Kim’s slaves and Putin’s masters

Eight US senators have written to FIFA, expressing their “serious concerns about the exploitation of North Korean workers at a World Cup stadium site in Russia.”

Those workers, write the senators, “faced appalling work conditions that almost certainly amount to forced labour. Those conditions may have included inhumane working hours and living conditions, constant surveillance by North Korean agents, threats to workers’ families still living in North Korea, absence of freedom of movement, wage garnishment by the North Korean government, and other similar features. News reports further suggest that one North Korean worker has died… possibly due to overwork. Such working arrangements are completely inconsistent with FIFA’s human rights policy and international law.”

In other words, St Petersburg’s Zenit arena was built by slave labour generously provided by one criminal state to another. Yet again, Putin’s Russia finds herself in refined company, this time forming the new axis of evil with North Korea and Iran. One wonders how long before those North Korean slaves will inspire books like Uncle Soo’s Cabin and Loots.

What I find amusing is the reference to “FIFA’s human rights policy”. It ought to be remembered that, to paraphrase Lord Acton, all international organisations are corrupt, and international sports organisations are corrupt absolutely.

‘Absolutely’ means to the exclusion of everything else, including human rights. Those football chaps aren’t about back passes – they’re about backhanders.

Why do you suppose they awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 one to Qatar? I’ve been looking at the Qatar weather charts in June, when the World Cup is traditionally held, and the temperature there hardly ever drops below 45C.

Playing football in such conditions isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s life threatening. I can confidently predict that many players will suffer strokes and heart attacks. Some will probably die, and so will some fans, especially those unused to such cauldrons.

And some proposed sites for the Russian World Cup are 2,000 miles apart, with most places featuring antediluvian facilities and infrastructure. Conceivably the stadiums can be improved – there are more slaves where those North Koreans came from. But it would take millions of them to make places like Saransk fit for human habitation or indeed for hospitality expected by football fans from civilised countries.

So on what criteria was Russia selected ahead of the other bidders, Portugal/Spain, Belgium/Netherlands and Britain? Or Qatar ahead of the US, South Korea, Japan and Australia? Only one criterion comes to mind. It’s for a good reason that FIFA president Sepp Blatter was banned in 2015 following a corruption scandal.

As to slave labour, Russia in general and St Petersburg in particular enjoy a rich tradition of it, and the conservative in me rejoices at seeing it so lovingly upheld.

The great historian Vasiliy Klyuchevsky (d. 1911) probably exaggerated the human cost of building the city named after Peter’s patron saint when suggesting that more people died in the process than had ever been killed in any war. But modern historians cite a death toll close to 300,000, which is still fairly impressive by the demographic standards of the time.

Nor was it a one-off tragedy: at least another 60,000 were to die erecting Petersburg’s hideous St Isaac’s Cathedral in the mid-nineteenth century. By comparison, Putin’s slave masters look like humanitarians trying to get in touch with their feminine side.

After the revolution, whose centenary the Russians will be ecstatically celebrating later this year, forced labour became co-extensive with the country’s borders. Like Dante’s Inferno, that hell had different circles, of which GULAG proper was the innermost but far from the only one. The whole country was one giant slave camp.

Some of those slaves were imported from countries that fell under the Soviets’ sway during the Second World War, but not only from there. Many British, French and US POWs  were ‘liberated’ from Nazi camps only to find themselves in Soviet ones. At least in the German camps they could receive food parcels from the Red Cross, a privilege that didn’t exist in Russia.

Southeast Asians also experienced Soviet servitude, during and after the Korean and Vietnam wars. In both instances, the recipients of Soviet aid had to pay for it, just like the Spanish loyalists did in their Civil War. The Spanish paid with their entire gold reserves, shipped to Russia and never returned. The Koreans and the Vietnamese were poor in gold but rich in human fodder, which they offered to their Soviet benefactors in part payment.

As to corruption, that too has a fine tradition in Russia, as any reader of Gogol or Saltykov Shchedrin can confirm. When Nicholas I asked another great historian, Karamzin, how things were in the provinces, the latter replied laconically: “Thieving, Your Majesty” (Ils voles, sire).

That again was child’s play compared to what the modern historian Sean McMeekin calls “history’s greatest heist”, when the Bolsheviks looted Russia on a scale never before seen anywhere in the world. History’s second greatest heist came and is still going on after the so-called collapse of communism, with Lenin’s slogan “loot the looter” turned into “loot the looted”.

Russia’s corruption ratings are at the top of every international list, where the country finds herself next to places like Zimbabwe and Gabon. Yet even against the background of rampant corruption from top to bottom, the sports establishment can confidently claim pride of place.

Doping and bribery are rife in Russia’s sports, as witnessed by the wholesale international ban of her entire athletics team. Add corruption to a rich history of slavery, and one can’t think offhand of any moral or legal constraints that could have prevented the Russians from using slave labour – or indeed the North Koreans from providing it. As to FIFA shutting its eyes to this charming practice, that too is par for the course.

In this context, the senators’ appeal looks touchingly naïve. But at least they’ve drawn my, and vicariously your, attention to this outrage.