Russia and the FIFA World Cup
Vladimir Putin arrived in Zurich in December 2010 with a smile on his face, a spring in his step and a speech in his pocket. Just hours earlier, Russia had been named as hosts of the World Cup for the first time. Now the Russian president simpered ingratiatingly at the dais before his assembled audience, addressing them in a language he could speak well, but hardly ever did publicly. “From the bottom of my heart,” he said in tentative but fluent English, “thank you.”
This was Russia whipping out a giant bouquet and turning on the charm: just a global superpower, standing in front of a large body of football administrators, asking it to love them.
Last Friday, Fifa’s World Cup YouTube channel issued a welcome address by President Putin — now eight years older, even more secure in power, Russia’s longest-serving leader since Stalin. The words were similar — football, passion, Russia, unique, great honour — but the delivery could almost have come from a different speaker.
Now Putin stood, solemn and unsmiling, in front of a Kremlin backdrop. Apart from a cursory greeting at the end, the entire speech was given in Russian. The message was clear: we’re in charge now.
At which point, you may charitably surmise that over the last eight years, something must have got lost in the translation. Perhaps it was the invasion of the Crimea. Or the time it shot down a passenger jet and killed 298 people. Or the time it orchestrated an enormous state-sponsored doping programme. Or the time it leapt to the defence of Bashar al-Assad. Or the numerous occasions when it is believed to have interfered in foreign elections. Or the fact that Russia would flatly deny almost all of the charges laid above.
But it’s fair to say, with just a pinch of understatement, that the whole open arms thing didn’t quite go as planned. The increasing hardening of Russia’s stance towards the outside world, and especially the West, provides an intriguing lining to a World Cup that will otherwise be defined by footballing geniuses.
This, in many ways, is the paradox of Russia’s World Cup: that a tournament conceived as a congress of nations, a bridge between worlds, a celebration of commonality and openness, is taking place in a country that has done more than any other to burn those bridges, to obscure and divide, to drive those worlds ever further apart.
The consequence of this is that Putin’s Russia is no longer overly preoccupied with what the outside world thinks of it. “The World Cup will not have any significant impact on Russia’s image,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, said: “It is just too toxic.”
So as enthralling and captivating as it will be, this World Cup isn’t being hosted for our benefit. It’s largely for domestic consumption; undeterred by the abject state of the national side, which as most Russians realised some time ago, hasn’t got the faintest chance of actually winning the competition.
This, by the way, is why comparisons with the 1936 Berlin Olympics are not just wide of the mark but rather lazy: the idea of a supreme athletic master race is rather harder to confect when you’re ranked No 70 in the world and expected to be fighting it out with Egypt to secure a place in the second round.
With no hope of a home triumph, then, the objectives for the tournament have been subtly shifted. It’s become about competence, professionalism, infrastructure, control: the Putin regime proving to its people that even in the face of sanctions, a staggering economy, falling oil prices and the nasty foreign media, it can host one of these big events just as well as any of the Western powers.
In order to pull it off, Russia has kept an uncharacteristically tight rein on a financial and bureaucratic apparatus more often associated with vast inefficiency, broken promises and a sort of modulated, tendentious chaos.
It’s proof, I suppose, that Russia can do pretty much whatever it wants to when it sets its mind to it. For those visiting the country from outside, it can seem an intimidatingly intractable place: not so much overtly hostile as deeply, menacingly, wilfully bewildering. A place where words can mean whatever you want them to mean, where a surreal doublethink reigns supreme, where an obscure and cryptic absurdism clings to every transaction like an invisible film.
This was Russia whipping out a giant bouquet and turning on the charm: just a global superpower, standing in front of a large body of football administrators, asking it to love them.
Last Friday, Fifa’s World Cup YouTube channel issued a welcome address by President Putin — now eight years older, even more secure in power, Russia’s longest-serving leader since Stalin. The words were similar — football, passion, Russia, unique, great honour — but the delivery could almost have come from a different speaker.
Now Putin stood, solemn and unsmiling, in front of a Kremlin backdrop. Apart from a cursory greeting at the end, the entire speech was given in Russian. The message was clear: we’re in charge now.
At which point, you may charitably surmise that over the last eight years, something must have got lost in the translation. Perhaps it was the invasion of the Crimea. Or the time it shot down a passenger jet and killed 298 people. Or the time it orchestrated an enormous state-sponsored doping programme. Or the time it leapt to the defence of Bashar al-Assad. Or the numerous occasions when it is believed to have interfered in foreign elections. Or the fact that Russia would flatly deny almost all of the charges laid above.
But it’s fair to say, with just a pinch of understatement, that the whole open arms thing didn’t quite go as planned. The increasing hardening of Russia’s stance towards the outside world, and especially the West, provides an intriguing lining to a World Cup that will otherwise be defined by footballing geniuses.
This, in many ways, is the paradox of Russia’s World Cup: that a tournament conceived as a congress of nations, a bridge between worlds, a celebration of commonality and openness, is taking place in a country that has done more than any other to burn those bridges, to obscure and divide, to drive those worlds ever further apart.
The consequence of this is that Putin’s Russia is no longer overly preoccupied with what the outside world thinks of it. “The World Cup will not have any significant impact on Russia’s image,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, said: “It is just too toxic.”
So as enthralling and captivating as it will be, this World Cup isn’t being hosted for our benefit. It’s largely for domestic consumption; undeterred by the abject state of the national side, which as most Russians realised some time ago, hasn’t got the faintest chance of actually winning the competition.
This, by the way, is why comparisons with the 1936 Berlin Olympics are not just wide of the mark but rather lazy: the idea of a supreme athletic master race is rather harder to confect when you’re ranked No 70 in the world and expected to be fighting it out with Egypt to secure a place in the second round.
With no hope of a home triumph, then, the objectives for the tournament have been subtly shifted. It’s become about competence, professionalism, infrastructure, control: the Putin regime proving to its people that even in the face of sanctions, a staggering economy, falling oil prices and the nasty foreign media, it can host one of these big events just as well as any of the Western powers.
In order to pull it off, Russia has kept an uncharacteristically tight rein on a financial and bureaucratic apparatus more often associated with vast inefficiency, broken promises and a sort of modulated, tendentious chaos.
It’s proof, I suppose, that Russia can do pretty much whatever it wants to when it sets its mind to it. For those visiting the country from outside, it can seem an intimidatingly intractable place: not so much overtly hostile as deeply, menacingly, wilfully bewildering. A place where words can mean whatever you want them to mean, where a surreal doublethink reigns supreme, where an obscure and cryptic absurdism clings to every transaction like an invisible film.