Steven Lee Myers, “acting bureau chief of The Times’s Moscow bureau…at work on a biography of Vladimir Putin”, takes a gentle ramble through Putin’s Potemkin village:
… “This is one of the biggest frauds of the Olympics,” Boris Nemtsov said about the new road and railway, and the whole Sochi project, he says, is the biggest fraud in Russia’s history, “maybe even the biggest in human history.” Now 54, Nemtsov was once one of the brightest stars of the democracy movement that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union. A mathematician and a physicist with a Ph.D. that he defended when he was only 25, he became involved in politics by protesting plans to build a nuclear reactor after the Chernobyl disaster. In 1991, he was appointed governor of Nizhny Novgorod, the formerly closed city of Gorky, and served until 1997, when Boris Yeltsin drafted him to join his government. He was so popular — young, handsome, intelligent — that he was widely discussed as a potential successor for the ailing Yeltsin. Those prospects crashed with the Russian economy in 1998 and, a year later, with the unexpected ascension of Putin. The two occasionally worked together in the beginning, but Nemtsov turned fierce critic after the arrest of the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003. He has since vehemently attacked Putin’s authoritarian instincts and the heavy hand of the security organs and has been arrested three times for taking part in anti-Putin protests.
“What is really interesting is that Putin believes nobody knows about the corruption,” Nemtsov said over dinner in Moscow. It’s not for Nemtsov’s lack of trying. In a report he co-wrote and distributes at political protests, he noted that Russian Railways contracted the bulk of the road and railway project to two companies, including one that is now partly owned by a businessman named Gennady Timchenko, who has longstanding connections to Putin. Nemtsov also claims that 15 percent of the entire Olympic budget went to companies owned by the brothers Rotenberg, Arkady and Boris, who were Putin’s friends and judo partners when they were coming of age in the 1960s. After Putin’s rise to power, they advanced in the ranks of Russia’s oligarchs. In an interview with The Financial Times in 2012, Arkady Rotenberg defended his friendship and said he had not used it for personal gain. “I have great respect for this person,” he said of Putin, “and I consider that this is a person sent to our country from God.”
Every Olympics costs more than the initial projections, but Russia’s costs have increased more than fourfold since Putin’s initial estimate of $12 billion. As Nemtsov figures, because most games typically double in cost, the difference in Russia — $25 billion to $30 billion — can be attributed to outright thievery. “This is a festival of corruption,” he said. And he argued that everything — from the choice of Sochi, to the design of the buildings, to the contracts parceled out — was effectively controlled by Putin. “There was no public discussion about the place. Zero. Not even one discussion in Parliament. Zero. No discussion on Putin TV, the zombie box. It was completely closed.”.
Long Read: “Putin’s Olympic Fever Dream”Post + Comments (46)