Red Dress

She's quite a talented young skater, certainly every bit a gold medalist at the age of 15. To me she does suffer from a lack of believable emotion. The emotion that skaters need in their routines seems a bit staged in Julia Lipnitskaia's case, at least for my taste. Tonight's performance was even taken directly from Hollywood. Slate sarcastically wrote this when she performed the routine earlier in the year: 

I think I speak for all of us when I say, “Finally, someone has adapted the saddest scene from a Holocaust movie into an acrobatic figure-skating routine.”

 In addition to the Schindler's List soundtrack, Lipnitskaia's red dress is used to connect her youthfulness to that of the little girl wearing red in the movie... and well, yes, red is a good color to connect this to Russia. Tragically, at such a young age, Lipnitskaia seems to have no individuality as a teenager in the part she plays for the Russian propaganda machine that is the 2014 Winter Olympics. Putin comes in right on cue to watch her, to let us know something important is happening here, and that we need to pay attention. However, it is not a celebration of Lipnitskaia, but of this aristocratic vision of a new Russia that seems to be the point of the games. What is important is the continuation of the rewriting of Russian history from the opening ceremonies. This time we must smudge out the persecution of the Jews by Tsarist Russia and later the Soviet Union. We must forget this history with no apologies because otherwise we would have to think this young lady was crass and vulgar to bring it up for a medal winning performance. She would then represent a time, apparently never gone, when Russian athletes were part of a machine. Some things you can say about Russia's propaganda: it is still a team effort, it has not gotten any less obvious, and the rulers of the day still have a lot to cover up.

 

by Michael DeVore