Western Media Coverage of Sochi

This about Politics, tagged , , was written by for on February 17, 2014

Here is a radio discussion on VoR I did on Sunday with Amos Gelb and Robert Bridge on the western media’s coverage of the Sochi Olympics.

http://voiceofrussia.com/uk/news/2014_02_17/Western-media-coverage-of-Sochi-The-worst-form-of-poor-sportsmanship-9458/

Please note that the written summary provided gives only a fraction of the discussion. Anyone wanting to follow the whole discussion will need to listen to it.  Please be warned it lasts around 40 minutes.  However  I thought it was a good discussion.  It contained the interesting disclosure from Amos Gelb that CNN was about to expose massive corruption at the Atlanta Olympics but that the story was suppressed by Ted Turner who had an interest them.  Evidence there (Russian liberals please note) that corruption is not exclusive to Russia but also happens on a big scale in the US including at Olympic Games and that the US media is fully capable of suppressing information about it when the interests involved are powerful enough

We got on to the subject of the “gay propaganda” law towards the end of the discussion. Anyone wanting my considered opinions of this law will not have to wait long. I have a (very) lengthy post on the subject almost ready.

Sochi-Adler Krasnaya Polyana Panorama

This about Society, tagged , , , , was written by for on February 2, 2014

There has been an unceasing campaign to denigrate the construction in the Sochi-Adler area. Incompetence, corruption, double toilets and so on and on. In all of this, few people have been shown what has been built for the total cost of 55 billion or so US Dollars. We have a preview; but first a discussion of cost.

Most Western sources claim that the real cost of the Sochi Olympics is the 55 billion and Putin is assumed to be lying when he says the cost is 6 billion or so. Now that Navalniy has his report out that claims to measure the alleged corruption, the Western media is full of wide-eyed quotations from it. But Western discussions, and Navalniy (not, I suspect, by coincidence) ignore the other stated purpose of the construction which is to create a full-scale sports and holiday complex in Russia’s Riviera. The aim being to attract Russian tourists away from foreign holidays and provide some development and employment opportunities in the chronically depressed North Caucasus.

So what is the real cost of the Olympics? 1) All of the 55 billion or 2) just the proportion that would not have been spent if the Olympics weren’t coming or 3) something in-between? The first question to be answered is how much of the total is definitely Olympics-only spending. Here Navalniy actually agrees with Putin: from his report “Olympstroy spent $6.3 bn to construct 11 sport venues”; that is the number Putin gives.

The disagreement is over what column to put the other expenditures in. Navalniy insists they all be charged to the Olympics, Putin that they be charged to resort complex construction and necessary infrastructure improvement. That’s what the disagreement actually amounts to, not that anyone in the Western media will tell you: Putin says some is Olympics, most is infrastructure, Navalniy says all is Olympics. But they agree on the total that has been spent. Putin wants to play the Olympics costs down, Navalniy wants to play them up; so each picks his favourite split. Each is being disingenuous.

Certainly an immense amount of money has been spent on sports facilities, visitor amusements, transportation facilities, hotels, restaurants and the rest. So, Dear Reader, you decide the split. How do you judge the most expensive single project (the 5-6 billion road-rail connection to the ski resort, replacing the Soviet-era link)? Would it have been built anyway to connect the town of Adler (where, as we have interminably been told, it doesn’t snow much) to the ski resort area where it does? Or do you judge that it was only built because of the Olympics? Or should only some of the cost be assigned to the Olympics and how would you assign it? How about the airport at Adler? The port development at Sochi? The isolation hospital in Lazerevskiy district? The Adler power station? The shopping mall? Putin says none, Navalniy says all but they don’t disagree that 50-plus billion was spent overall. And, when you make your decision, what makes you think the next person would agree? The only correct answer is that, when the Olympics are gone, there will still be a vast complex of modern facilities in a place and situation that ought to be pretty attractive to tourists.

