The Olympic afterglow long extinguished, we may now think back to the fiery ring pulled by the mascot troika not as the sun, as we thought back in February, but as something more ominous. Since the Olympics, Russia has moved to reclaim its place on that stage in a very different way, by annexing the Crimea, amassing an invasion-capable army on Ukraine’s eastern borders, and sending masked operatives into eastern Ukraine. In the closing sentence of Dead Souls, all nations and states “step aside,” giving Russia-troika “the right of way.” More than just rooting for the Russian national team, the troika also bolstered the political significance of hosting the Olympics in Russia: an effort to solidify Russia’s image as an ascendant power reclaiming its rightful place on the world stage.

What the Russians therefore likely saw in the Olympic troika was a defiant symbol of newly assertive Russian nationalism. For Russians, the image would have resonated with Gogol’s troika passage and its prophecy of Russia’s primacy among all nations.

Yet what the rest of the world perceived as a quaint cultural mascot had additional layers of meaning for the Russian public that were overlooked in western media coverage of the Olympics. This imagery is familiar to all Russians from childhood, as most had to memorize this passage in school, and would almost certainly have been foremost in any Russian’s mind at the sight of the Olympic troika. Gogol’s troika, in its soaring flight, transmogrifies into Russia itself: an icon of the nation’s elemental energy and limitless potential.

It was the nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Gogol who in his novel Dead Souls (1842) made this image into Russia’s most revered national symbol. In the splendid pageantry of the 2014 Sochi Olympics, the image of the luminescent Russian troika – a team of three horses at a slow-motion gallop – drew popular appeal. Edyta Bojanowska is a professor of Russian Literature at Rutgers University and the author of Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism.

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