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MOSCOW The sweeping accusations that a Kremlin-backed program facilitated

doping by elite Russian track-and-field athletes in the Olympics and other top sports
events earned a collective shrug Tuesday from the Russian public and even, to some
extent, from the officials who oversaw the debacle.
Was there public outrage over the destruction of positive drug tests, the
intimidation of laboratory technicians by secret agents and the extortion of the
athletes by the officials in charge who wanted to cover up the test results? Almost
none. Were there questions about the capability of President Vladimir V. Putin to run
a clean, competent administration? Even fewer.
And this was just the latest in a series of nasty shocks to Russia, some of them
direct results of Mr. Putins actions.
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Choked by low oil prices and Western sanctions imposed after the invasions of
Crimea and Ukraine, the economy is shrinking. The ruble has lost more than half its
value, inflation is at 11.2 percent, and a much-vaunted national project to create
local substitutes for banned Western imports seems to have produced mostly stuff
like dubious cheese made from palm oil.

And last week, a Russian charter flight plummeted into the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt,
killing all 224 people on board, in what British and American intelligence agencies
suspect may have been a terrorist attack in response to the Kremlins military
intervention in Syria.
Yet, the basic reaction is to shrug and point a finger elsewhere, preferably at the
West.
The West is envious that our athletes achieve good results, so they pushed forward
the doping claims, said Boris Ivanov, a rail-thin retired construction engineer,
without a trace of irony. Everybody takes dope! Americans and other nations, all of
them!
Russia was singled out, he said, because the Americans run most such organizations
and they want to attack Russia.
As in Soviet times, sports remains a government affair and another facet of global
prestige, so any blow to the image of the athletes is also a blow to the Kremlin. Mr.
Putin announced that he would meet with senior athletic officials on Wednesday.
After initial outrage over the accusations, the official Russian reaction was
somewhat more circumspect, with officials promising to investigate and to take
steps to correct the situation (something they promised back in 2013, before the
Sochi Olympics, where the Russian antidoping agency was the lead tester).
Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of the Moscow lab accused of malfeasance,
whom the report suggested be replaced, resigned. But Russian officials still
minimized the import of what experts call one of the most damning public reports in
the history of sports worse than we thought, said a co-author and doping
expert, Dick Pound.
Believe me, there are many similar doping scandals all over the world, Vitaly
Mutko, Russias sports minister, said in his initial public reaction, arguing that
doping should be considered an international issue, since elite Russian athletes
spend some 10 months of the year abroad competing. Doping is not a problem of
Russia.
A number of factors contribute to Russians readiness to accept such explanations,
the primary being the survival instinct. Most of the 140 million Russians struggle
just to get by, and do not involve themselves too deeply in larger issues.
Traditionally, though, the first line of defense against any problem is stoicism. This is
especially true since Mr. Putin has painted any current problems as the side-effects
of a national effort to pull Russia off its knees, where the West is said to have
shoved it in the first place.

We have had more difficult times before, said Viktoria Troschanskaya, a middleage Russian lawyer wandering through a Moscow park.
Russia is a country that is ready to tolerate pain for the sake of national
greatness, said Natalya V. Zubarevich, a professor who specializes in Russian
demographics. The simple rational explanation the economy went down, people
must be angry does not work in Russia.
Second, when they look for answers, state-run television tells them exactly what to
think. Ever since the March 2014 annexation of Crimea, the mantra has been that
Mr. Putin seeks to restore Russia as a great power, a goal the West is determined to
thwart. It is a circular argument that magnifies any gains and explains away any
setbacks.
Given that some 90 percent of Russians rely on state-run television as their primary
news source, and that for at least 18 months there has been a steady drumbeat of
anti-Americanism across all news programs, many people react automatically.
What the West considers a doping scandal in Russia will most likely be stretched to
be understood as something done for the public good, said Andrey Babitsky, a
former editor of Russian Esquire who recently founded a libertarian
website, www.inliberty.ru.
We are in a kind of competition, not to say a war with the West, said Mr. Babitsky,
explaining the general reaction, not endorsing it. Everybody knows that everybody
cheats, and if we were caught red-handed, it just means that they cheat better than
we do.
Finally, Russian officials face little accountability, and Mr. Putin in particular has
sought to insulate his loyalists from any public rebuke. There is a dark historical
precedent at play. Since Czarist times, Russians have been told that their leader will
always protect their best interests and they have been conditioned across centuries
never to question that fact.
As with doping, so with the catastrophic crash of the charter jet.
Russian officials starting with Mr. Putin expressed dismay that Western governments
were quick to point to a terrorist bomb as the likely cause. When Britain canceled all
flights and began an emergency airlift home, the initial Russian reaction was that
the West was trying to put pressure on Russia over its policy of deploying warplanes
in Syria since the end of September to bolster the fortunes of its ally and Western
bte noire President Bashar al-Assad.
No Russian officials acknowledged that Prime Minister David Cameron might face
domestic political problems if British citizens were harmed just months after 30
were shot dead in a terrorist attack on a Tunisian beach. Instead, Dmitry Kiselyov,
the television anchor who uses his Sunday night news show to set the agenda for

the Kremlin, questioned whether the United States and other Western nations might
have bought off the terrorist groups so they would attack a Russian jet.
It is well known that the Americans easily agree with terrorists about their
security, he said. They pay or they bargain: We close our eyes on something and
you dont touch us. This is a common practice with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Why
wouldnt this practice be replicated with the Islamic State?
Calling it just a theory, he said, Isnt the explosion on our plane that the
Egyptians say is 90 percent certain a product of an agreement not to touch civilian
planes of the Western coalition?
The Russian reaction to moral questions is complicated by their association of
national greatness with Stalin, who oversaw Russias industrialization and victory in
World War II, but during his long rule millions died in prisons, forced collectivization,
purges and mass deportations.
Russia tends to avoid confronting the crimes committed in tandem with its 20thcentury climb to greatness, analysts said, especially since it is trying to regain the
same stature. In defending Russian history, given that the government plays down
what Stalin did, a doping scandal appears fairly minor in comparison.
Just last week, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church defended Stalins
legacy without naming him. Achievements of one or another state leader who
stood at the roots of the countrys revival and modernization should not be called
into question, even if that leader is known for villainies, he said at an opening of a
museum exhibition on Russias 20th century history that also showed how Stalin
decimated the ranks of the clergy.
At the deepest levels, analysts say, the idea of morality in public policy died out
decades ago, if not centuries, under the weight of government repression.
It is not that Russian people are bad, Mr. Babitsky said. It is just that for 100
years they have not seen a politician who lives by any moral standards. When you
bring up a moral argument, everybody looks at you as a kind of crazy person, like
those people on Times Square shouting about the end of the world.