Entertain and Govern

Abstract

The article looks at Russia’s international sports politics from two different perspectives. The authors discuss sport mega-events as instruments of legitimizing the existing regime and stabilizing its foundations. They argue that, due to mega-events, the Russian state has found itself under persistent external pressures from international organizations, and has had to react to them and adjust its legal norms and policy practices accordingly. The key argument of the article is that both elements of the puzzle can be approached as central elements of governmentality.

INTRODUCTION

In only a few years’ time, studies of sport mega-events in Russia, a relatively new field of research, have engendered an outpouring of diverse approaches and conceptualizations looking at sport from the standpoints of human rights (Arnold 2016), identity (Casula 2016), ethnopolitics (Petersson and Vamling 2017), normative issues (Ekberg and Strange 2017), interstate relations (Taras 2017), and subnational regionalism and urban governance (Yatsyk 2016a, 2016b; Makarychev and Yatsyk 2014). Yet, this growing field of academic inquiry still awaits discussion of many critical questions. This article intends to raise some understudied issues and deploy them in the wider context of scholarly debates related to the various ways and means that non-Western governments use such events for domestically stabilizing their regimes and internationally legitimizing their administrative practices.

In this article we look at political instrumentalization of sport mega-events in Russia from two seemingly dissimilar perspectives. On the one hand, we discuss the sport milieu as a generator of discourses and policies that are far from the Olympic ideals due to their authoritarian and/or totalitarian background, and also their rampant commercialization. As seen from this angle, Kremlin mega-events are instruments of legitimizing the existing regime and stabilizing its foundations. On the other hand, due to mega-events, the Russian state—known for its stark adherence to sovereignty—has not only found itself under persistent external pressures coming from international organizations, but also has had to react to them and adjust its legal norms and policy practices accordingly.

It is this dichotomy that constitutes the main research puzzle we are going to tackle in this article by dealing with these two perspectives as two sides of the same coin. We do so through the application of Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality as a set of largely depoliticized technologies of population management as well as a medium for cultural messages and representations, performances, images, and signs. Our key argument is that both elements of the puzzle—mega-events’ contribution to solidifying the Kremlin’s authoritarian control over society and the high sensitivity of the Russian government to demands and requirements originating from outside—can be approached as central elements of governmentality. In fact, the two elements are intrinsically interlinked and represent two different forms of authoritarian adaptation to the challenges and opportunities that the hosting of mega-events implies.

In this study we attribute the main impulses of governmentality to international sport organizations (in particular, the World Anti-Doping Agency, WADA, and the International Olympic Committee, IOC), and to the international media exerting symbolic pressure on the Russian government. Within this context, the latter adapts to the formal demands and informal expectations of these two groups of global actors and translates them into policy actions. However, this adaptation is neither passive nor short of subjectivity: the Russian government adjusts its policies not only to meet the requirements of international sport institutions, but also to solidify its power bases.

The article is divided into three parts. We start with a theoretical prelude meant to elucidate two clusters of academic debates of highest importance for studying the Russian case—on the applicability of the concept of governmentality to non-Western countries, and the ubiquitous practices of making exceptions as parts of governmentality mechanisms. From that we turn to the 2018 World Cup and relate it to the lessons learned from the experience of the Sochi Olympics. Ultimately we scrutinize two policy areas in which the Russian government has had to react to the negative publicity it has received in recent years due to the doping scandal and football fan violence. We track governmental reactions to these issues of high public interest and thus unveil the vulnerabilities of Russia’s authoritarian adaptation to the global sporting environment. Our sources include official statements of Russian officials as related to sport events; coverage of the run-up to the 2018 World Cup in major Russian news portals (such as RBK); and promotional video materials related to the 2018 World Cup.

GOVERNMENTALITY: TWO DEBATES

The global industry of mega-events is still an understudied part of a wider discussion on the various contexts of the idea of governmentality. In this section we focus on two academic debates in the governmentality literature and relate them to the extant research on mega-events. First, we engage with polemics over the very propriety of extending the conception of governmentality to non-Western countries with illiberal polities. Second, we take a sympathetic look at interpretations of governmentality from the vantage point of exceptional practices as its constitutive elements, which can shed more light on the inner logic of the authoritarian adaptation briefly introduced above.

Governmentality Beyond the Liberal West

Initially, Michel Foucault, the author of the concept of governmentality, designed it to analyze liberal regimes grounded in knowledge-based technologies of power (Foucault 1991b). In various accounts, the concept extends to “political rationalities and technologies of governmental practices (surveillance, risk management, network governance, privatization, competitiveness, indexing and country benchmarking, best practices, public opinion)” (Weidner 2009, 389). The scope of approaches to governmentality in Western academic debates is very broad—from placing at the center of attention the government that ought to be “governmentalized” (Ahlqvist 2013, 330), to favoring “society-level governance … [as] an urban strategic management system that will expand the city’s capabilities and tolerance” (Okano and Samson 2010, 515). “With neoliberal governmentality we see the extension of the norms and values of the market to other areas of social life, as reflected in the widespread application of such terms as competition, initiative, risk-taking and prudence across various social domains” (Joseph 2010, 228).

