Olympics Opening Ceremony Offers Fanfare for a Reinvented Russia

SOCHI, Russia — With an outsize extravaganza that reached deep into the repertory of classical music and ballet, traversed the sights and sounds of the world’s largest geopolitical expanse, soared into outer space and swept across millenniums of history in a celebration of everything from czarist military might to Soviet monumentalism, a swaggering, resurgent Russia turned its Winter Olympic aspirations into reality on Friday night.

After seven years of building to this moment — the opening of what is believed to be the most expensive Olympic Games in history — the message of the over-the-top ceremony was simply this: In a big way, Russia is back.

As if there were any doubt.

(Where Russia may be headed — amid an economic slowdown, continuing rights abuses and suppression of political dissent that have drawn sharp criticism, especially in the West — was a question for another day.)

The 18-chapter, nearly three-hour opening ceremony began at the symbolic moment of 8:14 p.m. — 20:14, as time is counted here — and provided a majestic spectacle that included a glowing troika of horses made of light streaking through a snowbound sky, the multicolor onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral bobbing in the air; literary references to Gogol, Tolstoy and Nabokov; images of Stalinist skyscrapers; and performances by Russia’s storied ballerinas, musicians and singers<з>

If there were any traces of national self-consciousness lingering nearly a quarter-century after the collapse of communism and the loss of superpower status, they were put aside for the evening. Also set aside, however briefly, were the many political controversies of late, including criticism of a law banning homosexual "propaganda” and disputes over political influence in Ukraine, human rights abuses and other issues that prompted some Western leaders not to attend the Games.

Instead, what unfolded in the Fisht Olympic Stadium — the centerpiece of the newly built Olympic complex stretching from the Black Sea coast up into the Caucasus Mountains — was sheer pageantry and national pride, with all of the homespun promotionalism, mythmaking and self-aggrandizement that are the modern trademark of such ceremonies.

The music included pieces by Alexander Borodin, Georgy Sviridov, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky, with selections from "Swan Lake” and "The Nutcracker.” There were roles for the opera soprano Anna Netrebko; the prima ballerina Diana Vishneva; and Russia’s best-known conductor, Valery Gergiev of the Mariinsky Theater. There were Cossack dancers and singers from the more than 600-year-old Sretensky Monastery Choir.

There were salutes to Russian science and innovation, including nods to Mendeleev, who codified the periodic table of elements, and Igor Sikorsky, the inventor and aviator.

The Russian flag was raised by the cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev. The former first lady Naina Yeltsin was in the audience. And the Olympic torch was carried on its final steps by a cadre of Russia’s most famous athletes, including the gold-medal-winning rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabaeva, the champion pole-vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva and the tennis star Maria Sharapova, who won a silver medal at the Summer Games in 2012.

If the re-narration of history in the opening ceremony occasionally involved some breezing past inconvenient episodes — the Stalinist purges that killed millions, for instance, and the gulags that imprisoned and killed millions more — the ceremony was, in many respects, the introduction to the world of a re-created Russia, one far different from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that hosted the Summer Games in Moscow in 1980.

The national anthem played to the crowd of 40,000 in the stadium and heard by billions more watching on television around the world was the same music played nearly 35 years ago. But the lyrics have been rewritten, with lines about "the united, mighty Soviet Union” and "the great Lenin” replaced by references to "Russia — our sacred homeland” and "wide spaces, for dreams and for living.”

In this sense, unlike the most recent comparable spectacles — London, in 2012, which celebrated enduring traditions and reveled in ironic self-deprecation, or Beijing, in 2008, which firmly declared the emergence of a new power — the Sochi ceremony was a toast to reinvention.

The Sochi Games, in many respects, reflect a personal ambition of President Vladimir V. Putin, the most audacious in a series of megaprojects that illustrate the nation’s rise from post-Soviet chaos under his leadership.

As with the other projects, including last summer’s Universiade in Kazan, the Games were largely financed by Russia’s oil and gas wealth, and by many of the billionaires, so-called oligarchs, who have profited most handsomely from it. State-owned companies like Gazprom and Sberbank also made huge investments.

The 1980 Games, boycotted by the United States and dozens of other nations, have shadowed much of the preparations for these Games, and in many ways the Sochi Olympics have been designed to supplant memories of that time.

