News Journal: Olympics will offer window into Russian oppression

Suppose President Obama made a big deal about playing on a basketball team against the best of the NBA’s players, and his team won. Americans would collectively laugh so loud you could probably hear them all the way to Moscow.

If they are laughing in Moscow about the recent victory of 61-year-old President Putin’s hockey team against a team of Russian all-stars, they are doing so very privately.

That tells you a lot about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and the sad state of freedom in his country.

Next month’s Winter Olympic Games are the culmination of Putin’s determination to push himself and Russia into a larger role on the world stage.

He has spent an estimated $52 billion preparing Sochi for the games, $11 billion more than the record set by China on the 2008 summer Olympics.

The figure is even more astonishing when you take into account that the winter games are much smaller, hosting only 2,500 athletes compared to 11,000, and with only 15 venues compared to 40.

The payoff, he hopes, will be a huge public relations coup. But I think it is likely to be the opposite, as Putin’s Russia will be exposed for the first time in years to the scrutiny of a free press.

Freedom House ranks press freedom in Russia 176th out of 196 nations surveyed, right after Rwanda and the Sudan.

Its report says: “The already repressive press freedom environment in Russia declined even further with Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, as authorities relied on both crude and sophisticated forms of media management to distract the public from terrorist attacks, economic troubles and antigovernment protests. The government maintained its grip on key television outlets and tightened controls over the internet during the year, and most state and privately owned mass media engaged in blatant propaganda that glorified the country’s national leaders and fostered an image of political pluralism –especially in the months ahead of Putin’s victory in the March presidential election.

“Although the constitution provides for freedom of speech and of the press, officials have used the country’s politicized and corrupt court system to harass the few remaining independent journalists who dare to criticize widespread abuses by the authorities.”

Soon after Putin was first elected President in 2000, I had a conversation with Grigory Yavlinsky, a free market economist who had come in third in that election.

I asked him what Putin was like and what he would do. “Just think what a mid-level KGB officer [Putin had served 16 years in the KGB] would do. That’s what Putin will do.”

I haven’t seen any reason to quarrel with that prediction since.

Putin has used his control of the press to compile one of the world’s worse human rights record. Human Rights Watch summed it up this way.

“Mass protests following Russia’s December 2011 parliamentary elections prompted promises of political reforms. However, after his return to the presidency, Vladimir Putin oversaw the swift reversal of former President Dmitry Medvedev’s few, timid advances on political freedoms and unleashed an unprecedented crackdown against civic activism. New laws in 2012 restrict nongovernmental organizations and freedoms of assembly and expression.”

Up until recently, Russia’s huge oil and gas industries were able to prop up the economy. But that has come to an end.

The Economist recently reported that “with year-on-year GDP growth at just 1.2 percent last quarter and growth in investment and industrial production nearing zero, stagnation seems to be the most apt description of the Russian economy.”

The World Bank says that the Russian economy “could be running very close to its maximum capacity.”

Other economists point out that quality control is an enormous problem for Russian manufacturers, who are not making adequate capital investments in new equipment and technology.

There’s a long history of dictatorships drawing attention away from their failed economic policies by rallying their people against outside threats and distracting them with symbols of national greatness such as an Olympics venue.

Putin, with his incursion into Georgia and his intimidation of Ukraine and other former Soviet countries, is playing all those cards.

It will be interesting to see what happens when thousands of journalists from countries with real press freedom descend on Sochi next month.

I know for sure that you can’t fool people by obviously fixing a hockey game, and you can’t hide the ugliness of a political system with the glitter of a major sports event.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. Senator from Delaware.