Early on the morning of Jan. 31, 2018, snowboarder Alena Zavarzina was with a group of Russian athletes at the Sports Ministry in Moscow. It was a few days before their departure for the Winter Olympics in South Korea. They were driven out of the city to one of President Vladimir Putin’s residences, where they were to meet the Russian leader. Zavarzina, who was about to compete in her third Olympics, was chosen to make a speech to Putin on behalf of the Russian team.
A Kremlin official interviewed her in advance to check that she would stay on message. Asked what she wanted to say, Zavarzina summarized to the official: “Thank you so much, it’s incredible. Love you. Thank you for sending us to the Olympics.” He gave her the green light.
Zavarzina got nervous as the athletes spent hours expecting Putin to show up (the Russian leader has earned a reputation for keeping guests waiting). Eventually, he arrived.
“He gave a speech, I gave a speech, and then he responded,” Zavarzina said. “Then we gave him this hockey jersey, and we had an informal patting-on-the-back moment. I cracked a joke. I don’t remember what it was, but I was trying to be like ‘Putin’s my man.’”
Speaking from her basement apartment in London six years later, the Siberian-born Zavarzina, 35, now working as a visual artist, smiled at the memory. “It’s pretty ridiculous,” she said.
Zavarzina has come a long way since that encounter with the Russian leader. Later that year, she quit professional sports. Then she moved to London to study at Central Saint Martins arts school and divorced her Olympic medal-winning snowboarder husband. When the Kremlin cracked down on Russia’s opposition and launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she looked on with horror. Her university projects addressed topics like “fear and terror” inside Russia and the experience of anti-war Russian emigres.
Zavarzina’s transformation from a loyal athlete and minor Russian celebrity to an artist in London puts her among just a handful of Russians who have made the transition from establishment figure to exile. Even amid the devastating war in Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of the Russian elite have — at least in public — rallied round the Kremlin.
Her shift sheds light on the delicate and, at times, complicated dance that must be performed under an increasingly authoritarian regime, when patriotism and fame clash with moral convictions. Even before she quit Russian sports, Zavarzina started to have doubts about the system of which she was a part. A full reckoning with her past, however, required time, therapy and introspection.
While Zavarzina did not express any regret about her decade at the top of elite sport in Russia, she was critical of the current regime and the war in Ukraine. “It bothers me what’s happening to my country. It bothers me how they take laws and just do shit. How they take the constitution and change it. How they don’t respect people. How they think people are so stupid,” she said. “It’s just heartbreaking.”
The peak of Zavarzina’s career — and celebrity — came after she won bronze in the parallel giant slalom at the 2014 Winter Olympics hosted by Russia in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. Her husband, the U.S.-born snowboarder Vic Wild, who, with Zavarzina’s help, received Russian citizenship in the run-up to the Games and competed for Russia, won two gold medals. In the aftermath, Wild and Zavarzina were catapulted to fame. Besieged by journalists, they were invited to a string of receptions and parties in Moscow.
The Kremlin put billions of dollars into making sure the Sochi Olympics were a success, and these were halcyon years to be a Russian athlete. Ahead of the Games, Zavarzina was able to appeal directly to the minister of sport for help getting the right medical treatment for a minor injury. And after she won bronze, Zavarzina and her husband entered the outer layers of the Russian establishment, a place where B-list celebrities, midlevel officials and successful businesspeople happily refrain from criticizing the Kremlin in exchange for money and prestige.
Zavarzina was awarded the Order “For Merit to the Fatherland” by Putin. A Kremlin-issued photograph shows the two with wide smiles, shaking hands. Both she and Wild were showered with gifts. She became a brand ambassador for the Swiss luxury watchmaker TAG Heuer, auto manufacturers Audi and Toyota, U.S. dietary supplement producer Herbalife, French tourism operator Club Med and Russian clothing brand Zasport, which supplied the Olympic team.
The two athletes were given an apartment in a commuter town near the Russian capital by a prominent Russian billionaire whom Zavarzina declined to name.
“I had to go to the bank with the billionaire’s men,” Zavarzina recalled, describing how a man with a broken arm in a cast appeared with a bag of money. “I deposited it onto this account. So I bought the house. And the deed shows that I purchased this house with some fucking money. I’d never seen it before.”
Amid the post-Olympics whirlwind, Zavarzina admitted she had little awareness of, or interest in, politics. Shortly after the 2014 Games ended, the Kremlin annexed Crimea and then went on to sponsor a rebel uprising in eastern Ukraine with money, arms and troops.
“At that point, I didn’t really connect the dots about how sports are connected to politics,” she said. Later, though, she would become more aware. After she moved to London, she came across the term sportswashing for the first time — when listening to a podcast. “I realized that sportswashing is a thing and that Putin was proving he was a man by organizing the biggest sporting event in the world.”
