The Sochi Closing Ceremony

We have had Olympic spectacles in our country in Los Angeles and Atlanta and Salt Lake City, with lots of flag-waving and "USA-USA" chanting.  I get it that this sort of thing can be seen as over the top to people from other countries.

But Sochi was different.

Sochi is in Russia, now a plutocracy led by its richest citizen, Vladimir Putin, the new czar who has much to answer for in Chechnya, in Georgia, in Syria, in Ukraine and, not least, in Russia.

In Putin's Russia, defined as a democracy, opposition journalists have been assassinated.  Mikhail Khodorkovsky, no candidate for sainthood but once the head of Yukos Oil and the richest man in the country, spent 10 years in prison as a warning to other wealthy upstarts.  The members of a girl band, Pussy Riot, were jailed for challenging the government in a concert in a church.  Khodorkovsky and Pussy Riot were released just ahead of the Sochi games on an order of mercy from the new czar.

Russians are better off now than they were under Stalin or even under the chaotic mob-dominated Yeltsin regime, but that is a low hurdle.  The economy relies mostly on natural resources -- oil and gas -- that enrich Putin's court but do not fund economic development.  Among the proletariat, opportunities are few, birthrates are declining and the average lifespan is significantly shorter than here or in Europe, a result, in part, of the anaesthetizing effect of excessive vodka consumption.

So what to make of the Sochi closing ceremony?  It drew on Russian heroes of the arts, in music from Mussorgsky to Rachmaninoff to Rubinstein to Horowitz, in ballet from Diaghilev and the Kirov.  Popping up on display were enormous portraits of the giants of Russian literature, including Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn.

The point, of course, was to affiliate the high ideals of great art with a low Putin-style Russian nationalism.  For Putin, the best government is run by a ruthless strong man willing to use his army and economy to keep the thoughts and activities of his people firmly in check.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author who devoted his life to battling Soviet totalitarianism, must be spinning in his grave.

Before the Olympics, Putin armed a Syrian government that now has killed well more than 100,000 of its people and turned millions of others into refugees.  As the Olympics were under way, Putin instructed his puppet-president in Kiev to send the Ukrainian army to attack peaceful protesters.  Former defense secretary Robert Gates got it right in his biography when he called Putin a "stone cold killer."

As the Sochi Olympic games drew toward their end, a French intellectual urged other countries to boycott the closing ceremonies.  I wish the American delegation had done so.