I look at these photos and realize that a new stage of privatization has arrived: Putin’s oligarchs have privatized not just the country as such (that happened long ago), but its most important symbols and cultural touchstones. They genuinely think it is normal to step onto the ice and receive medals alongside the Russian national team after its victory in the game for third place at the hockey championship.
“I earned it,” Gennady Timchenko proudly thinks to himself—a Finnish citizen who made his fortune by acting as a middleman in the trade of our oil.
“This is my medal, mine,” thinks Finnish citizen Roman Rotenberg, son of Arkady Rotenberg.
“The Red Machine—that’s me,” thinks Arkady Rotenberg, a friend of Vladimir Putin who became a billionaire by acting as an intermediary in pipe supplies to Gazprom and now controls a huge share of state procurement contracts.
And they are not even embarrassed. As if this were perfectly normal. It would be one thing if they were pinning other people’s medals on themselves somewhere at a banquet, washing them down in the usual way by dropping them into a glass of vodka, and so on.
No, they actually go out onto the ice. Did Brezhnev or members of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee (the top Soviet leadership) climb onto the ice when that real, original “Red Machine” won? No, that would have been unimaginable.
But these people came out anyway, and Rotenberg, for example, hangs a medal around his own neck, even though he in particular ought to keep a lower profile—after all, with his active involvement, Dynamo had just been relegated from the Premier League for the first time.
They are not ashamed. Precisely because this is privatization. The pride of earning the right to step onto the ice with the national team has been sold off. The right to medals has been sold too.
Crooks and thieves will walk out alongside our athletes and stick out their necks for medals at the most solemn moments for the whole country.
Remember the old joke: - Putin’s two greatest achievements as president are winning the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet-German front of World War II) and launching Gagarin into space.
Well, now it is no longer a joke but the truth: the Rotenbergs and Timchenko defeated the United States 7–2 in hockey.
Now we wait for them all to be awarded medals “For the Capture of Berlin” and “For Courage.”
There is a special irony in Finland’s complete triumph at the championship: citizens of that country came out to collect both the silver medals and the bronze ones.
PS Just do not write to me saying, “They are sponsors and officials, they have the right.” They are ordinary thieves: they stole 10 billion, then gave 1 back in the form of “sponsorship support for sports,” and now they want us to thank them for it. In the USSR, the minister of defense or the minister of railways did not come out to receive medals on behalf of CSKA or Lokomotiv. And here we are talking about the national team, no less.