The truth is that a large high quality resort complex has been constructed, together with a great deal of infrastructure created or improved; some of this was built only because the Olympics were coming. So what is the cost of the Olympics? I don’t know either. 6 billion seems too narrow a definition but 55 billion is far too high. Can we pick a number out of the sky and say 7 or 8? Certainly a ludicrous amount of money to shell out for a few weeks of sports; probably an argument for having a permanent facility but, given that there wasn’t much there in the beginning except Nature, not absurdly high as these things are priced.

These panoramic photos show what has been done. And don’t forget, Dear Reader, Navalniy and others would like us to believe that a third of the money was stolen: look at all this stuff and decide whether that sounds right.

Russian language only, but you’ll get the idea.

PS. The toilet story isn’t true.

Shredding Sochi… in a Good Way

This about Society, tagged , , , was written by for , on January 31, 2014

After a long break, a new contribution to the Experts Panel:

Shredding Sochi… in a Good Way

Western journalists have been in the business of dismissing Russian achievements and magnifying Russian failures ever since Putin drove them into a collective derangement syndrome – he even haunts their dreams, as recently revealed by the Guardian’s Shaun Walker – so the preemptive besmirching of the Sochi Olympics can’t have surprised anyone.

What is startling, though, is the unusually low competence of the effort, even by the standards of these people that are sarcastically referred to as “democratic journalists” in Russia.

The first and foremost attack revolved around the supposed corruption surrounding the Sochi Olympics. In 2010, the Russian magazine Esquire estimated that 48km of roads around Sochi consumed a cool $8 billion of taxpayer money, a sum that implied the asphalt might as well have been made of elite beluga caviar. Julia Ioffe cheerily transmitted these sophomoric calculations to the Anglosphere. The only problem with these actuarial wisecracks? Said road also included a railway, 50 bridges, and 27km worth of tunnels over mountainous terrain… which presumably made it something more than just a road. What was intended as a metaphor for Sochi corruption turned out to be, ironically, a metaphor for unfounded attacks against it.

There are incessant comparisons to the $8 billion spent during the 2010 Olympics in Canada. But this sidesteps the fact that Whistler was already a world-class ski resort, whereas Sochi’s infrastructure had to be built from scratch and at relatively short notice. The actual event-related costs of the Sochi Olympics are $7 billion, of which only half was directly drawn from the state budget. This is not to say that there was no stealing – of course there was, as corruption is a real problem in Russia, and is especially endemic in the construction industry. Navalny has created an entire website about it, and coordinated a campaign against Sochi with Buzzfeed and The New York Times. But what’s striking is that far from the pharaonic levels of misappropriation we might expected from the tone of the coverage, in most cases the markup was in the order of 50%-100% relative to “comparable” Western projects (and that’s after selecting the most egregious cases). This isn’t “good,” needless to say, but it’s hardly unprecedented in Western experience. In any case, a number of criminal cases have been opened up, so impunity is not guaranteed. (The most prominent “victim,” Akhmed Bilalov, has fled the country and claimed he was poisoned – all true to the form of emigre oligarch thieves from the ex-Sovie Union).

The lion’s share of the $50 billion investment in Sochi – some 80% of it or so – consists of infrastructure projects to make Sochi into a world-class ski resort that will provide employment in the restive North Caucasus, kickstart the development of a Russian snowsports culture, and draw at least some of the more patriotic elites away from Courcheval.

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Translation: The Caucasus Situation

This about Politics, tagged , , , was written by for on September 10, 2013

In this article by Alexey Stepanov from Komsomolskaya Pravda, recent events and continued concern over the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi demonstrate that terrorism still afflicts Russian territory

Putin: Several Countries Are Deliberately Destabilizing the Situation in the Northern Caucasus

The President of the Russian Federation urged to “more roughly stop such attempts and to always give an appropriate response.”

At an enlarged meeting of Russia’s Security Council, the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin stated that several countries and international organizations are still interested in the destabilization of the situation in the Northern Caucuses.

“We are facing the destructive, anti-Russian activity of a number of foreign countries and non-governmental and international organizations under their control, who still consider the Northern Caucasus as a base for the destabilization of Russia as a whole” said Putin, as quoted by the BBC.

