As a Russian historian, I'm struck by the parallels between Sochi and the reforms of
Peter the Great, his attempt to westernize medieval Russia, this was in the early 1700's.
We call Peter "great", but his reality is more complex.
His project to westernize was grandiose, incredibly expensive, ad hoc, and rushed, and coercive,
and there, obviously we can see some of Sochi here.
A lot of Peter's project involved "prestige construction", for example, the building of
St. Petersburg and of huge, western-style, palace complexes.
So let's take the example of St. Petersburg.
The city was built with the forced labor of tens of thousands, or possibly over one hundred
thousand, serfs, and tens of thousands of these people died.
The city was built on the bones of these peasants.
The work conditions were terrible, they were living in damp dugouts, the weather was cold,
some died of exposure, and it was built on a malarial swamp, there was a lot of disease.
Moreover, the whole thing was ad hoc and rushed and there was massive embezzlement of state
property.
So, it's a much vaster scale than Sochi, but there are similarities here.
I think the similarities and problems don't have to do with some inherent defect in Russian
national character, I think that there are both psychological and governmental problems.
In part, the issues stem from a deep Russian uneasiness about Russian identity vis-a-vis
West.
Western European leaders have, and Western Europeans in general have often considered
Russia to be primitive, backward, uncivilized.
And Russians and Russian rulers naturally want to prove that this is not so, and they
can spend a lot of money on that.
Some other reasons that it is costing so much have to do with the ad hoc'd and rushed nature
of the project, and also with the massive theft of state funds by Putin's cronies, by
local officials, by construction firms who have sweetheart deals.
Well there are other costs, than the financial.
The whole thing has been built at a high cost to the local population, and to forced laborers,
who have actually done some of the work.
Not only has it been devastating to the environment in some areas, such as the ski area around
Krasnaya Polyana, but thousands of homes of local residents have been demolished, and
some of them were never paid.
Also, it was recently revealed that Serbian laborers who were hired to help with the work
had their passports confiscated so that they could not leave the area, and they were not
paid for their work, so effectively we're talking about forced labor here.
There are real problems with ruling Russia.
The government, we generally consider to be autocratic and authoritarian, and it has been
for much of its history, but that's on paper.
The reality is that in some ways it's a weak government.
This is a very big country, the State is poor compared to those in Western Europe and North
America which are quite wealthy.
To give you a sense of what real power is, in government, last time I checked the United
States government collects a higher proportion of the taxes owed it than any other country
in the world.
The Russian state has tremendous trouble collecting taxes and only collects a small proportion
of those owed it, and, this is real power, the ability to collect taxes efficiently.
So the Russian government is weak, often the central rulers can't get their orders obeyed,
they don't even have the personnel to get them obeyed.
Local officials embezzle funds, they simply don't follow laws that they don't like.
They also don't give good information to the center about local circumstances.
So I think that the deep causes of the problems at Sochi are insecurity vis-a-vis the West,
and an autocratic government that is at the same time, inefficient and ineffective.
And these have deep roots in Russian history.