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Moscow Times
August 16, 2004
The Winning 'Spirit' of the 1930s?
By Yevgenia Albats

Two seemingly unrelated events happened last week, which taken together explain a lot about the essence of Russia's current domestic and foreign policy.

First, Hamburg University decided not to award an honorary doctorate in economics to President Vladimir Putin, as was originally planned for Sept. 10 in the course of a summit meeting with German Chancellor Gerhard Schr der. The official pretext was that the university had failed to fill out the necessary paperwork, yet in reality a protest that originated in the university itself was responsible for what one German newspaper called a "diplomatic disaster." Some 50 faculty members, along with more than 1,400 students, felt it unacceptable to have Putin associated with the university due to "the violation of international law in Chechnya, and the suppression of free media and human rights organizations in Russia."

The university decided that Putin's record of recent months might taint the academic institution's reputation. And apparently even the German Foreign Ministry was unable to bring pressure to bear upon academia's free spirit.

As ceremonial and insignificant as this event might seem, it is a real blow to the president's image in Europe. Add to that the crumbling relationship with another long-standing supporter of Putin's policies, British Prime Minister Tony Blair (outlined recently in an article in the Financial Times and by CNN International) and the uneasiness, to say the least, within the U.S. White House over the Yukos affair and events in Georgia.

Throughout his first term in office, Putin carefully crafted the image of an enlightened politician, an economic liberal, a strong statesman -- albeit somewhat autocratic -- fit to be a member of the club of world democratic leaders. Yet the shameful Yukos affair, publicly acknowledged as Putin's moral defeat even by his domestic cohorts, which may have already enriched some bureaucrats by as much as $1 billion through insider trading; the unwise display of imperial ambitions and muscle-flexing vis-a-vis the small sovereign state of Georgia; ambiguous laws that have stripped state benefits from the poor while preserving them for the bureaucracy; the ongoing search for internal and external enemies eager to destroy Russia's image abroad -- taken together, all this has destroyed Putin's glamorous image in a matter of a few months.

The only question left unanswered, which is currently being debated in the foreign media, is whether Putin is as corrupt as his predecessor or whether he is simply no longer in charge: Take your choice between the bad and the even worse.

The second event I had in mind has to do with the 2004 Summer Olympics, which opened in Athens last week, or to be more precise, it has to do with the uniform selected for the Russian team to wear at the opening ceremony. That uniform, ordered by the Russian Olympic Committee and produced by the Russian company Bosco Di Ciliegi, in partnership with the Italian fashion house ETRO, is a modern remake of the uniform worn by Soviet athletes in the 1930s.

As a commentator for state-owned Channel One television explained to the nation, the uniform is supposed to promote nostalgia for the 1930s. Nostalgia for what, exactly, you may ask. For the time when millions of peasants who resisted collectivization were sent to Siberia? For the largely artificial, Stalin-orchestrated famine in Ukraine and Kazakhstan that left some 5 million people dead? Or maybe nostalgia for the Great Terror, which resulted in many more millions of Soviet citizens being killed or dispatched to the gulag?

Bosco Di Ciliegi's web site gives another, no less astonishing explanation for the uniform design: "At the heart of the design of the 2004 Russian Olympic team's ceremonial uniform are the idealistic sentiments of the 1930s -- the cult of the sporting spirit and body of that period."

Really? Does it not sound all too familiar? Is it not reminiscent of the 1936 Nazi Olympics with its cult of muscles and power, immortalized in the infamous film "Olympia" by Leni Riefenstahl?

Clearly the Kremlin and its ideologues, eager to promote the "spirit" of the Stalinist 1930s to the nation as a source of inspiration, are doomed in the outside world. Twenty-first-century Europe, if for no other reason than self-preservation, will never accept as an equal partner a state that is constantly looking back to its darkest past as a source of motivation and inspiration. Today Putin is refused an honorary academic degree, tomorrow Europe's leaders may choose to shut the doors -- just as they decided to do with Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.

And there was one other minor, yet related, event last week: At the request of the Central Bank, CreditTrust bank was declared bankrupt and a fraud case was filed with the law enforcement authorities. The event would not merit a mention if not for one tiny detail: Leonid Tyagachyov, the president of the Russian Olympic Committee which ordered the ambiguous uniform, was re-elected as chairman of the board of CreditTrust as recently as March. The lesson is clear: Corrupted morals and backward thinking do not make for good business any more than they make for good politics -- domestic or international.

Yevgenia Albats, who hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio on Sundays, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.