hmmm, I feel like all countries are doing it but for some reason Russia gets singled out. I guess when your government doesn't fall in line with the left ideology you get singled out as the red headed stepchild. If they were from Germany, Brussels, or France doubt they would ever get busted.
I used to mostly pursue oly lifting before bbing and still watch practically every major competition so I've followed this closely. I'm no fan of leftist sjwism, but it has nothing to do with this.
The sort of emerging economy nations, China, Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey etc have really dysfunctional internal doping controls. These countries "anti" doping bodies directly facilitate their lifters taking drugs by manipulating test results and samples and essentially giving lifters free reign to blast the test gh insulin winny dbol etc during their non competition season. They then only need to pass their international precontest doping control, which can be done somewhat easily by coming off and taking a few different masking agents in the months before competition.
Russia itself is getting extra scrutiny just because of some state run corruption where they were bribing and threatening the world anti-doping agency officials to the advantage of their athletes. Bulgaria faced similar treatment for a different reason in the past.
Originally, this worked and tests weren't detecting the trace metabolites of the stuff they were taking in the offseason. But new testing technology being applied to old samples is able to pick up useage of different stuff from much longer back.
So why don't lifters from countries like France, Germany, USA, Canada etc get popped by international testing? Because the lifters are already getting popped by their domestic anti doping agencies which are actually trying to catch people using stuff. In a super patriotic country like China, their national qualifiers to see who makes world/olympic teams are essentially untested. In America, they're testing even little local non qualifying meets. Seriously, little crossfit box USAW sanctioned olympic lifting meets where some 94kg guy clean and jerks 130kg or something not at all world class are occasionally tested. They're doing crazy amounts of out of competition testing for athletes that qualify for olympic qualifiers.
I don't think the olympics should be "clean" and people should be allowed to take risks with their health for elite sport. I never expected them to be successful and thought things would persist as they did in 2008 where PEDs were rampant, but shockingly with retroactive testing WADA has been very successful in cleaning up the olympics. This is ultimately probably not a good thing; we wanna see huge world records and lifting big weights, nobody wants us to go back to seeing 94kg guys doing WLing as a full time just to clean and jerk 180kg when they would have done 240 with the same habits but with PEDs.
Elite sport by definition isn't about health, why the fuck is society trying to be paternalistic about things and punish people for using PEDs, which arguably might reverse some of the negative health effects in sports like WLing, football, or wrestling? But we're going further and further toward clean olympics, unfortunately.