As a response to the expanding popularity of the concept, in recent years there have been attempts to extend it from its traditional grounding in liberal societies respectful of human freedoms to all “rationalized forms of power relation, including authoritarian” (Death 2013, 770). In this vein, some authors claim that governmentality “works through total inclusion, when everything is revealed as having the potential to become utilized” (Joronen 2015, 367), which applies also to non-democratic managerial practices. As seen from this perspective, the governmentality approach should not start by assuming that policy actors have liberal intentions or qualities, but rather that practices of policing and surveillance are inherent even in most democratic and liberal regimes (Guzzini 2012). Governmentality ought to be seen as a broad analytical framework that allows one to grasp how different agents (organizations, institutions, state bodies, etc.) utilize a set of instruments of governance as power tools. Adhering to Foucault’s chronology of governmentality, one ought to recognize that, going back to the seventeenth century, most Western countries have experienced tyrannical regimes that overrode laws and freedoms (Peters 2007). Obviously, under non-democratic rule the space for restrictive techniques of control is significantly broader, yet non-democratic regimes may appropriate a wide range of governmentality tools, including auditing, ranking, public–private partnerships, development plans, sustainability strategies, and urban planning—all of which are applicable to mega-events. Thus, the expansion of the notion of governmentality beyond the liberal West unveils “a range of different forms of governmentality.… Whether it is useful to try and describe different varieties of governmentality or whether the dangers of conceptual stretching outweigh the benefits can be decided on a case by case basis … [The] dominant neoliberal forms … might be forced to adapt to particular circumstances and to different local rationalities” (Joseph 2017, 15).

For Foucault himself the distinction between democracy and authoritarianism was never central, since he was keen on thinking beyond this—and other—binaries, thus unveiling a continuum of power relations (Foucault 1991c) that reproduce different hierarchies of power (Joseph 2013). This opens a niche for a more nuanced conceptualization of governmentality that can be partly occupied by studies of the ambiguous policies of global sport institutions. On the one hand, most of them are largely insensitive to distinctions between democracies and non-democracies. The case of the International Federation of Association Football, FIFA, demonstrates that an analog of a transnational corporation acting as a private regulator can emerge in the very center of Europe and intensively utilize practices of branding, media entertainment, and festivalization that do not necessarily need to be democratic. FIFA can successfully adjust its operation to the world of nation states competing for power and prestige, and seeking for regulatory exemptions aiming to maximize profits. The strong liaisons between global sport institutions and authoritarian governments might imply a pragmatic usage of governmentality techniques that can be turned from their initial design for expanding the space of economic freedom to consolidating administrative regulation and command.

Yet, on the other hand, sport mega-events make host countries subject “to international protocol and regimes of knowledge that empower them … and structure their possible field of action” (Aalberts 2012, 241). In this sense governmentality is a “non-coercive form of power … [that] foremost works through inclusion … to produce visible, responsive and predictable actors” (Aalberts 2012, 245–46). Thus, regimes whose practices of governance are considered beyond the normal can be “helped, educated, re-educated, healed, locked up and thrown out … [for the purpose of] reaffirming the identity of the normal and for triggering processes of (liberal) normalization, voluntary and/or habitual, if possible, imposed when necessary” (Guzzini 2012, 26).

An important dimension to the concept of governmentality that needs to be discussed in the context of authoritarian adaptation is the cultural production of marketable identities through representations and images derived from the entertainment industry, including expensive mega signifiers for nation branding and advertisements that serve different purposes, some political (regime consolidation), some depoliticized (promoting tourism). For example, nation branding as a peculiar form of cultural production implies a government’s policy revolving around the idea of the “competition state” (Browning 2015, 196). One might say, for example, that “spectacular performances become a prerequisite for each city’s economic performance. They have to be seen to be dynamic, progressive, modern—in a word, ‘global’—before actually becoming so economically” (Carter 2011, 133). Images and storylines boost branding strategies aimed at attracting visitors (Braun et al. 2014) as indispensable elements of governmentality techniques.

The often neglected upshot of such huge investments in producing images should be understood as practices of totalization, standardization, and convergence (Waalkes 2017). In this sense, Russia’s integration with the global economy facilitated the proliferation of mediatized discourses mainly (re)producing nation-centric imageries and storylines of patriotism, pride, glory, and self-assertion, sustained by a wide range of myths and narratives of symbolic power masterminded by mass media and advertisement professionals, propagandists, and policy consultants. It is the political economy of signs (the semiosphere) that plays a crucial role of a compensatory mechanism for Russia’s lack of domestic reforms, and substitutes for this deficiency with symbolic investments. Yet in the meantime, it is exactly the global visibility, augmented many-fold due to Russia’s integration with the mega-event business, that has not only exposed the government to global publicity, but also pushed it to alter or modify some of its policies.

Governmentality, Exceptions, and Exclusions

An interesting twist to the debates on governmentality comes from the plethora of practices of exclusion and exception that host governments have to implement by demand of global sport organizations. The sport industry can justifiably be treated as part of a much broader neoliberal governmentality (Dubal 2010) that, with all its normative background, operates through exceptional policies. This argument, well articulated by Aihwa Ong, implies that practices of exception are not an aberration, but rather a constitutive element of a neoliberal system of governance (Ong 2006). This approach, which we share, seems to be in dissonance with those authors who tend to explain governmentality only through “the logic of routine,” as opposed to “the logic of exceptions” (Bourbeau 2014, 190).

Exceptionalism in this context can be understood as a policy of singling “out areas with ‘global potential’ and turning them into zones that differ from normalized rule” (Kangas 2013, 304). This eventually leads to “the emergence of sites with unique legal protections and controls … which exclude certain sectors, people, or places from optimization calculations … [and] reproduce a hierarchical understanding of the importance of different places” (Kangas 2013, 304, 307). On the flipside, this type of exceptionality implies restrictions of political activity and protest (Nelson and Cottrell 2015). By curtailing space for freedom through bans and prohibitions, host authorities, blessed by global sport organizations, tend to abdicate “their responsibility for serving their citizenry in favor of entrepreneurial strategies designed to encourage and advance private capital” (Friedman and Andrews 2010, 184). Global sport organizations themselves “can pick a favorable regulatory environment as the home base for their international activities” (Geeraert 2015, 141).

From the viewpoint of our analysis it is important to note that Russia’s inclusion in the global regulatory regimes of sports is only possible on the basis of exceptional practices “independent of national law and to some extent negating the rule of law in international sport” (Wloch 2012, 299). Both FIFA and the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) not only claim their authority over national football associations, but also foster legislation that abolishes the need for obligatory consultations with the public, relieves its managers from salary restrictions, and justifies tax and tariff benefits and exemptions. For its part, the Russian government uses the regime of exceptions sanctioned by its global partners for its own sake. The state extended the “Olympic” legislation that allows evictions and expropriation of property in cases of loosely defined “ineffective use” of land (Shlepchenko 2013). Another clear example is a list of merchandise items that, according to the policy of Russia’s Ministry of Sport, might be imported, bypassing normal duty procedures, as part of arrangements with FIFA. Apart from professional sport and telecommunication equipment, foodstuff and vehicles, the list also included alcoholic beverages, which sparked harsh criticism from experts who compared this exception with the permissive policy of the Russian state toward the Russian Orthodox Church, which back in the 1990s earned a significant part of its revenues from duty-free importation of tobacco and alcohol (Ishchenko and Skrynnik 2015).

According to a presidential decree of February 2017, the Russian government will introduce extraordinary security measures in all the host cities of the World Cup. These exceptions include restrictions for specific types of transport (airplanes, ships, and non-regular buses), enhanced inspection of individuals in newly created zones of control, registration of non-local Russian citizens individually arriving in host cities upon their personal application to law-enforcement organs, discontinuation of sight-seeing during the Cup, and prohibition of alcohol sales (Garant.ru 2017).

This policy of exceptions is nicely manifested in the seeming contradictions over Russia’s stand toward Turkey after an incident with a Russian military jet that brought relations between the two countries to a deep crisis in 2016. As reciprocation for what Moscow qualified as a major blow to Russia’s security, then–minister of sport Vitalii Mutko announced a de facto ban on recruiting Turkish nationals into Russian football clubs (Lenta.ru 2015). Yet at the same time, the Russian government allowed Turkish construction companies working for FIFA 2018 to continue their contracts (Aminov 2016), which might be regarded as an exception to the otherwise punitive politics of sanctions toward all Turkish businesses operating in Russia after the fall of 2015.

Thus, the model of governmentality that emerged at the intersection of policies of the Russian government and global sport organizations presupposes a wide range of administrative and managerial techniques. However, the implementation of these practices is fundamentally dissimilar from the Foucauldian ideal of technical rule, due to multiple exceptions and exclusions that the hosting of mega-events implies. In the meantime, Foucault’s triad, sovereignty–discipline–governmentality, can be seen as a continuum that encompasses different modalities of power; the triadic approach stipulates that, depending on circumstances, “governance through freedom might apply in one case, while imperial tactics may be required in another” (Vrasti 2013, 56). This standpoint implies that “liberal techniques of government, which seek to work from a distance through the promotion of the free conduct of individuals, can always give way to more direct forms of disciplinary power. … [This] allows the state to continue to play a dominant role” (Joseph 2009, 462), to strengthen authoritarian rule (Matveev 2016), and to cement the political regime that, nevertheless, remains selectively sensitive to external pressures.

Methodological Implications

To sum up, these two scholarly debates explain the methodological advantages of the governmentality approach. First, it focuses more on “regimes of policy practices” than on established institutions or ideologies: “The nature of the institutions of the state is, Foucault thinks, a function of changes in practices of government, rather than the converse. Political theory attends too much to institutions, and too little to practices” (Burchell et al 1991, 4). This observation is of particular significance for Russia, with its relatively weak institutional settings and ample space for exceptional measures as tools of governance, which “does not limit its action on the governed to the general form of law; it works by the means of specific, detailed regulation and decree” (Burchell et al 1991, 10). Foucault was mainly interested in situations where the governing authority employs “a range of uniform tactics … rather than laws” (Foucault 1991b, 95), which is fully applicable to studies of Russian sport governance.

Second, Foucault’s research optics include what he called “eventalization” (Foucault 1991a, 76), a concept that denotes practices of governance through the prism of “singular events” and thus helps avoid excessive generalizations. Mega-events are a good terrain for practically applying this approach in event-specific contexts.

Third, the governmentality prism is instrumental in revealing rationalities behind administrative and managerial decisions, and pays attention to how the rationale of governance is articulated in discourses and implemented in practices. This rationale ought to be studied from the viewpoint of emerging practices, strategies, and technologies, rather than well-established objects, functions, and institutions (Lemke 2007).

Fourth, the Foucauldian approach is helpful in spotting and understanding connections between the technicalities of governance (“programs, technologies, apparatuses”) and “the production of truth … which serves to found, justify and provide reasons and principles for these ways of doing things” (Foucault 1991a, 79). In other words, governmentality always implies “the establishment of domains in which the practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent” (Foucault 1991a, 79). In this sense—unusual for other policy domains under Putin’s rule—the compliance with international standards of sport management is justified by the adherence to the “truth” of depoliticized Olympic ideals grounded in the principles of universality and non-discrimination. “Regimes of truth” in this context are the regimes of universality of sport values short of ideological connotations.

Ultimately, Foucault goes so far as to argue that “governmentalization of the state” is the only way for sovereign power to survive (Foucault 1991b, 103-4). It is through this lens that one can assess the adaptation of Putin’s regime to the requirements of global sport institutions as the precondition for any meaningful role Russia can play in the international sport community.

THE POST-SOCHI NARRATIVES: GOVERNMENTALITY TRUMPS SOFT POWER

In this section we address the specificity of Russia’s narratives in the aftermath of the Sochi Winter Olympics and in anticipation of the FIFA 2018 World Cup. Mega-events are usually seen as a soft-power tool for host nations (Grix and Kramareva 2017). Yet the structure of the post-Sochi debate in Russia might question this perspective, which basically emanates from the hopes for a new, more cooperative and less militant Russia to emerge as a result of hosting mega-events. In its stead, we argue, it is the governmentality perspective that better helps discern a mix of strong authoritarian dimensions to Russia’s policy of hosting mega-events and simultaneous compliance with the demands of international sport organizations.

Rethinking the Sochi Legacy

Before the 2014 Olympic Games, the Sochi project was tackled from two different perspectives. On the one hand, the official bid book “highlights the long-term development of the Sochi region as a key goal” (Casula 2016, 43) of the event as part of Russia’s modernization agenda. On the other hand, the Games were widely discussed as Putin’s strategic investment in Russia’s foreign policy agenda, “not simply as a matter of infrastructure, but as a genuine imperial symbol. … It was not about logistics, but about the proof of power. The imperial approach measures such events not by budgetary logic, but in terms of state grandeur” (Kazarin 2016). The celebratory anticipation of the Winter Olympics was an important element of politically legitimizing the Putin regime through self-assertive discourses of national pride, respect, and admiration that later gave way to the widespread practice of personally appealing to the president to solve specific issues in various sports (see, for example, TV Dozhd’ 2017). In the logic of Putin-centric narratives, the former Russian national football coach Leonid Slutskii suggested that, had Putin played for the team, he could have chosen any role he liked (Gazeta.ru 2016e); and the CSKA football club president Evgenii Giner compared a difficult victory over the Portuguese Sporting club with surviving and winning under EU sanctions (Gazeta.ru 2015c). The victory in Sochi by the Russian hockey team was interpreted as continuing the legacy of the USSR hockey team as one of the sport’s greatest.

Yet only months afterward, the Games were mostly discussed not in terms of identity-shaping performance or soft-power projection, but rather in terms of economic (mis)management and resource allocation. In this respect the post-Sochi narrative in Russia reminds one of the structure of South African discourse about the FIFA 2010 World Cup (Desai and Vahed 2010).

There is evidence that in terms of attracting tourists, Sochi is doing better than other Russian regions, which might be explained by the decline of the ruble and the reorientation of Russian tourist flows from foreign resorts to domestic sites (Eremina 2015). Yet it is hard to find empirical evidence that the Sochi Olympics was a game-changer for Russia in normative, institutional, or societal domains. Expectations that Russia “would have to change its state narratives” (Laruelle 2015) did not materialize. Stories about the imprisonment of the environmental activist Evgenii Vitishko, who protested against damaging ecological conditions in Sochi (Amnesty International 2015), and evictions in Sochi (TV Dozhd’ 2016a), confirm this.

What the Sochi Olympics made clear is the persistence of age-old problems with corruption and mismanagement. The urban infrastructure was reported to be in decay (Euronews 2015), with some new buildings about to collapse (YouTube 2015). A road construction company that worked in Sochi is under criminal investigation (Kommersant 2016a). Vnesheconombank, one of the key financial investors in Sochi, was saved from bankruptcy only due to the government’s bailout (RBK 2016a). The “Formula Sochi” company created to manage the Formula One race in the city could not evade this end and was declared bankrupt (TV Dozhd’ 2015), although, according to the government’s assessment, the race in Sochi was economically profitable (RNS 2016).

Oleg Shishov, director of “Mostovik,” one of the Olympic construction firms, who was sentenced to three years for embezzlement in 2016 (TV Dozhd’ 2016b), explained his story:

The state has been artificially reducing the estimates for construction work, while the real costs have been rising. … Sochi was absolutely unprepared for such a grandiose event, which resulted in a badly organized all hands’ job.… None of the state officials supported us.… We took all the risks on ourselves, with all due comprehension that there was no way out of these projects, since in that case there would be no Olympics.… We were responding to appeals to save the motherland … and took huge loans from banks that presumed all calculations to be properly done.… I still fail to comprehend why the state did this to us.… We should have never trusted people from the government.… We were simply killed.… Our major mistake was to participate in the Sochi project. … A company like ours, without extractive resources or state financial backing, simply cannot be equal to Gazprom, Sberbank, or Russian Railways.… It is impossible to implement large projects in Russia without administrative resources. (Vedomosti 2015)

This stunning confession makes clear that the state, claiming its sovereign superiority, evades financial responsibility and exposes itself as an untrustworthy business partner. As Mikhail Zadornov, CEO of the VTB-24 bank, concluded, “much of the expenditures that cannot be returned de facto come from budgetary funding. It would be more honest to say: we are to put one billion rubles in the Olympic budget … and each one would pay one thousand dollars from his own pocket” (TV Dozhd’ 2016c).

