Peter Pomerantsev

Among the alleged thirty billion dollars’ worth of inflated contracts, self-dealing, kick-backs, crooked tenders and orgiastic waste that have made the Sochi Olympics cost more than all previous winter games put together, what stands out is the sheer brazenness of the whole thing. ‘The Sochi Olympics reveal the dark heart of Putin’s Russia,’ Panorama concluded on 27 January. But nobody is really bothering to hide it. The Kremlin knows it doesn’t matter how much is stolen or siphoned away: Gazprom will still control energy in Europe, Berlin will still appease Putin, Brussels will still roll over, London will still yearn for oligarchs’ money.

In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Slavoj Žižek takes a scalpel to the late Soviet period. The surface, spoken ideology, Žižek argues, was not what actually held the system together. You could joke about ‘great leaders’ and the inadequacies of Marxist economics: the system let you have a giggle. The real holy of holies was the idea of the narod (‘common people’), in whose name the leadership could validate any action. Thus the deeply subversive nature of Milos Forman’s early, Czechoslovak films such as The Firemen’s Ball, which portrayed the narod as stupid, greedy, ugly. This was a cut the system couldn’t take and Forman had to leave. Over the last few days Russia’s only independent (and really rather small) TV channel, TV Rain, was accused by the Kremlin of stepping ‘beyond the limits of the permissible’. Most cable carriers dumped the station, leaving it in crisis and its future under serious question.

Commentary on the turmoil in Ukraine often focuses on the division between a Russian-speaking east and a Ukrainian-speaking west. Ethnolinguistic lines, the argument goes, explain the pro-Moscow v. pro-EU camps, pro-protest v. pro-Yanukovich. But the situation is more nuanced than that. The closest thing Maidan has to a leader is the boxing champ Klitschko, who struggles in Ukrainian and whose Russian is far purer than President Yanukovich’s. Its first martyrs are an ethnic Armenian from Russian-speaking Dnepropetrovsk and a Belarussian Ukrainian resident. Its violent front line appears to be multilingual.

Of all the pages of comment and analysis I’ve read since Mikhail Khodorkovsky was suddenly pardoned on Friday by Vladimir Putin after spending ten years in prison, a note on the Facebook page of the film critic Roman Volobuev stood out: All day I’ve been thinking: 10 years in a Russian prison! You know what a Russian prison smells like? I’ve been to Russian prisons a couple of times for work and I still dream of that smell periodically. And now a man who’s been there ten years is in a nice hotel room, takes off his socks and walks barefoot on the carpet, or has a drink of Glenlivet and just lies down in the bath... and all that stuff about the Future of Democracy. That can wait.

For the 20th anniversary of the Russian constitution last week, Vladimir Putin gave a big speech in which he announced that the new Russia seeks leadership but not superpower status, has no ambitions to interfere in the affairs of other countries, and is increasingly looked to by other nations as a guide for spiritual and moral values. At the Kremlin party afterwards, the ageing rocker Oleg Gazmanov played his hit ‘Born in the USSR’, which echoes the tune of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’: