Winter is Coming (38 page)

Negotiations continued through December while Maidan became a strange sort of pro-freedom tourist destination, with visiting politicians from all over the world coming to speak to the crowds. Protesters, journalists, and opposition leaders were victimized in raids and attacks by shadowy forces. Incredibly, while it all seemed to be rushing by at the time, with news and surprises coming nearly every day, the standoff continued well into January. Putin kept dangling carrots that Yanukovych was too terrified to reach for. Putin would rather have seen the protesters violently put down than peacefully accommodated, of course. The Kremlin had hoped the Orange Revolution virus had been isolated and contained along Russia’s borders and promised Ukraine $15 billion to aid in its quarantine. Yanukovych’s panicky turnarounds showed that although he wanted to live like Putin, he did not want to die like Gaddafi.

More violence erupted soon after new anti-protest laws were passed on January 16, including several deaths. Several activists who had gone to the hospital for treatment were abducted and one was later found murdered. Yanukovych attempted to bring the opposition leaders inside his government in an attempt to quell the protests, offering positions to Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Klitschko. The offer was declined.

Throughout Euromaidan, Russian officials made increasingly hysterical accusations about the role of “foreign agents” in the protests. Despite having no evidence, the Kremlin repeatedly accused the Ukrainian citizens of being trained and armed by America and of plotting a violent coup. This line was reminiscent of the way the Soviet Union treated dissidents. If you were against them it could only be because you were a foreign spy, or crazy. The Kremlin could not afford to admit that Ukrainians, the people closest to Russians, were fighting for their freedom. As with Georgia, it was a bad example that could give Russians dangerous ideas.

Despite the resignation of the entire Ukrainian cabinet on January 28, and the Yanukovych government’s sudden willingness to make minor concessions to the courageous protestors, tension continued to build in the streets. A Kremlin delegation arrived to discuss things with Yanukovych in private. It was as if the government was waiting for something. The relative calm ended on February 18 as violence erupted over the next several days. Russian-trained snipers from the Ukrainian special forces fired into the crowds. At least eighty people were killed (including a dozen police) and more than a thousand were seriously injured. But again the protesters refused to disappear and this time it was clear they would settle for nothing less than Yanukovych’s exit. Euromaidan went from protest to revolution.

Instead of resigning or waiting to be impeached, Yanukovych fled to the safety of his patrons in Russia before he could be brought to justice over the epic scale of his corruption. Photos of his gold-plated palace spread like wildfire on the Internet as the opposition established a new government and scheduled new elections for May.

It is no coincidence that the Ukrainian security forces stormed the Kyiv opposition camps of Maidan during the Sochi Games, which ran February 7-23. Russia invaded Georgia during the Beijing Olympics in 2008, remember. Such spectacles have often provided useful distractions and much of the media that had been in Kyiv had moved to Sochi by the time the worst violence erupted.

Sochi provided a distraction at home for Putin as well. Opposition activist Sergei Udaltsov’s trial was delayed until February 18; he faced ten years in prison for “organizing mass riots,” which is Kremlin-speak for walking down the street at the front of a protest march—the march that was peaceful until violently crushed by police. The Bolotnaya Square case produced eight guilty verdicts on February 21, again under the welcome distraction of the Olympic Games.

The news showed plenty of photos of a smiling Vladimir Putin posing and raising glasses with deferential politicians, officials, and athletes; exactly the coverage he hoped for while his injustice system created more Russian political prisoners. Putin learned from history that people tire of bad news, tire of hearing sad stories of repression and death. Propaganda works best of all when it is easier to hear lies than to hear the truth, but it cannot change the truth.

As I had feared would happen, Olympics broadcaster NBC and the IOC followed Putin’s script and portrayed Sochi as a step toward liberalization in Russia instead of the reverse. Putin used the Games as a distraction from show trials and the most virulent anti-American and anti-Semitic campaigns in decades. How could these stories compete with figure skaters and hockey players? But the Ukrainian people did not play their appointed roles and they fought for their freedom and their lives. Their courage deserves every accolade. The protesters of Euromaidan remind us that no matter how much respect a dictator is paid by foreign leaders during his rule, the story ends the same way: disgrace in the eyes of his own people.

The International Olympic Committee was an eager partner in all of it and of course has a long and dark history of its own. For example, after the triumph of Berlin the next Games were planned for the fascist capitals of Tokyo in 1940 and Rome in 1944. IOC president Thomas Bach’s strained protests about how foreign leaders protesting Sochi were “inserting politics into sport” ignored the fact that selling a huge platform for propaganda and corruption to a dictatorship is also “playing politics.” By Bach’s dubious rationale, the IOC would happily award the Games to North Korea as long as the venues were adequate and the fees were paid promptly.

I knew Putin was not standing by idly while his flunky Yanukovych abandoned Ukraine. I warned in an article in the French paper
Le Monde
on February 24 that “if Putin cannot have all of Ukraine under his fist, he would settle for partition. Already, guided by the Kremlin, Russian-leaning regions of Ukraine like Crimea are talking of ‘independence,’ which, in the finest Orwellian tradition, would mean exactly the opposite, the loss of freedom as a piece of Putin’s neo-USSR.”