Regional authorities come up with their own complaints. The head of Krasnodar krai claimed that his region lost about 15 billion rubles due to tax exemptions on Olympic Games facilities that have been enacted since January 2013: “This is a huge chunk of money for the region; the federal authorities promised to find ways and means to compensate for the missing sum, yet the issue has not been solved so far” (Kommersant 2015).

Anticipating the FIFA World Cup

The run-up to the FIFA 2018 World Cup involved the creation of multiple official videos and media products that reflected Russia’s strategy of promoting the event through a blend of traditionalism (visualized by frequent references to Orthodoxy and legacies of the past in city promo videos) and the modern industry of hospitality, entertainment, consumption, and life enjoyment. In advertising itself as a global tourist destination, Russia accentuated its huge expanse and diversity (mostly reduced to folkloric elements), along with the anticipation of a “miracle,” a materialized “dream” that resonates with Russia’s culture of fairy tales, particularly relevant for provincial hosts with no experience of organizing events of such a scale.

In the meantime, as noted above, the lead-up to the FIFA 2018 World Cup took place against the backdrop of digesting the Sochi lessons. It is hard to think that criminal cases opened against Sochi contractors would entice private businesses to invest into the FIFA project in eleven Russian cities. Complaints about the huge costs of the World Cup for local budgets were voiced in St. Petersburg (Vishnevskii 2016) and Nizhny Novgorod, where the hosting of the FIFA Cup made the local government postpone the construction of an oncological hospital (Obukhov 2016). According to estimates, the aggregate financial losses in seven major host cities by 2021 could amount to 2.4 billion rubles (RNS 2017).

Preparations for the 2018 World Cup have been further complicated by the ongoing Western economic sanctions enacted as a reaction to Russia’s policy toward Ukraine. Rising security costs constitute an additional burden for the event’s budget (Veth 2015a). The austerity policy pursued by the Russian government has led to delays in the construction of new roads to the Domodedovo Airport in Moscow (Kommersant 2016a), as well as delays in constructing stadiums in Samara and Kaliningrad (see Arnold and Foxall, this issue). The financial troubles stemming from underfunding, lack of market incentives, and the habit of the regional authorities to include unrelated objects in the contracts only strengthen the top–down structure of mega-events management in Russia, yet also augment the economic vulnerability of the regime. In Martin Müller’s cogent conclusion, “the World Cup is not a catalyst for Russian modernization, although the Russian government, FIFA and a host of other stakeholders would like it to be just that. Instead of pushing modernization, it is blocking it” (Müller 2014, 18).

The situation is exacerbated by the financial crisis in Russia’s football industry: the Russian Football Union’s (RFU) debts amount to 1.5 billion rubles (Gazeta.ru 2015a). The resignation of Fabio Capello as the Russian national team coach in 2015 was largely remarked upon as evidence of financial and managerial problems in the RFU (Veth 2015b). A plethora of social issues acutely discussed in the context of the Sochi Olympics persist: evictions and demolitions continue (TV Dozhd’ 2016e), as do payment arrears (Luhn 2015).

Against this dreary background, Putin tried to deflate the overall importance of the 2018 World Cup for Russia. In contrast to the energizing expectations pre-Sochi, he suggested that Russia should not have “particular ambitions in this championship, although we, of course, anticipate a good performance from our team. Our aim coincides with that of FIFA: expanding football geography” (Putin 2015). This vision seems to be harmonious with depoliticized strategies of global corporate business: the head of Adidas pledged that even under the conditions of economic sanctions, his company “is straightforwardly aimed at long-term operation in the Russian market, with a particular emphasis on opportunities that the FIFA World Cup opens for strengthening the Adidas brand” (Gazeta.ru 2015b).

Therefore, the usual claims that “politics is eating sport” in Russia (Hayward 2015) represent only one dimension of a reality that is basically enshrined in the celebratory consolidation of Putin’s power by symbolic means. Yet Russian sport discourses also contain important depoliticized segments that play an important functional role for stabilizing the regime by distinguishing it from a domain discursively constructed as “political,” with all the negative connotations attached to it. It is through the negatively marked “interference of politics into sport” that Putin explicated sanctions against Russian athletes accused of doping: in his interpretation, the Russian athletes were penalized to exert a “geopolitical pressure over Russia” and hurt its image in the world (Zasedanie Soveta 2015), which the Kremlin qualifies as an attempt to reconsider the original ideas of global Olympism (Vstrecha s olimpiiskoi 2016).

ADJUSTING TO GLOBAL NORMS

Like many authoritarian regimes, Russia promotes itself through investing lots of resources in advertising and embellishing its image for global audiences. By the same token, Putin’s regime incorporates various groups of managerial, administrative, and business elites that are connected to global practices of governmentality. In spite of the currently dominant trend toward an ideology of self-sufficiency, the regime in many ways is linked with the neoliberal economy of global financial flows, cultural consumption, entertainment, and the media industry. This begs the question of how the Kremlin operates in situations that require refocusing from confrontation and revisionism to practices of connectivity and engagement with largely post-political instruments of governing when running large-scale international projects.

There are at least two policy areas in which Russian sport policies, being exposed to international scrutiny, have had to react to multiple pressures from abroad: the doping scandal and Russian football hooliganism. In both cases it was international public attention—including extensive media coverage—that influenced public opinion and ultimately triggered some changes (albeit modest ones) in Russia’s policies.

