Tennis and the decline of Russian soft power

They would have been celebrating heartily in the Kremlin. This year’s US Open women’s finalists were from Moscow and from Minsk. The men’s champion was an ethnic Russian, a Sasha, no less, who got there by defeating a Muscovite in the semi-final. It would seem as though the Soviet and then Russian sports machine had been paying off handsomely.

Instead, there’s not much to celebrate. The flags gave it away. On the television coverage and on digital media, the match-ups and the scores feature the national flag of the player, though the tournament is not, like the Olympics or the Davis Cup, organised on the basis of country of origin. That is, the flags may have no practical significance, but they do offer a window into Russia’s hegemonic unravelling.

The women’s champion, Elena Rybakina, was born and raised in Moscow, and played for Russia as a junior. But she chose in 2018, at the age of 19, to play for Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic, despite not having any earlier association with that country. Kazakhstan forms Russia’s near-abroad, with a materially important Russian-speaking population, but it is a different, sovereign country, and one not necessarily aligned with Russia in international affairs.

The other finalist, Aryna Sabalenka, is a Belarusian and has played under the flag of that country for her entire career. Unlike Kazakhstan, Belarus is still de facto integral to the Russian hegemon, but the sanctioning of Russia and Belarus by the global sports community has meant that Sabalenka’s name appears next to an empty box.

The alienation goes further. Rybakina lives in Dubai; Sabalenka’s official residence is Miami. It is not just a matter of weather. Yes, the reality of the professional tennis tour militates against many players actually living in their flag countries, but the irony of a Belarusian-flagged player living in the US is too great to ignore.

On the men’s side, semi-finalist Karen Khachanov, born in Moscow, is officially a Russian (flagless) player but emphasises the Armenian roots of his father. (His mother is an ethnic Russian.) The former Soviet republic of Armenia is at odds with Russia on many geopolitical matters. Khachanov also lives in Dubai.

Number one seed and ultimate champion Alexander Zverev, who defeated Khachanov in the semi-final, plays for Germany. He was born in Hamburg after his parents moved there in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. He now lives in Monte Carlo.

The denizens of a rising hegemon benefit from that association. The opposite is the case with declining powers, where aspiring individuals seek their professional, financial, and personal futures elsewhere. These tennis players are not necessarily making conscious geopolitical decisions. Far from it. Rybakina’s switch was a professional calculation made possible by Kazakhstan’s willingness to support her tennis development. Zverev’s parents moved before he was born. Still, the picture in aggregate remains one of Russia losing its best and brightest to warmer or more Western climes.

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia sought to hold together its former Soviet possessions through the Commonwealth of Independent States. It sought, as Britain had done with the Commonwealth, to retain economic, cultural, and political links among sovereign former Soviet republics. But it never succeeded in creating a community that would prolong Russia’s influence and extend its reach globally after the Soviet period had come to a close. The scattering of its tennis stars is a minor but clear manifestation of that failure.