The Putin Olympics

Last time Russia prepared to host the Olympics, Leonid Brezhnev briefly considered canceling the whole thing. "Besides the enormous cost," he wrote to party officials in 1975, according to archives since declassified and published in the Russian press, "there may be all sorts of scandals that could tarnish the Soviet Union." In the end Brezhnev needn't have worried. A U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow 1980 Summer Games kept away most prying Western eyes. Russia these days is much richer, somewhat freer and led by a man who'd apparently rather spend the sum of a small war rather than cancel a single event of the Sochi 2014 Winter Games, which begin in February. But after six years and the most extreme cost overruns in Olympic history, Vladimir Putin is still waiting for contractors to finish the main stadium and other key infrastructure. Money has been no object: Altogether, Russia's public and private Olympic spending is currently projected at 1.5 trillion rubles ($47 billion), from an initial bid estimate of 313.9 billion rubles.