Doped and Disclosed

The doping scandal that erupted in 2015 uncovered important aspects of Russia’s vulnerability in the global sport milieu. WADA issued a series of public reports unveiling the mass-scale government-supported system of doping used in many sports in Russia (McLaren 2016; WADA 2016). The international media published eye-witness evidence accusing the Russian Ministry of Sport and the Federal Security Service (FSB) of destroying proof of Russian athletes’ positive doping tests (Ruiz and Schwirtz 2016). The ensuing debate went far beyond sport: “If independent investigators were allowed into Russia’s government procurement system, the military-industrial complex, state energy companies or the ‘public movements’ supporting President Vladimir Putin, their findings would almost certainly be similar to the ones detailed in the anti-doping agency report” (Bershidsky 2015). The doping practices have roots in the Soviet sport system, as the USSR conducted an extensive doping program; thus, the structure of Russia’s doping program and its problems with WADA could certainly be seen as legacies of a state sport system designed to achieve victories for the state by promoting doping and protecting dopers.

In November 2015 the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) was the first to ban the Russian Athletic Federation from participation in all international competitions under its aegis. In July 2016 the International Olympic Committee decided not to “organise or give patronage to any sport event or meeting in Russia” and to freeze “preparations for major events in Russia” (Olympic.org 2016). In a matter of only months afterward, Russia was divested of a number of high-profile international competitions under the aegis of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, International Biathlon Union, International Skating Union, and International Ski Federation. In addition, Russia was expelled from the Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Ultimately, by decision of the IOC, the entire Russian national team was banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Russian reactions to the doping revelations were a combination of politically confrontational rhetoric and more constructive engagement with international sport institutions that can be conceptualized through the prism of governmentality. On the political side, there were numerous declarations in Russia that WADA prohibited meldonium due to its high popularity among athletes from post-Soviet countries (RSport 2016a), and that the whole scandal was an act of sabotage masterminded by Russia’s ill-wishers (Gazeta.ru 2016b). This narrative was echoed by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who remarked that he would not be surprised if someone accused Russian diplomacy of being doped and on this basis demanded its withdrawal from partaking in world politics (RIA Novosti 2016). This was in line with Russia’s reaction to the earlier corruption scandal in FIFA that was widely perceived in Russia as a U.S. plot. For instance, the deputy head of the State Duma Committee on Sport, Sergei Poddubnyi, understood the WADA allegations as “a purely political case, having nothing to do with sport” (RSport 2015). The articulation of their standing as non-political gives Russian state officials the privilege of dismissing accusatory statements or policies as allegedly politically motivated. Dmitrii Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, challenged the credibility of allegations against Russia by dubbing them “the slander of a defector” (RBK 2016b)—an allusion to the former director of the Moscow Doping Laboratory, who, after fleeing abroad, testified against 15 Russian medal winners in the Sochi Olympics. This statement was followed by Russian authorities’ reported obstruction of the inspection mission of the UK Anti-Doping Agency in Moscow (Ingle and Gibson 2016). The head of the State Duma’s International Committee, Aleksei Pushkov, called on WADA authorities to resign (Gazeta.ru 2016f). Many athletes directly appealed to Putin for protection (Gazeta.ru, 2016g).

The Russian president took a much more conciliatory position, however, and reframed the issue in governmentality-friendly categories:

[W]e should neither politicize anything here, nor bring up conspiracy theories. We ought to systematically and promptly react to decisions taken by international organizations. If you lacked data on how fast this substance can be removed from human bodies, it was necessary to work on that, get in touch with colleagues and discuss with them the whole issue well in advance, instead of engaging in retrospectively debating what was done right and what was not. (Slon 2016)

Again, Putin said:

Obviously, our sport officials misunderstood the topicality of these issues, failed to update the corresponding lists on the basis of information provided by international organizations, and failed to duly inform our athletes and coaches of WADA decisions concerning bans of certain substances. (Gazeta.ru 2016c)

Ultimately, the former Russian sport minister, Vitalii Mutko, admitted his responsibility for the doping incidents, apologized for the wrongdoing, and said, “We need to understand what went wrong, and create a system to protect our top athletes” (TV Dozhd’ 2016d). The head of the Russian Athletic Federation, Dmitrii Shliakhtin, ordered an investigation of all the allegations against Russian athletes exposed in a film produced by the German ARD Channel (Gazeta.ru 2016d), an unparalleled move in the Russian administrative culture of governance, traditionally distrustful of Western media. The new Russian minister of sport, Pavel Kolobkov, denied the interpretation of the punitive measures undertaken against Russian athletes as an attempt to internationally marginalize Russian sport, and reiterated Russia’s full cooperation with WADA (Ministry of Sport of the Russian Federation 2017).

Thus, Moscow’s reaction to the doping scandal was by and large in line with the logic of governmentality: Russian sport authorities were forced to recognize the problem and had to pledge to obey international standards. Ultimately, Putin signed a decree that criminalized doping in sport (Pravo.gov.ru 2016). In March 2017, speaking in Krasnoyarsk, the host city of the World Student Games in 2019, Putin publicly acknowledged the failure of Russia’s anti-doping system, recommended taking seriously the WADA investigation, and pledged to punish all those found guilty (Kremlin.ru 2017). By presidential decree an independent anti-doping committee was established; the Russian Ministry of Sport withdrew recognition from the founders of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, and the latter became subordinated to the Russian Olympic and Paralympic Committees, while the Russian Anti-Doping Laboratory became part of the Moscow State University (Zasedanie Soveta 2017).

The doping story creates an apparent discrepancy: in one situation Putin recognized the validity of accusations against Russian athletes, yet in other episodes he and his closest associates negated the veracity of specific information leaked to the media. Since the whole story questioned Russia’s credibility as a host of future mega-events, the Kremlin had to engage in communication and could not afford to disregard what otherwise might have been dismissed as an unfriendly encroachment upon Russia.

