In Russia, Olympics Watches You: Reevaluating Russia in Light of the Sochi Olympics

It’s been a week since the Winter Olympics (or what I call the Lesser Olympics) have ended, and I don’t know about you, but the Winter Olympics far surpassed any of my expectations. No terrorist attacks, and no one died.

(Those expectations? Kind of low to begin with.)

Despite the lack of prime-time coverage secondary to time-zone differences, and I don’t know anyone who watched any of the events live, the Sochi Olympics managed to be pretty entertaining:

• - the world finally took note of a sport (yes, sport!) known as curling, if only because of Team Norway’s fantastic pants (Team Fancypants?)
• - virulent conjunctivitis (a.k.a pink eye) got its own nail-biting storyline as people tuned in every day for the ‘Bob Costas Eye Watch,’ and then did what they do best on the interwebz.

Bob Costas /via

"Bob Costas tomorrow morning." /via

• - we were introduced to the saddest Olympian in the village, who apparently should walk around accompanied by “a guy playing a sad trombone.” (the Olympics' version of a tiny violin, I suppose)
• - another figure skating controversy - always fun, especially when you end up crashing someone’s server because of a request that will never come to fruition - about artistic versus technical scoring in an Olympic sport
• - these crazy costumes, and these, and this:

God bless America, truly. /via

• - this little girl, who will have a great future ahead of her, and by artistic AND technical merits is now one of my favorite skaters
• - this version of “Get Lucky”

Additionally, even in the midst of controversy, racism, and faulty doors, the Sochi Olympics still managed to introduced the world to the cultural influence of Russia.

Prior to Sochi, this was my idea of Russia: 

• Cold, icy cold. Lots of snow. 
• Palaces with funny looking, colorful bulbs for roofs rising from said snow.
• Lots of grey, identical concrete blocks used as housing. 
• Tall, bottle-blonde women sneering in fur. 
• Writers who produce thick bricks of books with equally dense themes and far too many characters with too-similar surnames. 
• KGB. 
• Vodka, lots of vodka.

[It follows, then, that when my friend and I were choosing between cheap tickets to Moscow or to Norway, I threw a wet blanket on the idea of going to Russia. I distinctly remember this image of us shivering outside in front of a palace in an otherwise dead Communist-block style street, with restaurants serving only vodka or tea, and humorless Cyrillic syllables bouncing harshly and uselessly around my Romantic-and-Germanic-language programmed head popping into my head. Funny enough, we ended up meeting a group of teenagers from Murmansk, Russia while trudging around the Arctic Circle; it was hilarious, and an entirely different story.]

It’s probably because I was raised on an almost Cold War-era diet of propaganda consisting of GoldenEye, Jason Bourne, KGB-by-the-way-of-Archer (what era is that set in anyway? - the “Era of Plot Convenience,” says the internet), and recently, the superb The Americans. 

Also, a lot of early childhood conversations were dominated by talk of Siberian gulags, which my dad prefers to the death penalty, and with which I was threatened from time to time for bad behavior. 

Also: Putin just looks, for all intents and purposes, like a fascist dictator.

Those eyes will follow you wherever you go /via

Russia, for me, in one picture, is this:

(That is actually Harbin, China, but so heavily influenced by Russia that it may as well be. Also, if you haven’t seen this episode of No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain, it’s a must. There is food. Awkward conversational pauses. A luging accident. Vodka, lots of vodka. The above dance, which goes on for a half-minute, and is narrated by Bourdain thusly: “Really two of my two favorite things, actually, together in one place: freezing to death, and karaoke. Really, just add genital torture to that, and we’ve got the perfect trifecta of ****.”)

But you know what? The closing ceremonies had me revising my mindset of Russia. 

For one, the Russians - they have a sense of humor!:

via

(And as far as we know, the poor soul who messed up that Olympic ring was not executed.)

And clearly, Russia has a rich history of art and music and culture, and an equally strong influence on global culture that we don’t often consciously acknowledge. I can’t think of any other country where artists - their ballerinas, their writers - are more honored by the general public, to the level of celebrity, than in Russia.

The Bolshoi / Darron Cummings/AP / via

In ballet - my alternate-universe profession! - Russia is undoubtably the gold standard to which all other ballet is held.

I initially had a giant paragraph nerding out about this - once a bunhead, always a bunhead - but let’s face it: most normal human beings don’t know or care. So suffice it to say that the legends, so well known that one only needs to hear their surnames - Balanchine, Baryshnikov, Nijinsky, Nureyev, Pavlova - they all hail from Russia. Some of the world’s greatest ballerinas today were trained in Mother Russia - for instance, my favorite one, Evgenia Obratzsova. (For a fantastic look at the world of Russian ballet, try the excellent documentary Ballerina - and then come find me so we can obsess together, please!).

Doug Mills / NYT / via

Even music for ballet is written by some of the greatest composers of all time. Tchaikovsky anyone? Stravinsky? As someone who labored away hours and years of my youth at the black-and-white keyboard, I don’t think that influence of Russia on music can be more strongly felt than in the piano. I could go on for paragraphs, and still only lightly touch upon how much pain and how much joy Russian composers have brought me: technically challenging, notoriously difficult, and occasionally, like their literature, incomprehensible (Prokofiev and your Sarcasms, I’m talking to you).

But when mastered, it’s otherworldly in depth of feeling and artistry; it’s powerful and complicated; it's an accomplishment. 

Josh Haner / NYT / via

And of course, Russian literature. Besides being:

• - good protection when caught in the line of fire (a paperback copy of War and Peace = Kevlar);
• - a movie trope signaling how intelligent and thoughtful a character is;
• - a good way to attract a theater girl at a liberal-arts college (when paired with thick-black rimmed glasses and a morose Prince-of-Denmark expression), 

Russian literature is also particularly good for challenging the mind. Forget Jeopardy and Luminosity and all that other brain food crap - just shovel your way through a hundred pages of characters who are prone to lengthy monologues of internal thought - and are all somehow royalty - and try to keep their names straight. Too easy? Okay, now try understanding what you just read.

And yet, despite the complexity of their literature, everyday Russians - from high to low - seem deeply influenced by it, by which I assume that they read and actually understand it. I guess I wouldn’t expect anything less than equal comprehension from serf to sire in a formerly Marxist society.

In fact, what really got me revising my view of Russia were these lines from the NYT Sochi closing ceremony recaps:

“Enormous pictures of Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and others rise and receive an unaccountably loud cheer. It’s a well-read audience, clearly.”

“Got to love a country that gives its greatest novelists the celebrity treatment. In the United States, you need a movie franchise to get that kind of applause and attention.”

Gotta love that country, indeed.

James Hill / NYT / via

Also, you gotta love a nation that thought it was a good idea to feature as their Olympic mascot a hydrocephalic, blinking, animatronic bear the Internet quickly nicknamed “Nightmare Bear.” Russian humor!

Some mascots just want to watch the world burn. James Hill/ NYT/ via

Oh Jurij, you will never live this down. On the other hand, this is perfect. source

So really, if we learned anything from the Russian-hosted Winter Olympics, it boils down to what someone said in conversation last weekend: “People keep saying that Snowden must be having a really hard time, but it’s not like he’s stuck in the middle of North Dakota. He’s in Russia.”

And really, to be stuck in the land of Tolstoy, the Mariinsky, Rachmaninoff, and high-quality vodka? 

It’s not a bad place to be.