Sportswashing — the practice of using sports to improve tarnished reputations and showcase power — is often associated with authoritarian regimes, but it has been attributed to a whole array of nations, from Brazil to Israel, as well as corporations and even individuals. Accusations of sportswashing against Russia were particularly loud when the country hosted the Winter Olympics and soccer’s World Cup four years later.
Zavarzina said that she first started having doubts about the way Russia was run in 2011 — just after her first Olympics — amid a wave of opposition protests triggered by fraud-marred parliamentary elections. But she pointed out that athletes in Russia are employed by the state and know that criticizing the ruling party, senior officials or Putin himself would destroy their careers. She said she made a decision not to “bite the hand that feeds me.”
Zavarzina said she laughed with friends and family over athletes who posted fawning messages on social media about Putin on the leader’s birthday. But, at least in public, she avoided politics — neither praising nor condemning the regime.
“Politics and sport are very deeply intertwined in Russia,” said Anastasia Vorotnikova, a Russian film director who first met Zavarzina almost a decade ago and went on to make a documentary about her sporting career. “It wasn’t possible for you to say what you thought if you wanted to continue being a sports person in Russia and participate at a high level.”
In both the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, sporting success has traditionally been equated with national prowess, with top officials keen to be associated with sporting achievements in general and sporting stars in particular. Putin himself has long been reported to be romantically involved with Alina Kabaeva, an Olympic medal-winning gymnast, and Russian athletes often go on to forge high-level political careers. There are dozens of former sporting champions in the current Russian Parliament, including heavyweight boxer Nikolai Valuev, figure skater Irina Rodina, biathletes Sergei Chepikov and Anton Shipulin, wrestler Artur Taymazov, and ice hockey players Vyacheslav Fetisov and Alexander Aksyonenko.
However, there was less official interest in sports after the Sochi Games, and Zavarzina witnessed how funding dried up. More important, in 2015, an independent commission from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accused Russia of running a state-sponsored doping program, leading to the national team being banned from international competitions and medals being stripped from dozens of athletes.
Neither Zavarzina nor Wild was ever accused of doping by WADA or linked with doping in the press. But Zavarzina was still subjected to what she said was an excessive amount of drug testing by national agencies and came close to physical confrontations with athletes from other countries who told her she should apologize on behalf of Russia.
“Slowly, it all started falling apart,” she said. “I was always clean. I had nothing to do with that doping scandal bullshit, but my life got affected by the decisions that were made from above.” Zavarzina was furious with both the Russian sporting authorities for their role in the doping crisis, as well as the international sporting community that seemed to judge her purely because of her nationality. “This was my firsthand experience of how the government really affects me,” she said.
Nevertheless, she remained a patriot inside and out. “I represented my country on the global arena, and wearing the flag to the podium and listening to the national anthem just does something to you. It makes you think that this is part of your identity,” she said. Perhaps paradoxically, the international opprobrium heaped on Russian sport in those years made Zavarzina even more patriotic. At her final Olympics, in South Korea six years ago, where the entire Russian team competed as neutral, she decided not to attend the opening and closing ceremonies. “I’ve never wanted to drape myself in that damned [Russia] flag more than at those Olympics,” she said in Vorotnikova’s documentary, “Slalam.”
The year 2018 was a turning point for Zavarzina. First, her mother died, then she finished fourth in South Korea. She was also painfully aware of how, while Moscow was booming, the Putin regime was doing little for more distant towns and cities where most Russians lived. In Vorotnikova’s documentary, which was shot in 2018, Zavarzina was shown visiting the slopes in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk where she learned to snowboard. “I don’t like going back to the places of my childhood,” she says to the camera as mournful electronic music plays. “Nothing has changed, everything has only got worse. It’s like you’ve arrived at a party, but there’s no one there anymore.”
Increasingly, Zavarzina was angry with the Russian officials in charge of managing snowboarding. She said her life was little more than a constant battle to get funding, with “mafia-style” meetings with bureaucrats who did not take her seriously and insisted athletes strive to win international tournaments, while cutting funding for training, medical care and equipment. Eventually it all became too much. Furious with the Russian sporting authorities, she quit snowboarding in late 2018, aged just 29.
Looking back, Zavarzina said it would have been extremely hard to break rank any earlier. After all, she pointed out, her employer was her country, and protesting would have meant giving up on all chances of competing as a snowboarder. “Unless you get personally fucked with, you keep it quiet,” she said. After leaving sport, she began therapy, which continued while she was in London. “It took me at least three years of therapy to unpack that trauma of being a cog in the machine,” she said. “It almost broke me at the end.”
