Then and Now

When, in the summer of 1980, Soviet Russia bade a tearful goodbye to its giant Misha mascot, which drifted away from Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium with a bunch of balloons, organizers must have breathed a sigh of relief.

The 1980 Olympic Games, the first ever held in the Communist bloc, were finally over. The thousands of foreign guests who had demanded unprecedented security in the capital city could now go home.

KGB operatives at the Moscow Olympics had to pose as cleaning personnel at hotels, foreigners were searched at the border, and postal employees did not let any parcels out of Moscow without examining their contents.

One story, never officially confirmed, purports that the internal affairs minister at the time summoned 20 of Moscow’s biggest crime bosses, the so-called “thieves in law” (vory v zakone) running the capital’s criminal underworld, to a meeting in the ministry’s headquarters. There he demanded that they “rule out any excesses during the Olympics.”*

Six thousand foreigners were put on a black list, labeled as dangerous, and not allowed to attend the games. Muscovites deemed mentally ill or having “delusional ideas” (many dissidents were thus classified) were to be kept away, “to prevent harsh, antisocial outbursts.”

Declassified documents inked in the months preceding the 1980 games show that security officials saw the Moscow Olympics as threatened by hostile forces that dreamed of staging acts of terror and upsetting the Soviet celebration of sport.

“Foreign anti-Soviet, nationalist, clerical, and other groups are actively engaged in enemy work, preparing terrorist and other acts to undermine the Olympic Games on the territory of the Soviet Union,” read a memorandum to the Central Committee, penned jointly by the KGB and the interior ministry.

Homeless persons, former convicts and other “elements” whose appearance would clash with the state’s effort to showcase Soviet Moscow as a Communist Paradise were taken out of the city. The capital was cordoned off “to prevent unwelcome persons from coming to Moscow.” Ordinary Soviets could only get through if they had special permission, tickets to sporting events, or local residency registration (the coveted propiska). People wanting to purchase train or plane tickets to Moscow during the games were unable to buy tickets unless they could show their propiska to the ticket sellers.

People who lived in Moscow at the time say the capital seemed almost deserted, that there were no drunks in the streets, and stores were unusually well-stocked with products of all kinds – either because supply was better during the games, or because out-of-towners customarily arriving in the capital on so-called “sausage trains” were absent. (In the 1970s and ‘80s people would take trips to Moscow to buy food, such as sausage, as the capital was better supplied than the rest of central Russia. These were dubbed “sausage trains.”) Even Coca Cola was sold!

In the end, the biggest upset of the Moscow games came from US President Jimmy Carter, who urged other nations to boycott the event after the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “Neither the American people nor I will support sending an Olympic team to Moscow,” Carter announced in January 1980, just months before the opening ceremony and just as Russian athletes were leaving to compete in Lake Placid’s Winter Olympic Games. Faced with a widening boycott (dozens of countries declined to send teams to Moscow, and the US organized a so-called “Liberty Bell” games for athletes), the IOC briefly considered moving the Summer Games from Moscow to Montreal, but decided that the Canadian city was not ready (Montreal had hosted the 1976 games). Soviet authorities meanwhile scrambled to deal with the fact that many tickets would go unsold, and that US companies were cancelling deliveries of key items like camera equipment, and concentrate to make Coke.

The Soviet Union accused the US of actions inconsistent with the spirit of the Olympic charter, but then quickly toned down its most bitter rhetoric to concentrate on lobbying efforts to get countries to attend. Many foreign athletes who ended up attending walked under the Olympic flag at the opening ceremony and ascended the medal podium to the sounds of the Olympic anthem.

Meanwhile, in the iconic Moscow subway, authorities installed the clocks that remain there to this day, counting up the seconds since the last train’s departure and displaying the correct time – a feature that many still use to set their watches. The lighted navigational signs, also still in use, were hung. During the games, stations were announced in both English and Russian. This was rumored to be the reason why one station – Park Kultury imeni Gorkovo – had its name shortened to simply Park Kultury; there was not enough time to say it in both languages!

The build-up to the closing ceremony was so exciting that Muscovites were glued to their television sets that evening. Other entertainment venues, even theaters that normally had long lines for tickets and were nearly impossible to get into, were empty.

Moscow had witnessed huge construction projects, some of which are used to this day: the Olimpiysky Stadium, a new international terminal at Sheremetyevo Airport (then called Sheremetyevo-2, now known as the F terminal and overshadowed by the recently built modern D terminal), a new media center that is now the headquarters of RIA Novosti news agency, and the Cosmos Hotel for foreign tourists located near the exhibition center VDNKh. The Olympic Village for 12,000 athletes was located in southwestern Moscow and is now a residential neighborhood.

NOW

Since 1980, many things have changed. Guests and athletes are now carrying smart phones and laptops, the KGB has been renamed, Moscow is no longer the heart of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan is occupied by American troops rather than Russian, and this time Russia is hosting the Winter Games, a smaller-scale affair. That is, until you arrive in Sochi, where the event will take place.

