s stray dogs that were culled and dissidents who were silenced, but this doesn’t invalidate the point.
In fact, according to my reliable Moscow sources the rebranding and reconstruction of Sochi actually cost no more than £8 billion, which is in line with the budgets of other similar events. So where did the £22-billion balance come from?
The answer is, it came from the sleight of hand practised by Volodia’s detractors. They larcenously include into the overall amount those sums that really belong in a totally different rubric.
“The stealing has been audacious, enormous — theft from every single direction. Presidential friends received contracts on a plate. Billions were awarded to loyalists. Ministers winked as tranches of cash left the country. More vanished into kickbacks. Bureaucrats carried off entire tarmac budgets. Bandits took their cut…,” writes Ben Judah in today’s Times.
In his (otherwise excellent) article Mr Judah is right factually, but he’s wrong conceptually and, if you will, mathematically. The stolen £22 billion, much of it swelling the £40-billion stream flowing out of Russia into offshore banks last year, has only a tangential link with Olympic costs.
In reality it’s the cost of power, or rather of Volodia staying in power. ‘Tsar Vladimir’, as his friends call him, can rule by himself but he can’t protect himself by himself. Like any ruler he needs a large but close-knit coterie of loyalists forming a buffer between him and the masses or else other power-hungry politicians.
The masses generally share Peter Hitchens’s almost erotic admiration of a ‘strong leader’, but at the same time they make an average of £400 a month (prices in Russia are close to ours). This makes them rather upset at the sight of monumental palaces popping up all over the place, with at least 20 of them belonging to Volodia personally and the rest to his cronies.
The Russians enjoy a deserved reputation for docility and forbearance, but this is occasionally punctuated by what Pushkin called “the Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.” The only thing ever separating a real or metaphorical tsar from being torn apart limb from limb is his own strength and that of his entourage.
No other considerations come into play, including, say, the tsar’s kindness and fairness. On the contrary, such traits are taken as a sign as weakness and the people (or disgruntled courtiers) inevitably pounce.
For example, such tsars as the ‘False’ Dmitry, Peter III, Paul I, Alexander II and Nicholas II, were somewhat influenced by Western liberalism and Christian morality. This sent wrong signals out, and each of the protoliberals was – respectively – ripped to pieces, strangled, torn in half by a bomb and riddled with bullets together with his whole family.
My friend Volodia has all the necessary qualities to stay on top: unlimited cruelty, limited intellect, the morality of a wayward skunk, tyrannical temperament, duplicity, greed. But these would count for nothing if the same people who put him into the Kremlin weren’t willing to keep him there.
Such people don’t come cheap. They too want their 500-foot yachts and billion-dollar estates, and they must be kept sweet in however toe-curling, vomit-making a way if Volodia is to avoid a bitter end.
Hence the £22 billion stolen in the run-up to the Sochi Olympics has little to do with the cost of the Games. It’s the cost of doing politics in Putin’s Russia.