The Bear Seeks a Scapegoat for a Reason

Russians have this expression: Who’s guilty?

“They look for someone to blame, a scapegoat, when anything goes wrong,” Robert Edelman, a Russian history professor at UC San Diego, was saying by telephone Friday. “It’s an unpleasant side of the culture.”

We in the United States have a similar expression.

It’s called passing the buck.

I called Edelman, one of the nation’s leading authorities on Soviet/Russian sports, to ask his opinion of the Russian Olympic Committee’s threat to boycott Sunday’s closing ceremony if its sudden barrage of protests--the latest concerned Russian Irina Slutskaya’s second-place finish to American Sarah Hughes in figure skating--isn’t taken seriously by the International Olympic Committee.

He explained that Russian officials are under considerable heat at home, and not merely from the sports fan on the street but also from the sports fan in the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin.

For all the change in Russia under previous President Boris Yeltsin, he didn’t spend much time on sports outside of an occasional tennis match for the benefit of photographers.

Much of the old Soviet regime was still in place when Putin came to power and appointed a new team, including ROC President Leonid Tyagachev. But Putin didn’t stop there. An ice hockey fan, he all but handpicked Viacheslav Fetisov to coach the Olympic team.

Make no mistake about it, ROC officials answer to Putin.

He was already peeved at them last week because they lost what many Russians considered a propaganda war with the Canadians in the pairs figure skating controversy. Putin believed they acquiesced too much when the International Skating Union, with the IOC’s blessing, awarded a second gold medal to the Canadian pair.

But the larger issue concerns the performance of Russian athletes, who, through Thursday, had won a mere 14 medals. ROC officials had predicted 23.

They’ve got some explaining to do.

Their explanation: We wuz robbed.

It is playing in Red Square.

It has been playing well here too among most of the Russian media. But not all.

A reporter during a Thursday news conference asked Tyagachev if he was creating controversy to distract the Russian public from the medal count.

“Where are you from?” Tyagachev demanded.

“Russia,” the reporter said.

“It is not possible that you are from Russia and could ask such a question,” Tyagachev said.

Tyagachev might be a modern Russian bureaucrat, stylish and well-spoken, but his was a pre-glasnost response.

His rhetoric in the last two days has been reminiscent of Cold War-era Soviet sports officials. It is borne in the insecurity complex dating back to before Peter the Great about whether Russians measure up to the rest of the world.

The Soviet-led boycott of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles was in large part revenge for the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow.

But Peter Ueberroth, president of the L.A. organizing committee, suspected that Marat Gramov, the head of Soviet sports at the time, wholeheartedly endorsed the action.

Gramov, he speculated, feared his athletes would be much less successful on American soil than they had been at home in 1980 under his predecessor, Sergei Pavlov.

So the old Russian bear is growling again.

I guess we should consider ourselves fortunate that they are confining their bellicose threats to the sports world.

But the problem within Russia is serious.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, sports became a concern of the state for the promotion of patriotism and good health.

The demise of communism created a similar challenge, because so many young people in the country aren’t aware of the sacrifices made by their grandparents and great-grandparents in World War II, known as the Great Patriotic War in Russia.

There also is a perception among the country’s leaders that the majority of youth has become intoxicated by the allure of Western frills. Edelman’s

excellent book on Soviet sports is titled “Serious Fun.” Russian kids today are more interested in just fun.

The breakup of the Soviet Union has created other problems for Russian winter athletes. The bobsled and luge track is in Latvia. The speedskating oval is in Kazakhstan. There is not enough money to maintain ice in the summer for skating rinks, meaning that many Russian figure skaters must train abroad. The government also has less money to support athletes, especially at the grass-roots level.

Putin is aware of all of that, having asked Tyagachev to call a meeting recently of all the country’s athletic federation presidents to discuss means of raising money to rebuild the Russian sports empire.

It is important, he told Tyagachev, for the country to win medals to restore national pride and encourage young people to get off the streets and back into the gyms. It is important, he said, for the future of Russia.

So Putin knows the true story here. He is too smart to buy the Anglo-Saxon conspiracy theories advanced by his sports officials, having already called off the boycott threat.

But it’s possible the Russians’ 3-2 loss to the United States in ice hockey Friday could make him reconsider.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at randy.harvey@latimes.com.