There, the stadium complexes in Olympic Park (just a couple of kilometers from Abkhazia, a rebel region that has declared independence from Georgia) have dwarfed a former residential neighborhood and new roads have been built, including a 48-kilometer highway linking the park with mountain venues bordering Sochi National Park and the Caucasus Reserve.

Security in the city hearkens back to 1980, with officials requiring all arrivals to this city of 300,000 not in possession of Olympic passes to register with local authorities within three days (one if you’re a foreigner). And there are check points going up at all train stations and on roads. Faced with increased terrorist threats after the North Caucasus warlord Doku Umarov called on Islamists to attack Sochi, Russia has designated a vast mountain zone bordering Abkhazia and the region of Karachai-Cherkessia – connected to Sochi only by narrow hiking trails – a restricted zone where no hiker or hunter will be allowed between January and the end of March. Protests will also be restricted to specially designated zones.

The entire area will have massive surveillance and defense systems: locals have reported seeing anti-missile systems go up around the Olympic Park, while security agencies have been trained to use new types of surveillance drones equipped with cameras and infrared heat detectors. They will fly both above the stadiums and over the inaccessible mountains.

In a strange echo of the 1980 Olympics, a 2013 document outlining security in the Krasnodar region raised concerns about “the desire of certain anti-Russian circles to discredit the efforts of federal and regional authorities to prepare for the Olympic Games in Sochi,” warning that terrorist threats stemmed not from inside Russia, but from “foreign clerical and humanitarian organizations.”

In the run-up to the event, local activists and journalists working in the city said they appeared to have been targeted as part of a counter-terrorist operation. When a member of Environmental Watch on North Caucasus was stopped at a Krasnodar airport and held for over four hours at night, policemen showed him a mock all points bulletin distributed as part of a drill conducted in the region. Sochi residents were warned that “terrorists in training” would be going through the area and that they should contact the authorities if anything arouses their suspicion. The drill was apparently used as a pretext to search and harass activists who have alleged that the preparations for the games have harmed Sochi’s wilderness and the livelihoods of locals and construction workers.

The construction workers, overwhelmingly from Central Asia and frequently without documents, began to be deported en masse in September, after local Governor Alexander Tkachev ordered that no illegal migrant should be in the city when the games begin. But, as often happens, legal migrants were also sent home, and Russian citizens with dark features began to be stopped and detained, sometimes for days. In a particularly worrying incident, a central police station held dozens of people extra-judicially in its garage, denying that they had arrested anyone, even after construction companies inquired why their perfectly legal workers were frantically calling for help from inside police premises.

While local Sochi residents complained that migrant workers were making their neighborhoods unsafe at night, a local rights group, Migration and Rights, said many laborers were not being paid for hours worked and that some were deported without receiving their salaries. To catch migrants, officials conducted door-to-door checks, asking residents to provide a wide range of personal information, including passport and employment information. One Sochi resident laughed and said policemen carefully wrote down the names of all adult residents in the apartment and their dog, but ignored their cat and guinea pig.

City Hall published a list of hundreds of employment opportunities at the games on their website, a boon for the region. But then it turned out that the local government is requiring tens of thousands of volunteers, doctors, and food service employees working in Sochi to receive mandatory vaccinations against six different illnesses, including dysentery, measles, and Hepatitis A, all in the space of a couple of months, to the great displeasure of those who don’t want to subject their bodies to unnecessary shocks.

As the games drew closer, criticism also mounted over the organizers’ inability to deliver on some of their pledges, such as “Zero Waste.” Instead, companies were reportedly dumping construction waste in mountain areas, formerly part of the Sochi National Park, and failing to install any recycling facilities in the city. Environmentalists complained that promises of compensating the region for forests logged also fell short, as thousands of saplings planted in place of cut trees weren’t properly tended and quickly died.

As if that all that weren’t enough, in the latter half of 2013 some began to talk of a boycott, prompted by Russia’s “gay propaganda” law that bans the distribution of information about homosexuality to minors and was widely interpreted here as an anti-gay measure to be used to crack down on anyone who identifies themselves as LGBT, including tourists and sports fans. While gay activists protested in the US by pouring Stolichnaya vodka (in fact, made in Latvia) down sewer drains, the idea of a boycott never rose to the presidential level.

So American athletes will be zipping down Sochi’s slopes and gliding around its sleek new ice rinks. And visitors will probably not get fined for holding hands with a same-sex partner (although expect any protest action to be “tolerated” with an impressive show of force). Like in 1980, when Moscow was heralded as a Communist Paradise, in 2013 Sochi’s Olympic Park will be touted as an island of equal rights for all. Pesky protesters will be conveniently stopped on their way to Sochi. In Russia proper, it will be business as usual. RL