In connection with this, Putin considers it necessary to “more roughly stop such attempts and to always give an appropriate response.”The head of the government also emphasized that the terrorist threat in the Northern Caucuses is holding out (still remains), now as before.

“In spite of the obvious positive progress, the state of affairs in the Northern Caucuses improves much too slowly.  The terrorist threat and challenges to security have not been removed once and for all”, Vladimir Putin declared, recalling, “the suppression and neutralization of terrorist and criminal threats are especially important in connection with the holding of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014.”

We remind you that on Monday, September 9th, at around 8 in the morning, a Russian diplomat in Abkhazia was shot and killed.

In Moscow on Sunday, September 8th, the 25 year old militant Sherali Kuratov, of the extremist organization “Mujahideen Jamaat al-Tawheed Val-Jihad”, was arrested with a grenade in his pocket.

On the eve of the holiday¹ in the capital, several attacks against members of Moscow’s police force occurred, which led to (ended up with) mass arrests of immigrants and members of criminal ethnic groups.  Moscow’s Central Office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs stressed that these raids in the struggle against illegal immigrants were not demonstrative and will be conducted regularly.

Translator notes

1.  The holiday in question is “Election Day”

Olympic Observations

This about Human Biodiversity, tagged , , was written by for on August 12, 2012

Now that the Olympics are drawing to an end, it’s now time for me to weigh in with my HBD / game perspective.

(1) What is up with India? Only 5 medals. Record-setting (3 in Beijing, 0-2 in all previous Olympics) but that’s still atrocious for a country of 1.2 billion people – even a poor and malnourished one. Michael Phelps alone has won almost as many Gold medals as India has done as a nation for as long as the Olympics existed. Why? Ryan G. will be along to lecture me soon enough on my Indophobia 🙂 , but I think it’s due to a perfect storm of negative HBD, economic and cultural reasons. Indians like East Asians have low testosterone; they are malnourished, and it doesn’t help that many are follow an inferior diet i.e. vegetarianism; the Commonwealth Games showed them to be pretty disorganized which doesn’t bode well for athlete training programs; and finally it appears that many Indians disdain sport and physical activity (their love of cricket actually proves this: Not exactly the most physically intense sport out there). I’m sure as India gets richer they’ll start earning more medals but I doubt they’ll ever do much better than 10th or so.

(2) Russia didn’t perform badly, contrary to popular opinion. Vancouver was a disaster. This wasn’t. As of the time of writing, its total medal count (78) exceeds Beijing 2008 (73) and Atlanta 1996 (63) and isn’t far from Sydney 2000 (89) and 2004 Athens (92). It’s still third overall and given the population and commitment of China, and the advanced training facilities and Black population (let’s be realistic) of America, coming third on total medal counts is entirely respectable. This time it was overtaken by Britain in the gold medals tally, but this reflects an astoundingly good British performance rather than Russian under-achievement.

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The Red Slope to Caviar Road

This about Economy, tagged , , , was written by for on July 23, 2010

The Russian magazine Esquire came up with some pretty shocking figures: It would be cheaper to pave one 48km road for the Sochi Olympics with elite beluga caviar than asphalt. The total cost would come in at a cool 227 billion rubles, or $160 million per kilometer – five times higher than what it costs to build an equivalent stretch of Autobahn! (It’s also 2/3 of what Russia spent on all road construction in 2009). But even under the most charitable assumptions, that the Sochi road will be built to the highest traction and environmental standards, doesn’t this mean that at least 80% of the Sochi road funds are being stolen?

Not really. The only problem with looking at Russia through this failed state prism, without bothering to corroborate sources, is that in no sense can the Adler-Krasnaya Polyana route be described as just a “roadway”. Intended to be completed within 3 years in an area with a poorly developed infrastructure, this so-called “road” also includes a high-speed railway, more than 50 bridges, and 27km of tunnels over mountainous, ecologically-fragile terrain!

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