When Assad and Putin danced a waltz across Obama’s red line in Syria in 2013, I warned that dictators and would-be dictators from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang were watching closely. Would the West stand up to aggression against a sovereign state to preserve “regional influence”? Did the Obama administration in particular have the courage of its convictions when it came to keeping promises when they were challenged? While there were other factors, I’m convinced that Syria gave Putin added confidence to find out. Putin had returned Russia to a police state and Ukraine, referred to by Putin as “Little Russia,” was next on his list. This seemed apparent to me, especially considering the many parallels with the Berlin Games of 1936.

Putin wanted the Sochi Olympiad to be his Peter the Great moment, his beloved Soviet summer resort town turned into an international jewel the way St. Petersburg was built into an imperial capital practically from scratch. Putin also hoped to drum up some patriotic pride with a big circus to serve with thick Russian black bread. This is the sort of delusion that sets in when a despot confuses himself with the state after being too long in power. Absent the feedback mechanisms of a free media and real elections, he begins to believe his glory is the country’s glory, that what makes him happy also makes the people happy.

There is a distinction here between Sochi 2014 and the Summer Games in Moscow in 1980 and Beijing in 2008. In those earlier cases, the authoritarian propaganda machine was in the service of promoting the achievements of a country and a system. They were dedicated to the greater glory of Communism, the totalitarian state, the superiority of the system and the athletes it produced. Nobody remembers who presided over the 2008 Games in Beijing and only a few might recall Brezhnev in Moscow. Meanwhile, the chairman of the Russian Olympic Committee never appeared on TV or anywhere else, nor did the director of the Sochi Games. No, the Sochi spectacle was clearly about the ambitions and hubris of one ubiquitous man, something it has in common with the Summer Games held in Berlin in 1936.

I will detour for a moment because this is where I often used to see interviewers and pundits roll their eyes. The phrase “But Putin is no Hitler!” formed on their lips before I’d finished saying the word “Berlin.” It is a fascinating and dangerous development in historical ignorance that nearly any mention of Hitler or the Nazis is now ritually scoffed at, from professional journalists to anonymous tweets. It’s as if the slow and public evolution of a German populist politician into history’s most infamous monster is beyond rational contemplation.

I’m very aware of the dangers of comparing anything bad to the Nazis or Hitler, or everything repressive to fascism, or every act of appeasement to Munich. Overuse leads to trivialization and the loss of meaning, which is also why “genocide” and “Holocaust” must be reserved for very specific things instead of used casually or for shock value. This is the very heart of “Never again” and it must not be forgotten. This is why President Obama’s seven-year streak of breaking his 2008 campaign promise to recognize the Armenian genocide matters. How can we fight against the many evils present in our world today if we do not have the courage to face an evil whose ghosts are a century old? So we must be honest and we must be brave enough to call evil by its name, especially the mother of all twentieth-century genocides.

And so it is not at all lightly that I compare a modern one-man dictatorship spreading fascist propaganda to a previous one when it annexes a chunk of a European neighbor on exactly the same pretext of “protecting our blood brothers.” It is not out of ignorance or a desire to shock that I compare the cowardice and conciliation displayed today by the leaders of the free world toward Putin with the desperate, futile, and ultimately ruinous appeasement policies of the 1930s toward Hitler. These are coherent and dangerous precedents, not trivial comparisons of two diminutive autocrats each with a penchant for profanity.

Of course the evil of the Nazis defies rational comparison. Of course no one can rival the murderous fiend Hitler became in the 1940s, or the horrors he produced. Of course no one assumes a new world war or an attempt to emulate the Holocaust. But summarily discarding the lessons of Hitler’s political rise, how he wielded power, and how he was disregarded and abetted for so long is foolish and dangerous. And as I said in the introduction, back in 1936 even Hitler was no Hitler. He was already viewed with suspicion by many inside and outside Germany, yes, but he stood beaming in that Berlin Olympic stadium and received accolades from world leaders and stiff-armed salutes from the world’s athletes. There is no doubt that this triumph on the world stage emboldened the Nazis and strengthened their ambitions.

Intentionally or not, the Putin regime followed the Berlin 1936 playbook quite closely for Sochi. There were the same token concessions in response to international outcries over bigoted laws. A few prominent political prisoners were released right before the journalists arrived. Even the tone of the propaganda had a very familiar ring, as brilliantly illustrated by the writer and journalist Viktor Shenderovich. He quoted a statement by Putin loyalist politician Vladimir Yakunin accusing the Western media of anti-Russian hysteria and hostility and condemning these foreign critics for attempting to disrupt the Olympics. Shenderovich then revealed that half of the statement was actually by Karl Ritter von Halt, the organizer of the Berlin Games, only substituting “Russia” for “Germany” throughout. The transition was seamless.

At the end of February 2014, for the second time in six years, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops across an internationally recognized border to occupy territory. This fact must be stated plainly before any discussion of motives or consequences. Russian troops took Ukrainian Crimea by force, and also assisted with the evacuation there of Viktor Yanukovych. This act made Putin a member of an exclusive club, along with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, as one of the very few leaders to invade a neighboring nation in the nuclear age. A few weeks later Putin outdid Milosevic by formally annexing Crimea, as Hussein did with Kuwait.