According to Joseph Nye, who coined the concept of 'soft power', Putin 'failed to capitalize on the soft-power boost afforded to Russia by hosting the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi' (Nye, 2014). With political volatility in the region throughout the year, Russia's ensuing actions-culminating in the secession of Crimea-and its position over the armed conflict in Ukraine, certainly appear to bear this out. The Sochi Olympics were predominantly framed by the Western press as a Russian soft power quest and an attempt to obtain belated recognition as a great power. However, Sochi should be understood as a part of a wider package of "spatial governance" undertaken by Putin's regime. We argue that the Sochi mega-event is part of a wider soft power strategy-one which is not the same as, for example, the UK's or Brazil's use of such events. For Russia, international status means possessing both soft and hard power resources and being able to use them.
Russia's (and the USSR's) use of sports mega-events (SMEs) makes this BRICS country (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) not only an outlier among emerging states, but also among key SME hosts generally. In this paper the authors argue that both the historic Moscow Olympics (1980) and the more recent hosting of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics provide evidence that Russia has, on both occasions, focused on geopolitical priorities using hard power (military might) at the expense of soft power acquisition. Further, the authors advance the notion that first and foremost both Olympics were used to pursue domestic soft power goals, which, again, makes Russia an outlier in terms of the political use of sports mega-events by states in the literature on this subject. The 1980 Olympic Games, therefore, in terms of their potential to generate soft power and national unity, turned out to be a mis-used opportunity for Russia. The authors explore the extent to which this is specific to Russia and whether the first Russian Olympics could provide valuable insight into the modern-day hosting of sports megaevents by Russia (2014Russia ( /2018
This paper focuses on the comparative (mis-)interpretation of the 1980 Moscow and 2014 SochiOlympic ceremonies by media outlets located in Great Britain and the USA, Russia's 'significant others'. Further, the paper attempts to uncover the most persistent facets of Russia's identity -by decoding culturally-specific meanings of the signs and symbols in both ceremonies -and to trace which aspects of its national narrative Russia had to let go eventually in the course of the 34 years that separate the two Olympics. This is undertaken by a documentary analysis of 'Western' media between the periods of 20 July and 6 August for Moscow and 7-23 February for Sochi -time frames when the direct coverage of the ceremonies took place. Our key findings suggest that instead of enabling Russia to validate a new national identity and image the Western media only helped to reproduce resilient reciprocal national identities. Furthermore, it was the Sochi Olympics as Russia's biggest soft power party to date, not the aftermath, which, not least through a transformative attendant media response/framing from both sides, became the closing chapter of the Russian-Western interdependent identity construction in the early 21st century. Thus, apart from placing the spotlight on Russia's evolving identity and interests, this paper also investigates how the USA's and the UK's media resisted Russia's (Soviet) soft power strategy, whilst in the process solidifying their own identities and promoting their strategic narratives.
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