Putin's Olympics

Robert W. Orttung is the Research Director of the Sustainability Collaborative and Associate Research Professor of International Affairs at The George Washington University, USA.Sufian N. Zhemukhov is a Senior Research Associate at The George Washington University and Lecturer at The University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA..

• 1. Introduction: How Putin’s Political System Led to Olympic Corruption, Military Adventurism and State-Sponsored Doping2. The 2014 Sochi Olympic Mega-Project and Russia’s Political Economy 3. Political and Civil Society and the Sochi Olympics 4. Security: Fighting Terrorism and Strengthening the Military5. International Issues: Circassians, the Former Soviet Countries, and the West6. The Legacy of the Sochi Olympics

Putin’s Olympics rightly and repeatedlyreminds us that in the process of creating the Sochi experience, Putin, like his autocratic andauthoritarian predecessors, broke a lot of eggs in order to make this cake.Catherine A. Schuler, University of Maryland