February 10, 2025

Russia Using World Stage to Prove Itself ‘Normal’

PARIS — Russia is using international events like the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi to show the world it is “normal,” a Russian official said Thursday, even as it uses such high-profile projects to direct critical investment to modernizing outdated Soviet-era infrastructure.

“Hosting these international events gives us a chance to show as many people as possible that Russia is a normal country,” Arkady Dvorkovich, Russia’s deputy prime minister, said. “We’re trying to include as many cities as possible, to show that there’s more than just Moscow and Saint Petersburg.”

Mr. Dvorkovich was in Paris to promote a bid by the city of Ekaterinburg to host the 2020 World Expo. Russia is already slated to host international university games next summer in Kazan, as well as the 2018 soccer World Cup. That comes after the government hosted the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in September.

Mr. Dvorkovich also cited Russia’s achievement in joining the World Trade Organization this year, and its hopes to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2014, as evidence of its efforts to integrate into the international community two decades after the end of the Soviet Union.

He acknowledged that hosting major events was expensive, but said the gains in infrastructure development more than compensated.

Dmitry Chernyshenko, the president and chief executive of the Sochi 2014 organizing committee, told The New York Times this month that the budget for staging the Games was about $1.8 billion, while the cost of building Olympic facilities and related infrastructure was projected at about $5.9 billion — exclusive of “the programs on renovation of the region that are not directly linked to the Games.”

“Sochi’s costs are high,” Mr. Dvorkovich said, “but we didn’t have sports infrastructure in the region,” meaning railroads, roads, and “everything required for tourism” had to be developed. The payoff, he said, is that Russia now has a developed winter sports resort area that will continue to contribute to the economy.

At the same time, he said, staging such events imposes a deadline on Russia that helps to force the country to make needed improvements, “in terms of infrastructure, particularly.”

“It’s not about Soviet traditions” of state economic planning, he said, “it’s about the complexity of the country.”

Ekaterinburg, named Sverdlovsk under communism, is Russia’s fourth-largest city. Despite a defense manufacturing base that has attracted Western companies including Boeing and Rolls-Royce, and a rich cultural life, the Ural Mountains city is little known outside of Russia.

In part, that is a legacy of the Soviet system. Sverdlovsk, named for the Bolshevik revolutionary who commanded the 1918 assassination in the city of Czar Nicholas II and his family, was home to so much military industry that it was closed to foreigners.

“It’s only a two-hour flight from Moscow,” Mr. Dvorkovich said, noting that was closer than Texas to New York. “It’s not some distant village.”

Presentations over the next year will determine the 2020 Expo winner. Others bidding are Dubai; Izmir, Turkey; Sao Paulo; and Ayutthaya, Thailand.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/23/business/global/23iht-russia23.html?partner=rss&emc=rss