Nothing unusual in all that, you might think. Yet amid all the World Cup joy, it’s worth noting that anti-Putin activists have been dragged away from these very same spots for staging public gatherings without permission. Others have been arrested for holding up, as a civil liberties experiment, blank pieces of paper to see if they would be arrested. They were.
These are no ordinary times in Moscow. The city has been scrubbed and polished for FIFA’s festival of football and state employees have apparently been ordered to be polite and smile at foreign fans. No surprise then that so many people were fooled when Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader, quipped on social media that even the city’s jails had been spruced up with painted bars, goalposts in the exercise yards and food “better than in restaurants” — just in case any English fans were locked up. His comments were reported by a number of media outlets before he confessed he’d been joking.
It’s not only the authorities in Moscow who are anxious to exploit the World Cup’s massive PR potential. Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, lost no time in posing for photographs with Muhammad Salah, the Liverpool star, when his Egypt side arrived at their training camp in the southern Russian republic. It later emerged that Salah, who is recovering from a shoulder injury, had been given permission to skip Egypt’s first training session, but had been woken up at his hotel by Kadyrov who then drove him to the stadium. If Salah didn’t know much about Kadyrov, who denies multiple allegations of murder and torture, before the photo, the resulting media storm means he almost certainly does now. And we all know a little bit more about how determined Russia is to use the World Cup to polish its tarnished international image.
Marc Bennetts is a journalist and author of “Football Dynamo: Modern Russia and the People’s Game.” The views and opinions expressed in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the position of The Moscow Times.