Russian identity, the Olympics and sport

100 Rouble note showing image of the Fisht Stadium

I remember London at the time of the Olympics, and how a great sense of excitement overcame the capital city.  During the Opening Ceremony, as the Olympic circles rose over the Stadium, London and Britain became focussed on sport and on welcoming an international audience to its Games.  The Games, and its attendant cultural activities, gave us a sense of our national pride.  In London at least, people were walking around with smiles on their faces.

In Sochi, Russia, as the dramas of the Winter Olympic Games unfurl, I am hoping that the same feelings are shared.  The Opening Ceremony filled me with optimism that Russia may find a way of celebrating its national identity and of unifying the diverse characteristics that are a result of its turbulent history, multiple ethnicities and vast geography.  These Games give Russia the opportunity to emphasise its unrivalled artistic and sporting heritage and hence highlight its position as an emerging cultural superpower, and the Opening Ceremony were its first steps in that direction.

It is all too easy to forget that it is only a little more than twenty years ago that Russia was a Communist country whose governance left it isolated from the English language speaking world.  In Britain, we therefore knew very little about our friends in Moscow, St Petersburg and beyond, other than what we saw on the stage of the ballet theatre and sporting arena, what we heard in the media, and what our governments chose to tell us about the conduct of diplomatic relations. 

Today, of course, Russia is a little more open, and its self image is increasingly important as the country attempts to re-establish itself as a leading nation and develop a higher, more confident profile on the world stage.  Since 1991, most effort has been put into the development of its economy and infrastructure, and the pursuit of wealth has become a theme in the developing narrative of Russian national identity.  The obscenely wealthy Russian Oligarch has become a cipher for the notion that Russia is growing into an economic superpower.  Names of vast, powerful companies such as Gazprom have become familiar to us in the West.  When I visited Moscow last spring, the iconic GUM department store, once a very old-fashioned department store under the Communists, was full of high end brands such as Chanel.  One could almost imagine that Russia were a wealthy country.  However, the everyday reality for the vast majority of Russians is somewhat different.  Wealth remains in the hands of a very small number of individuals, while the majority work hard for a relatively small return.  The Oligarch is only one part of the story.

Russian company Gazprom are sponsors of the Olympic cauldron in Sochi

It is, surely, natural that a society that has undergone such change will face itself with a degree of uncertainty.  Russia still has to find itself, and to reconcile its past with its ever-changing present.  There was a clear sense of nostalgia for the Communist era expressed in the Opening Ceremony but this does not tell other, more difficult truths associated with that era, truths that may have scarred some Russians.  Russia still also has some catching up to do in terms of its civil liberties, where current mores seem retrograde.  The Olympics has made the whole world aware of such problems and perhaps the exposure will help Russian society to begin to discuss and address its problems.  Hopefully the Olympics and its associated cultural programmes will also give Russia a way to think about its past and its present, to heal, and to begin to find a way of expressing a holistic and inclusive national personality.  Exposure to alternative ways of seeing, and integration with the international community might also bring positive benefits and reduce the tendency to look inward that can be a characteristic of large countries.

Russia as a cultural superpower is one aspect of the national personality that I hope might begin to emerge following the Games.  The Opening Ceremony highlighted much that is special about Russia -  dance, music, literature and science.  Much of this has become so central to our lives, so familiar that we hardly stop to think about it as a product of Russia.  An estimated three billion viewers* worldwide watched the Olympic opening ceremony worldwide (Kozlov, 2014), enjoying some of the most recognisable aspects of Russian culture as well as a short history of the country and some highlights from its sporting past. 

The link between sport and culture was a strong one during the Soviet era.  In this blog, we have previously examined the significance of the terms 'physical culture' and 'sportivnosti' to the sporting culture and ethic of the Soviet Union.  In short, sport went beyond the physical into the spiritual domain, representing a means of overcoming the constraints of the human body and of expressing innovation and great achievement.  Artistic gymnastics as a sport was an almost perfect expression of this morale, and fitted perfectly into the Soviet philosophy of sport as culture. 

Yet in Russia today, sport has lost its 'cultural' label, and you won't find many people talking about physical culture.  Artistic gymnastics, once so prominent in the Soviet Union's projection of itself as a nation, has lost profile, at least in terms of its popularity as a spectator sport; during the European Championships, held in Moscow in the spring of 2013, they could barely fill half the seats of the Olympiski arena that was once packed for such regular competitions as the Moscow News.  Participation levels have slumped to the extent that there are barely enough elite gymnasts to fuel the national women's team.  Coaches have departed overseas in order to be able to continue their employment in a job they love, and to earn a decent living.  If Russia cannot overcome these basic problems of participation and retention, they might not produce enough gymnasts and coaches to support a profile in international competition.  The international emphasis of the sport has certainly turned away from the cultural and aesthetic towards the athletic and powerful, and is thus less redolent of the Russian national character than once it was.  One question this asks is whether Russia's current investment in sport as agent of economic uplift is dependent upon the successful performance of its athletes? 

