This essay examines the polarizing politics of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. I analyse the function of soft-power diplomacy in the design of the opening ceremony in relation to the international controversy around these games over the repression of civil and human rights. The Sochi Olympics became a lightning rod inciting pro-Western democratic protests against and Russian neo-national support for President Vladimir V. Putin's cultural reform programme. I argue that the Sochi stage was the opening scene of a much larger cultural propaganda campaign reflecting the government's move to boost a conservative world view. Sochi's spectacle mediated a reform strategy designed to reinvent Russian identity and restore Russia's global status. For contrast, I look back to the opening ceremony of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics and its vision of Soviet society in order to highlight the changing contexts in which soft power underscores broader objectives in geocultural politics.

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This article reconsiders Edgar Degas's lifelong fascination with the working routine of the ballet dancer, alongside other forms of female labor represented in his artworks by laundresses, milliners, bathers, and prostitutes. I analyze Degas's repeated exploration of gesture, phrasing, line, and shape in the dance images in connection with the visual artist's own labor-intensive methods of art making. I argue that his approach to different movement vocabularies eventually breaks away from the virtuoso myths of Romantic works of art to reveal a diverse range of daily rhythms that express the strain and discipline of modern cultural production performed by women.Do we invite the crowd, the audience, behind the scenes, into the workshops of the costume and scene designers; into the actress's dressing room? Do we show the public (enthusiastic today, tomorrow indifferent) the mechanism behind our effects? Do we explain to them the revisions, the improvisations adopted in rehearsal, and even to what extent instinct and sincerity are mixed with artifice and charlatanry, all indispensable to the amalgam that is the work itself? Do we display all the rags, the rouge, the pulleys, the chains, the alterations, the scribbled-over proof sheets, in short all the horrors that make up the sanctuary of art?

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