Zavarzina’s relocation to the United Kingdom deepened her estrangement from her homeland. “My whole life I was trying to change the perception of Russian people and then this happens,” she said of the invasion of Ukraine. As a snowboarder, she had traveled to Europe and the United States for competitions, as well as training, and said she always tried to battle against the stereotype of Russians as “vodka-drinking assholes.”
A few days after the Kremlin ordered tanks over the border, Zavarzina lost access to several hundred thousand dollars she had saved during her sporting career. Invested via a Russian broker, they were frozen by Western sanctions. “That made me very upset and very scared,” she said. “I know it makes me sound like, ‘oh, people in Ukraine are dying and you’re just worried about your money.’ But obviously I’m worried about people in Ukraine, too, and the global scale of this conflict and how it reflects on my countrymen, myself included.”
While some expected the full-scale invasion of Ukraine to lead to high-profile defections from the Russian elite, the opposite turned out to be true. Whatever they might have said in private, the majority endorsed Putin. The most well-known figure to break ranks was singer Alla Pugacheva, the queen of Soviet pop music, who condemned the war and relocated to Israel with her husband in 2022. While Kremlin envoy Anatoly Chubais, who helped bring Putin to power in the late 1990s, quit his job and left Russia after the invasion, he has not publicly denounced the regime.
According to Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, an expert at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, the reason for the lack of public condemnation of the war among the elite is simple: fear. Even leaving the country is no guarantee that you are safe.
“Defecting is dangerous, speaking up even more so,” said Schulmann about Russian emigres. “There is a threat to families, to parents and siblings, to assets and property. And, even if people don’t have these things back in Russia, they can, with good reason, be afraid of being killed in any part of the world.”
Perhaps inevitably, the war in Ukraine has divided Russia’s sporting community. As a result of the invasion, the International Olympic Committee ruled that Russian athletes would be allowed to compete only as “individual neutral athletes” in this year’s Olympics. That means they cannot display any flag, anthem, colors or any other identification and can compete only in individual, not team, events. Russian athletes who actively support the war or who are contracted to Russian security agencies are banned from taking part. In total, officially just 15 Russians traveled to Paris for the Games. While the majority of Russian athletes have not protested against the war, hundreds have changed their nationality to compete for other countries, with Israel, Serbia, Germany, France and Poland reportedly being the five most popular new homes.
Before the Games began, French President Emmanuel Macron accused Russia of running a disinformation campaign to undermine the Olympics, and their start was mired in chaos as fires were set across Paris. French Sports Minister Amelie Oudea-Castera said last week that Russia was “possibly” behind a string of attacks on the country’s rail network, apparently designed to sabotage the Olympics ahead of the opening ceremony. Two days earlier, France arrested a 40-year-old Russian man on suspicion of planning to “destabilize” the sporting event. Media reports later identified him as Kirill Griaznov, a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef.
Wild — Zavarzina’s now ex-husband — has remained in Russia, apparently supportive of Moscow’s actions. Only a few athletes have emigrated and condemned the war. They include Russian fencers Sergey and Violetta Bida, who are now wanted on Russian arrest warrants, fencer Konstantin Lokhanov and tennis player Daria Kasatkina.
“I’m against this war, I don’t want to be associated with this war. I express my support to all Ukrainians,” Lokhanov posted on Instagram in December 2022. He later got the word “Liberty” tattooed on his arm.
According to Vorotnikova, who accompanies Zavarzina on anti-Kremlin protests in London, Zavarzina is a completely different person. “Now she lives a completely different life. There’s no more of the Alena that there was back then.”
The Kremlin is concerned about former members of the elite living abroad and either criticizing the war from afar or sharing information with foreign governments, according to Schulmann. This reveals itself in formal bans on lawmakers and other officials from leaving the country, as well as what appear to be attacks on Russian journalists, politicians and even cultural figures in Europe.
“The Russian state has been doing extrajudicial killings since Stalin’s time,” Schulmann said. “They don’t hide it; they boast of it. The risks are very real and tangible.”
While Zavarzina is opposed to the full-scale invasion, she is careful not to be too outspoken or too critical. In large part, this is because she has family inside Russia.
“I’m not Pussy Riot,” she said, referring to the feminist punk band whose members were jailed in 2012 for performing in a Moscow church. “I just want to live comfortably and have a nice passport.” Zavarzina, who remains a Russian citizen, is applying for a visa to continue living in the U.K. She said she has no plans to return to the country of her birth, even if her visa application is refused.
“Russia completely messes up everything that you do. It gives you an illusion that you have created something, and then takes it away in dramatic fashion,” she said. “Everything that I worked for was taken away.”
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