Doga's Sweet and Tender Beast provided inspiration for this waltz

There was a time when sport provided a bridge between Russia's public face and its culture.  Artistic gymnastics in particular made the classical music and dance most closely associated with Russia accessible to a wider audience, and perhaps in turn the music gave their sport character.  One of the highlights of the Opening Ceremony was a colourfully lit waltz to Eugen Doga's Sweet and Tender Beast.  It was an atmospheric salute back to Russia's last Olympics, the 1980 Moscow Games.  Doga, Romanian by birth, lived in Russia for most of his life, and wrote the piece for that 1980 Games' opening ceremony.  In Sochi, 34 years later, here it was again, providing the backdrop to a scene from Tolstoy's War and Peace.  That was not the only reason, though, that my ears pricked when hearing the piece.  Those of you who have followed gymnastics closely for the past 40 years or so will recognise the tune as one that the unforgettable Irina Baraksanova interpreted during the 1984 Alternative Olympics and the 1985 World Championships.  In the Sochi Opening ceremony we also heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (Olga Strazheva), and Khatchaturian's Sabre Dance (Natalia Shaposhnikova), perhaps showing that Russian tastes haven't changed much in the last few years, or at the very least that the Soviet Russian taste for classical music has endured.

It may be all very well for me to remind readers of the cultural significance of Russian sport and how Russia continues to leverage both culture and sport as a means of promoting international friendship and profile.  At the same time as the Olympics have immense positive potential, all present-day Olympics are also accompanied by a fair deal of controversy, not least due to the huge expenses they incur.  It can be difficult to justify this financial expense when ordinary people are struggling to earn enough money to buy food, and when the conflicting priorities of healthcare, education and housing seem to be sacrificed at the altar of big time sport.  But without making investments in the underlying infrastructure to support an economic uplift, these problems will remain unchanged and everyday life will remain a struggle for the vast majority of Russians.  The Olympic Games are not only symbolic of international peace and friendship, they are also a hugely powerful international brand that can provide a larger, unifying purpose, a focus for collective efforts to strengthen the economy and to illuminate the positive aspects of society, a catalyst for change and the immense effort that it takes to overturn long held trends and attitudes. Their legacy can and should be far reaching, to justify all that expense, yet their success can only be judged at a significant distance, long after the Games are over.  The next twenty years will show us the extent to which the Olympic legacy benefits Russia.

Mishka and the Olympic mascots extinguish the Olympic flame (sadly) on Sunday evening

This legacy may not only be economic, but also something closer to spiritual, healing and diplomatic, especially in the case of a country like Russia, which has undergone immense change over the past twenty years and looks likely to change even more in the next twenty.  Not only can the Games be an agent for a changing self identity, it also seems true that Russia's relationship with the world at large is changing.  Social media is growing and there is much more opportunity for one to one communication and networking between people in different countries.  A loose interpretation of this could be that diplomatic relations between countries are becoming less formal, less under the control of governments and more informal and diversified between individuals.  The beacon of the Olympic Games leads to a focus on one particular country and the shift of power that this infers can work both ways.  Read this article from the New York Times to understand one viewpoint of how powerful these Games have been in changing opinions in Russia's favour, even within such a short period of time.

Much of this article was written as the Games took place, and before the closing ceremony.  At the outset of the Games, media coverage (especially out of the USA) rather meanly focussed on some of the adverse aspects of the set up such as the texture of the snow and inadequacies in the hotel provision.  Russia's civil liberties record has also quite rightly been under the spotlight.  Yet Russia's sport and culture, and the hospitality of its people, seems to have won through by the end of the Games. 


*Three billion is three times more than the estimated audience of the London Olympics ceremony - impossible to know how they arrived at these figures ...

References and further reading

Kozlov, V (2014) 'Sochi: Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony Viewed by 43 million Russians' The Hollywood Reporter 11th February 2014 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sochi-winter-olympics-opening-ceremony-679250 accessed 12/2/2014

Booth, E (2014) 'Is Gymnastics Still Russian? A post-Europeans, early Olympiad perspective'Rewriting Russian Gymnastics 23rd May 2013 http://rewritingrussiangymnastics.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/is-gymnastics-still-russian-post.html accessed 12/2/2014

Macur, J (2014) 'Amid the triumphs, an argument for tolerance: Olympic closing ceremony proves Russia a worthy host' New York Times 23rd February 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/sports/olympics/olympic-closing-ceremony-proves-russia-a-worthy-host.html?_r=0 accessed 25/2/2014