If money can buy success, Russian football will top the world league table soon. Oligarch riches have won Premiership titles for Chelsea (Abramovich, whose assault on the Champions' League is unrelenting) and the FA Cup for Portsmouth (Gaidamak). But these are mere kite-flyers for the real Russian assault on the bastions of world football. This year Zenit St Petersburg won the Uefa Cup; Moscow's CSKA did it in 2005. In just two years Russia has risen from 15th to sixth in the Uefa rankings. The national team is yet to reap the harvest of massive oligarch investment, but a last-four showing at Euro 2008 is the shape of things to come.
Russia's current sporting success is not confined to "the people's game". This year CSKA won the European club basketball title and the national ice hockey team celebrated victory in the world championships, beating Canada in the final. That's some progress from the shambles left by the chaotic Yeltsin regime of 1991–2000.
Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, immediately seized upon sport as a means to restore Russia's pride, power and dignity after the international humiliation it had received since the Gorbachov era. A top-class athlete himself, Putin was mindful of the prestige accruing to the old Soviet Union through its sporting success at the Olympic Games. The Party had spelled out its sports objective as early as 1948 (previously it had boycotted the Olympic movement, branding it as "bourgeois"): "We must raise our level of skill so that Soviet athletes win world supremacy in the major sports in the immediate future." And after joining the International Olympic Committee in 1951, the Soviet Olympic team fulfilled its plan, winning almost every Olympics in which it participated between 1956 and 1992.
Yet Putin's aim has been more ambitious, encompassing the world's top professional sports as well as the old amateur Olympic events. Whereas the erstwhile communist regime invested state cash in sport, Putin has been clawing back the nation's assets from the oligarchs and forcing them to invest their fabulous fortunes at home, including in Russian sport. If they demur, they know they will lose not only their gas, oil and metals assets; they may end up shot, poisoned, pick-axed, debris in a helicopter crash or working in a Siberian labour camp, like the Yukos oil chief Khodorkovsky. According to the Russian press, in 2006 over 5,000 "known" hit-killings took place.
Continues in the print edition. Order now.
