Russian Elites Must Step Up

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, March 06, 2022

 

What to do about Alex Ovechkin, the Vladimir Putin crony who is a star player for the Washington Capitals? Or, as Jay Nordlinger asks: What about the great conductor Valery Gergiev, another Putin ally, or the pianist Denis Matsuev, who not only acts as a PR agent of the Putin regime but who also has specifically endorsed violence against Ukraine? What about soon-to-be-former Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch pressured into putting his team up for sale?

 

“Our fight is not with ordinary Russians,” the platitude insists. Perhaps. But these are not ordinary Russians.

 

Is an oligarch entitled to a private life? Is a celebrity?

 

Private life has been very much in decline in our time: A few people who want it cannot get it, and many more people who might have it do not want it, preferring instead to live their lives in public via social media — would-be celebrities who act as their own paparazzi. As it turns out, there was never any need for Big Brother to create a vast surveillance state — a few hundred million Little Brothers and Little Sisters have done that on their own, and we all live in the glass house they made, from disgruntled airline customers who flip out a little bit on camera to Russian oligarchs whose private jets can be tracked around the world by hobbyists doing the work that spy agencies used to do.

 

The world’s rich are not content with being rich: They also want to be famous. Some people enjoy caviar; some people enjoy being seen enjoying caviar. It isn’t quite the same thing.

 

I would wager that almost no one reading this column knows who the governor of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug is (or what in the hell the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug is), and maybe 50 readers in New York and London will know what Millhouse LLC is. But you may know former governor of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and Millhouse founder Roman Abramovich.

 

That’s why billionaires buy sports team.

 

Abramovich is . . . everywhere: He is a well-propertied gentleman in London, or else he is one of  New York City’s biggest celebrities, or else he is the richest man in Portugal or the second-richest man in Israel. A long way from Chukotka Autonomous Okrug is our Roman now. But the shadow of Putin is always on him.

 

The frenzy of denunciation that has greeted Russians at large in the world after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is very much a phenomenon of the social-media age, and, as such, it has at times been predictably stupid: such shenanigans as dumping French vodka down the drain because it has a Russian-sounding name, vandalizing the Russia House restaurant in Washington, D.C., which is co-owned by an American veteran and a Lithuanian immigrant, and other nonsense of that nature. Commentary reports that an Italian university dumped its Dostoevsky course.

 

It is a bit like that spate of attacks on Sikhs after 9/11: One turban is as good as another, for a moron.

 

Our fight isn’t with the Russian people. Everybody says this. How true is it? Our sanctions are going to hurt ordinary Russians — they are designed to do so. Our financial weapons may be a bit more discriminating than the bombs we dropped on Dresden, but there is no such thing as a surgical strike.

 

Russia is full of men who have grown immensely rich and powerful under the patronage of Vladimir Putin and his junta. So are Belgravia and Surrey and Tribeca and Beverly Hills and South Beach, and so are major sports leagues and symphony halls and equestrian clubs all over the Western world.

 

No, the Russians (most of the Russians) did not ask to be put in this situation — but, then, neither did the Ukrainians. The heroes of Kyiv surely would have preferred a world in which their heroism — and martyrdom — were unnecessary. But that is not the world we have, thanks to Vladimir Putin and those who have kept him in power and profited from that power — and the burden of dealing with Russia will necessarily fall, to some considerable extent, on Russians.

 

Perhaps Mr. Ovechkin and the rest of the globetrotting Russian elite can bear some of that burden, even at the risk of being heroes.