Sochi Winter Olympics will weaken Russia's Vladimir Putin, not help him

THE Sochi Olympics, Vladimir Putin's $50 billion vanity project, may end up merely showcasing Russia's many weaknesses.

OVER-controlled, overspent and over-egged, the Winter Games of Vladimir Putin are a wilful act of megalomania, the vanity project of a leader who has long since abandoned any ambition to modernise Russia. Sochi, where Stalin used to go to treat his pleurisy and play skittles with his murderous henchmen, has been transformed into a celebration of the achievements of Mr Putin's Russia - and yet may end up merely showcasing its weaknesses.

Not that anyone seriously wishes ill to Sochi, neither the balmy palm-treed resort that has been smothered in concrete nor the Games themselves. If, in the Olympic spirit, Western sportsmen and women end up befriending Russians, that is good. Even better, of course, if they find ways of cocking a snook at the country's anti-gay laws, which come very close to violating the Olympic Charter.

Forced, however briefly, to be nice, authoritarian regimes can learn something from international get-togethers.

There is a real risk, though, that things could go badly wrong. The vicious suicide bombing of Volgograd station last December demonstrated that Islamic jihadists, based in the North Caucasus but ready to strike throughout Russia, could provide a violent backdrop to the Olympics.

With 40,000 troops and police on the ground, Sochi will be difficult to infiltrate. The terrorist tactic of men such as the Chechen Islamist Doku Umarov will be to attack cities nearby to draw away Russian security forces.

The tension around Sochi is a reminder of the fundamental problems that Mr Putin has failed to tackle during his 13 years in power as President and Prime Minister. Since crushing the Chechen insurgency in 2000 his policy towards the southern tinderbox has been one of relentless crackdowns. There has been no comprehensive political solution to the conflicts in North Caucasus. Russian special forces swoop on supposed fundamentalists on the thinnest of pretexts. Families are collectively punished for individual acts of rebellion. There is no rehabilitation of former fighters, no serious Sufi-Salafi dialogue. Many locals in Dagestan and Ingushetia feel brutalised and exploited. The entire region has been muzzled lest anyone disturb the calm of Sochi.

The deeper failure, though, is in managing the consequences of the breakup of the multinational Soviet empire. The demography of Russia has become a central problem: ethnic Russians have very low birth rates and very high death rates. That has improved slightly over the past year but it is still the rapid growth of the Muslim population that is preventing Russia from slipping fast. In 1991 there were 148.5 million Russians; in 2010 141.9 million. Its cities are increasingly dependent on, but resentful of, cheap migrant labour from the south. For Mr Putin, it is a crisis so big that it has become invisible.

When Russia bid to host its first Winter Olympics in 2007, the expected cost was about $12 billion.

However, the extensive renovation of Sochi has seen the cost blow out to about $50 billion, the most expensive Olympics yet.

The Sochi games are a classic Soviet-style pantomime, a massive deployment of resources to simulate national unity. Yet even Stalin would not have approved of the current defacing of the resort. The real dilemma buried during the Putin era is about Russian identity, its sense of self. Is it Europe or is it Asia, or, as Andre Malraux had it, neither? What are its true borders?

The southern republics that are short bus drives from Sochi are being treated as postcolonial ballast, interesting only for their manpower. And to the west, Ukraine is seen as part of the emotional Russian heartland, worth fighting for at least diplomatically and economically. Rather than exorcising the Russian fear of encirclement, Mr Putin has created enemies and rivals on his western, southern and eastern borders. By invading Georgia in 2008 (during the Beijing Olympics), he pushed the country closer to NATO. By failing to contain China, he is now up against a formidable rival for influence in Central Asia.

Don't expect answers any more from Mr Putin. Some Kremlin watchers believe that after Sochi the Russian leader will have time to address the country's real challenges. I wouldn't count on it. It is clear now: he's not a strategist. He's certainly not an economist - under his watch Russia has become more dependent on oil and gas (75 per cent of all exports) and needs an oil price of dollars 103 a barrel to balance its budget (in 2005 it was dollars 20 a barrel).

There is massive waste, low growth, worrying inflation, and productivity less than half the level in the EU.

No doubt the Russian leader imagined that Sochi would contribute to his greater glory. Instead, he is emerging from it all as a weak (if enduring) tsar. In a few years time, Sochi, the legacy of the Putin era, will resemble a Black Sea version of Torremolinos - a destination for mass-market summer binge tourism with a bonus of the world's most expensive, and pointless, ski jump.

The Times