Russia: Why is everyone so critical of Sochi?

Americans are being fed a censored version of the Sochi Olympics, said Pravda.ru in an editorial. NBC, which has a monopoly on Olympic coverage in the U.S., didn’t show the magnificent Opening Ceremony live, but delayed the broadcast so it could “cut all positive moments about Russia out.” Americans could not see the section on Russia’s communist period, or the brilliantly funny performance of the Interior Ministry choir covering Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” The “words of gratitude to the Russian Federation” from the head of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, were also “deleted entirely.” NBC isn’t technically a state-run channel, but it obviously does Washington’s bidding. It understood that “as Barack Obama did not go to the opening, it means that the USA should not watch.”

An anti-Russian bias is blatantly obvious in Western coverage of Sochi, said Mikhail Rostov in Moskovsky Komsomolets. Yet it may be that Western journalists are simply ignorant rather than malicious. The New York Times, for example, ran a big story about how the Sochi Olympics are overshadowed by the horrors of an anti-gay law and suffocating restrictions on free speech—written by a sportswriter with no knowledge of Russian history or culture. Unlike the Times writer, I know something about press freedom, since “I am writing these lines in a newspaper the ruling party has been trying to strangle for the past year.” And I can tell her that “the reality is far less colorful and much richer in nuance.” The article cited the jailing of Pussy Riot members as an example of persecution, but it never mentioned that the two women jailed had staged, as a so-called political demonstration, “a sex orgy in a public place with children looking on.” By defending such people so ardently, and writing so confidently about issues of which they know nothing, Western reporters end up “looking like clowns.”

Still, it’s not all sweetness and light over here, said Andrei Malgin in The Moscow Times. The Olympics’ Opening Ceremony was beautiful, but it was utterly dishonest. “There was no sign of babushkas wrapped in shawls giving the sign of the cross and wailing pseudo-folk songs, no Cossacks with whips, no socialist realism, no portrayal of Stalin as an effective manager”—in short, none of the elements of the state propaganda that President Vladimir Putin normally favors. Most surprising was the lack of reference to the Soviet victory in World War II, usually the main theme of “Putin’s propaganda machine.” Turns out, though, that the Kremlin actually did propose the Soviet victory over fascism as the ceremony’s theme, but the IOC refused to allow any reference to war.

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Actually, most foreigners “loved the Opening Ceremony,” said Ilya Zubko and Alexander Samozhnev in Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Some foreign newspapers gushed about the “unforgettable male choir performing the national anthem” and the “pageantry that showed the historical path of revolution.” Some complimented Russia for not politicizing the ceremony. And almost all simply recognized this “beautiful and spectacular show” as a glorious start to what will be an unforgettable Russian Olympics.