Philip Barker, a historian of the Olympics, said the Moscow Games were also notable for the first opening ceremony that was a true spectacle. "Before that, it was a parade of teams, a bit of kids dancing, and that was it,” Mr. Barker said. Still, compared with Friday night, the 1980 event seems rather quaint.

Like so much else in modern Russia, Sochi’s opening festivities were painstakingly choreographed yet oddly unpredictable, with a few surprises — not all of them good. At the beginning, one of the five gigantic snowflakes intended to burst into Olympic rings failed to open.

The show, formally titled "Dreams About Russia,” was produced under the leadership of Konstantin Ernst, the director of Channel One, Russia’s largest state-controlled television channel, and a staunch loyalist to Mr. Putin.

At a news conference earlier in the day, Mr. Ernst noted that Russia could not compete when it came to popular music and instead would rely on what it had done best for centuries: classical.

"We cannot, like London, boast of a great number of world-famous pop performers; that’s why we focus more on the most popular part of Russian music — classical music,” he said.

The ceremony also showcased Russian ballet, with performances not just by Ms. Vishneva, the star soloist with the Mariinsky Ballet, but also by Svetlana Zakharova, a principal dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet; Ivan Vasiliev, now with American Ballet Theater; and other stars. In one sketch, the dancers brought to life a ballroom scene from Tolstoy’s "War and Peace,” and Mr. Vasiliev drew gasps with his signature gravity-defying leaps.

In a buzz-stirring departure from the emphasis on the classics, Mr. Ernst chose the girl duo t.A.T.u. for the final act of the preshow and used the duo’s song "Not Gonna Get Us” to accompany the arrival of Russia’s athletes during the parade of nations.

Popular in the early 2000s and one of the few Russian pop acts with worldwide fame, t.A.T.u. was perhaps best known for dressing as schoolgirls and kissing onstage — a display that now could potentially generate problems under Russia’s law banning gay propaganda.

The central character in the show, however, was a little-known 11-year-old, Liza Temnikova, from Krasnodar, the capital of the region where Sochi is. The daughter of two taxi drivers, she won the role in a casting call.

Her character, named Lyubov, which means love, led the audience on a journey across centuries, as well as Russia’s roughly 4,400-mile expanse, across nine time zones, from Europe to the Pacific Ocean, and from the Arctic Sea to the Black Sea.

The show celebrated not only Russian geography but also the Cyrillic alphabet (which gave a surprise twist to the order in which countries marched into the arena) as well as the military prowess of Peter the Great. It also delved into Russian fairy tales with the story of the mythical city of Kitezh, submerged in a lake by its prince rather than surrendered to the Mongols, leaving only the sound of the church bells tolling on the surface on summer nights.

And, of course, there was some love for Mr. Putin, Russia’s paramount leader for 14 years, who the program noted "is also an Alpine skier and has learned to ice skate and play ice hockey.”

Just before 10:30 p.m., Mr. Putin fulfilled his role — carefully dictated by the Olympic charter — and uttered a single sentence declaring the Games officially opened. A barrage of red-white-and-blue fireworks immediately shot into the night sky.

Notably, Mr. Ernst designed a show that, like Mr. Putin, was not shy about embracing certain aspects of the Soviet past. Some of the most striking sketches involved an artistic view of the 20th century, glossing over some of Russia’s darkest times, with a focus instead on industrialism and the avant-garde.

The sketches illustrated the period with huge mechanical cogs and gears, spinning and churning, as well as with images of the Stalinist skyscrapers that are among the most recognizable buildings in Moscow, and perhaps most dramatically, with an image of Vera I. Mukhina’s iconic sculpture "Worker and Peasant Woman.”

Whatever the Soviet Union’s ideological failings, the ceremony reflected a view, clearly shared by Mr. Putin, that its sheer bigness — especially its unification of Russia’s multitude of ethnicities — should be admired.

No doubt, one of the most enduring images for the audience was that of the glowing white troika, the chariot drawn by three horses immortalized in Gogol’s novel "Dead Souls.”

"Where art thou soaring away to Russia? Give me the answer! But Russia gives none,” Gogol wrote in the book, published in 1842. "All things on Earth fly past, eyeing the troika, and all the other peoples and nations stand aside giving it the right of way.”