The doping saga illustrates not only the hybrid nature of Russia’s model of governmentality in sport, but also the importance of its symbolic side: the fact that Russian champions and medal winners were publicly exposed as violators of Olympic rules and sport ethics ruined the whole mythology of the Sochi Games as a heyday of Russia’s greatness and its soft-power appeal. In this sense Putin’s regime fell victim to its own policy of consistent elevation of sporting events to the top of Russia’s symbolic order as a playground for national consolidation. This explains why the doping revelations are so sensitive for the hegemonic discourse: they not only put the Russian government in an uncomfortable defensive position, but also seriously damaged the Sochi triumphalist narrative.

RUSSIAN FOOTBALL FANS: HOOLIGANS OR PUTIN’S FOOTSOLDIERS?

Fans are an indispensable element of the global visibility of any sport, both as participants and as consumers of mega-events. In the Russian case football fans are producers of a conservative, patriotic discourse with accompanying paramilitary practices, yet in the meantime they find themselves as objects of state regulation.

The case of fierce clashes between Russian and British football fans in Marseille during the UEFA Cup of 2016, along with the reaction of Russian officials, created another peculiar context for governmentality projection. In June 2016 between 150 and 300 Russian football supporters provoked a bloody street fight with their English opponents that left 35 people injured and one dead. Three Russians were sentenced to two-year terms of imprisonment in France. The RFU was fined 150 thousand Euros and warned about the possible disqualification of the Russian team if similar incidents happened again.

According to the Marseille prosecutor, Brice Robin (Guardian 2016), as well as other experts (Sharogradskii, Gostev, and Kanevskaia 2016), the Russian hooligans were professionally trained for combat. Alex Stockley’s documentary Russia’s Hooligan Army, released by the BBC in early 2017, investigated Russian football fan clubs and exposed their group identity as brutal and confrontational, even as the fans themselves call their movement “spiritually healthy.” Football fans in today’s Russia are not heavy drinkers or passive observers, say the protagonists of the film; they are well-trained young males, practicing a healthy life style and ready to fight. “We are learning to fight now, it’s a normal tendency, it is healthy Russian manhood,” says one of them (Stockley 2017: min. 17.19–21). “Twenty-five years after the Soviet Union collapsed, a new generation of Russian citizens has grown and among those who were on the plane to Marseille were champions of combat fighting. The Brits were fighting a trained machine that swept them away like an avalanche,” adds Aleksandr Shprygin, head of the All-Russian Union of Football Fans at that time (Stockley 2017: min. 21.17–33).

Physical force is a substantial part of fan subculture, coupled with xenophobia and cultural chauvinism understood as defense of moral values. Thus, Russian fans interpreted the demonstration of “raw” power in Marseille as an act of “disciplining” the drunken British hooligan mob. As Vasilii “the Killer,” ex-leader of Spartak fan club, asserted in the film, “The whole thing was a total failure of the organizers and the French police. It is nonsense to blame Russians fans. I am sorry to say this, but there were 50 thousand of the Anglo-Saxon rabble in the city. They behaved like kings. It is impermissible to insult another country, its anthem and head of state” (Golovin 2017). “The current standing of English hooligans is the same as your western culture and civilization. I mean it is in a deep garbage bin,” he adds (Stockley 2017, min. 15.30–40).

This is how football hooliganism might be viewed as a matter of different civilizations in Russia and Europe. One of the film’s heroes claimed that for the Brits, “Russians are different, they are terrible, wild, and unable to host such a holy event as the World Cup, which we invented in England” (Derunets 2017). “Our so called western partners … inflate the doping hysteria, and evoke speculations on Marseille, saying that allegedly KGB agents have kicked poor British old men and ladies. All this stuff is a link in a chain aimed against Russia,” echoes Vasilii “the Killer” (Golovin 2017).

Igor Lebedev, member of the Russian parliament, expresses a similar opinion: “They are not hooligans, but people who support their team with their heart and soul. I think that France and its police should have been better prepared for hosting such events” (VICE News 2017, min. 4.20–41). Vladimir Markin, head of the investigative committee at the Public Prosecutor’s Office in 2016, agreed that Russian fans were “normal men,” unlike those participating in European gay pride parades (MK.RU 2016).

These narratives refer to the Kremlin’s conservative discourse grounded in the ideas of blood and family (see Makarychev and Yatsyk 2015, 2017), as well as to the hegemonic masculinity exploited by Putin himself in the 2000s. The statement “To us the most important thing is to keep close to our group, to our families and not betray them,” explains their values, says another member of the fan group (Stockley 2017, min. 43.50–54). Against this backdrop, the model of the soldier, the warrior, that temporarily disappeared from hegemonic cultural discourses in the 1990s (see Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2002; Makarychev 2016), once again becomes visible in Russia. The scenes of a “forest fight”¹ near Rostov-on-Don (Stockley 2017, min. 51.17) makes a clear reference to the great power rhetoric, which adds a political perspective to the hooligan carnage in Marseille that was orchestrated, in the author’s interpretation, by “special military forces of football hooligans sent by Vladimir Putin to conquer Europe” (Stockley 2017, min. 15.47–51).

