However, one point still stand: Russia poured huge amount of cash into the Sochi Olympics, making it the most expensive Olympic game ever (Second come China at 43 billions, but those were summer Olympics. The other games tend to cost less than $15 billions) and the results are far from stellar. Hotel with the lobby not build yet is not "less than stellar reception", not when that much money was poured in. It's a sign of corruption, embezzlement and widespread mismanagement.
The number of 50 billion dollars spent by Russia for the Sochi Olympics isn't official. It comes from a liberal Russian politician and a Yale graduate Alexei Navalny. Many his reports about corruption have been criticised for inaccuracy, sometimes even by his followers, but Western media believes everything he says, because his liberal and pro-Western political views make him more truthful than any other sources.
Frankly, Russia deserve more than Putin.
...because Yeltsin's incorruptible liberal democracy that was destroyed by tyrant Putin was so much better. Lots of people in Russia had to collect scraps to survive back then. Many people who couldn't find jobs or who didn't have any money because of salaries not being paid drank themselves to death, committed suicide or even simply starved. One of West's favourite Russian politicians from the 1990s, Anatoli Chubais, spoke about them to his successor chief of Russian Propriety Committee Vladimir Polevanov: "Why do you care about them? Let's say, thirty million people will die. They didn't fit into the market. Don't think about them, others will grow".
The 1990s have left a very good impression about liberalism, laissez-faire economic policies and democracy among the Russian people.
P.S. Also, you haven't answered about security concern. Who wants to bet on the likelihood of an attack?
Sochi is basically a closed city right now, so any direct terrorist attack at the Olympics will be hard to carry out. The most common troublemakers will likely be Western activists, just like on the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Time will tell, though.
Guardian's mindset is frozen in some indetermimate 1985 date. Russia is unfairly criticised at every turn and never did anything wrong, it is under threat from the West which is a united entity and always will be, North Korea really isn't all that bad, strong leadership is the answer, tractor factories are important, Belarus/Russia are the same, Stalin really wasn't all that bad, Russia has never colonised other nations only civilised them, Gaddafi really wasn't all that bad, Assad really isn't all that bad, all this stuff about LGBT rights is hooey.
I won't argue about many of these points, because I'm not in the mood for that and I don't want to repeat the same things again, but anyway:
1. I didn't say that North Korea is good. North Korea with its ideology of Stalinism taken to a logical extreme with Korean nationalism mixed in was an odd country even among the Socialist states during the times of USSR. North Korean policies are extremely heavy-handed, but most Western sources reporting about them are propaganda sources that shouldn't be taken at face value.
2. Liberal democracy is
not a panacea against all troubles that can apply (and should be applied) in every single country. Quite a lot of Westerners believe it, because their "freedom and liberty above all else" mindset ingrained in their cultures don't accept any authoritarian rule - it inhibits freedom, so it's universally wrong. The example of all democratic governments of post-Soviet states in the 1990s proves that democracy is not always effective - liberal leaders couldn't solve the problems of their countries and were more concerned about making money for themselves, benefiting their sponsors and being friends with the West.
The life of people in Libya didn't improve much with the death of Gaddafi. Now Libya is a country of squabbling tribes and armed militias that hinges on the verge of collapse, but if we look at it from a Western "freedom first" point of view, it got better, because now it's a democracy. Russians would say otherwise.
3. Where did I say that Belarus and Russia are the same? Culturally, they are not. Belarusians and Russians have different mentalities, for example Belarusians are much more orderly and don't take things to logical extremes like Russians. Some Russian war veteran in the 19th century even complained about Belarusian soldiers that they don't indulge in drunk parties like Russian soldiers do.
4. You may ask why I'm so worried about the West being a Russian adversary. The problem is that Belarus lies on a path that many Western armies took on their way to "civilize those Russian barbarians". As a result of the latest such quest for European integration committed by a group of European countries viewing themselves as morally and culturally superior to the rest of the world, Belarus lost 25-33% of its population - about 2-3.5 million people. We are at a crossroads of many transport routes leading to Russia - during the war between Russia and any European powers, we find ourselves between the hammer and an anvil.
Tractors are a moral travesty in modern Western society. We must return to the use of ploughs and Clydesdale horses to furrow soil.
If the people of Belarus refuse to submit to superior Western values then we will destabilise their country with gay propaganda until their economy collapses due to infrastructure damage caused by all the mincing. When our non-traditional agents overthrow their government, we will privatise their agricultural machinery production industry then dismantle all the factories.
I see that you are being ironic, but anyway, concerning industry, the liberal reforms in former Warsaw Pact states and many Soviet republics did result in the destruction of many factories. The former workplace of Lech Walensa the Gdansk Wharf in Poland, the Ikarus bus factory in Hungary (reopened in 2010... kind of), the RAF minibus factory and VEF radio factory in Latvia, the textile factories in Estonia and many others are examples of it.
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