Russian deputy prime minister: We're watching you people in the showers

They're no longer the Soviet Union, but Vladimir Putin is determined to restore Mother Russia to the glory of the Soviet years.

So far, so good, if that means Russians and their guests have to put up with the type of desolate living conditions that characterized the days of Stalin, Brehznev and yes, Gorbachev too. Whether you call it communism or not, a system that is heavily controlled by an all-powerful central government and operated in a manner designed to reward political friends and allies never results in high quality. And that's what Olympic athletes and others descending on Sochi for the Olympics are discovering. The accommodations are abysmal and no one appears to be accountable for the mess. Ariel Cohen and Stanislav Miachkov report for the Heritage Foundation's Foundry:

Journalists arriving to the Olympic Games are reporting major problems with the hotels, such as broken elevators and a lack of hotwaterand heat.

---

This is indicative of broader, systemic problems — and it’s not shocking, as hospitality service in the former Soviet Union was notoriously horrendous. In fact, many Western fast food providers and hotel operators in Russiarefused to hire anybody with previous Soviet experience in food and hospitality industries. Russia lacks a tradition in service industries, suffers from opaque business practices, and is riddled corruption– all factors which led to the fiasco we see now. Some building contracts in Sochi were given to companies without bidding, and construction projects had very little public scrutiny. Even though 100 percent of the Sochi Olympics is state-funded, there is no publicdisclosureof the expenditures. The main contracts went to the brothers Rotenberg – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s childhood friends – and to two other Russian companies affiliated with peoplein chargeof the Olympic projects. Foundry reports that the initial projected cost to Russia for hosting the Olympics has soared from $12 billion to $50 billion, so I guess we can take solace in the knowledge that it's not only American politicians who pull budget projections out of their butts for political purposes and then blow past them. But quasi-police states do some things exceedingly well:

For days journalists attending the games have complained about incomplete construction, hotel rooms without door knobs, suspiciously colored water running from taps, and most notoriously two toilets in a single stall. When confronted by reporters today,Dmitry Kozak, the deputy prime minister responsible for the Olympic preparations, accused the Western media of a bias against Russia, and said he had seen surveillance footage from inside hotel bathrooms that supported his claim. “We have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turn on the shower, direct the nozzle at the wall and then leave the room for the whole day,” Kozak said, according to theWall Street Journal.

I always feel like somebody's watching me! The Russian government, of course, claims Kozak "misspoke" and there are no surveillance cameras in the shower. But we all know you can't trust a Russian, even though the motivation for surveillance under the circumstances might be more the sort of thing we associated with Carlos Danger. As for the bathrooms with two toilets per stall, hey, we don't judge. You would have thought things couldn't get worse for the Russians after reports that they were rounding up and summarily executing stray dogs in advance of the Olympics. You would have thought wrong. Putin likes to flex his muscle on the international stage, and that becomes only too easy for him when he comes up against a weak counterpart like Barack Obama who gets himself into fixes that create golden opportunites for Putin to take strategic advantage. But leading a nation means looking out for the interests of all the people, as well as for the nation's international image, and you can't do that very well when you're steeped in corruption and committed to payola to benefit friends and political allies. The International Olympic Committee had the call to grant the 2014 Winter Games to Sochi knowing full well that this is how Putin operates. Whatever their motivation for doing so, I hope they're happy with their choice.