The severe accentuation of matters of Russian identity by the fan community did not prevent the state from taking measures, however. Due to the forthcoming FIFA 2018 World Cup and the highly negative publicity that Russia earned due to the Marseille event, the Russian government responded by removing Shprygin from his post at the All-Russian Union of Football Fans and excluded this organization from the Russian Supporters Union (Gazeta.ru. 2016a). Moreover, in May 2016 legislation was passed aimed at preventing the most aggressive fans from entering places where sport mega-events take place (Government of Russia 2016). In February 2017 this policy was extended by introducing the Football Fan Passport (Fan ID), a compulsory document for visiting the sites of the 2018 World Cup. Fan ID exempts foreign visitors from obtaining visas to Russia, and fixes and aggregates all infringements of rules of conduct in a single database.

According to Vitalii Mutko, Russia is the first country to implement such a measure for providing security in football (Vilf 2017). This story is an illustrative example of how police practices of regulation and control can be part of governmentality mechanisms when it comes to hosting mega-events. From the exceptionality perspective, the Fan Passport can be seen not simply as another tier of ubiquitous control policies enacted due to security considerations, but rather as a mechanism of legalized inclusion in and exclusion from the community of sport fans. Clearly, the practice of applying to attend public events that have a high level of social attraction and cultural visibility, with the subsequent possibility of being rejected, can be extended to spheres other than mass sport events.

CONCLUSIONS

Russia’s engagement with the global industry of sport mega-events looks quite ambiguous. On the one hand, Russia spent between $50 and $60 billion on the Sochi Olympics to prove its world-class status, and ultimately showed itself to the world as capable of staging mass performances with a global audience. Yet on the other hand, Russia simultaneously exposed itself as a place where evictions and exploitation of a cheap migrant labor force are normalized, and as a nation with traditions of artificially embellishing reality (Medvedev 2013).

In this analysis we applied the concept of governmentality to unpack Russia’s policy of mega-events. We proposed to conceptualize governmentality from two interrelated perspectives—administrative and cultural/performative. Consequently, we unpacked governmentality as a blend of managerial techniques with cultural performances that produce stories and imaginaries structuring the discourse on behalf of the national collective Self. In other words, practices of governing are intertwined with symbolic power conveyed through discourses and images of belonging to the collective national Self. We argue that governmentality, being largely associated with regimes of control and media entertainment, strengthen the autocratic elements of power, especially when it comes to a vast area of overlapping interests of the Russian government and international sport organizations, and when issues of security are at stake.

The lesson of Foucault appears crucial at this juncture: measures of totalizing control and police regulations may be inscribed in global tools and structures of power relations, of which mega-events are good examples. Their hosts can adapt to the structural requirements of global sporting organizations and produce practices of exclusion, top–down imposition of pre-given rules, and restrictive regulations, substantiated by imperatives of order and safety. In this respect, governmentality can be seen as a post-political elimination of democratic procedures. This is exactly what happens in the sphere of mega-events—theatrical exhibitions for global cultural consumption that function as spaces of “legalized exceptions,” with a high degree of security measures, administrative surveillance, monitoring, and oversight. These mechanisms are effectively put into practice by authoritarian governments willing to host major events.

Analysis of Putin’s narrative identified two possible reactions to the accusations against Russia for fostering a state-supported doping system. As a sovereign ruler, he could play the role of protector and defender of “our athletes”—unduly persecuted and intentionally discriminated against by the malign West—which would be structurally homologous to the Russian World rhetoric. Or he could accept the liability and start developing new “regimes of practices” aimed at rectifying the previous wrongdoings. Putin’s choice of the second option indirectly acknowledged that the ideology of national self-assertion faces limitations and ultimately has to give way to practices of governmentality conditioned by compliance with international standards and more autonomy to —at least formally—non-state units.

Of course, Putin’s regime is rightfully considered as authoritarian and isolationist, which became manifest with the economic sanctions and counter-sanctions, the expulsion of Russia from G8, and the stagnation of Moscow’s economic cooperation with major Western powers. Yet in the meantime Russia is part of the global world, which only actualizes the search for points of juncture or openings to the international institutional and economic milieu. Global sport organizations form a group of Russia’s partners that are instrumental in assisting the Kremlin to avoid isolation and remain an important reference point when it comes to infrastructure projects and the entertainment industry. Against the background of the ongoing crisis of Russia’s relations with major Euro-Atlantic institutions and transnational actors (global NGOs and international foundations), sport organizations seem to constitute a particular group of Russia’s global interlocutors. The Russian government treats FIFA, IOC, and other sporting organizations as important elements of Russia’s global engagement requiring interaction and communication. This explains Putin’s rejection of a conspiratorial interpretation of the doping issue and his (partial) acceptance of guilt.

This “inclusive exclusion,” a combination of openness to engagement with the global industry of mega-events and a self-distancing from the West, creates both challenges and incentives. On the one hand, mega-events are perceived in Moscow as a chance to legitimize Putin’s regime through nation-branding techniques without undertaking substantial changes in governance. On the other hand, due to the augmented visibility, Russia exposes itself to greater international scrutiny and becomes an object of demands from part of the international community, to which the Russian government has reacted by taking punitive measures highly appreciated by global sport organizations, while maintaining the basis of the centralized and autocratic administrative system inside the country.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We are thankful to Mikhala West for her assistance with proofreading the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by institutional research funding (IUT20-39) of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research and by the Russian Humanitarian Fund grant “Territory Branding in the Context of Russian National Integration: Strategies of the Creation of Ethno-Cultural Image of the Republic of Tatarstan” (#16-03-00071).

Notes

1. So-called forest fights are forms of fighting in Russia that are usually organized by football fan organizations to train their members for combat.