Winter Wonderland

“Together we will prepare an international event on the grandest scale, an international celebration, and a celebration for all the Russian people. We cannot allow even a single Russian citizen’s experience of this celebration to be tainted by problems that arise in the course of this work. No one should have any problems, and if they arise, they should be resolved in a just manner.”

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, February 2009

In the spring of 2009, Sochi residents clung to the words of their powerful prime minister, uttered when the city was still in the earliest stages of building up to the 2014 Olympic Games. In April 2009, the main Olympic Park was largely a layer of debris being shoved back and forth by bulldozers. The legendarily productive Rossiya farm, a former kolkhoz, had already been knocked down, but construction crews had not yet begun working, and locals planted radishes among the ruins to gain some benefit from the warm spring and reap at least one harvest.

The neighborhood of the farm, now the main Olympic Park, is called the Imeretinskaya lowland. Lying near the border with Abkhazia, this lazy backwater of Russia’s largest resort city was once home to Sochi’s best beaches, Old Believer farmers, and a growing community of people who had tightened their belts and scraped up enough cash to build small hotels or guest houses for sun-starved Muscovites, in hopes that their investment would make their lives comfortable and give them something to hand down to their children and grandchildren.

Today, the area is filled with sleek and gleaming stadiums, separated from the outside world by tight security. In November 2011, construction crews were installing seats in the ice palace and putting the finishing touches on the large ice arena’s roof. They were also wrapping up the railroad station in the Olympic Park, where people will disembark after their ride from Adler Airport.

But beyond the big blue fence there are still people struggling to continue with their daily lives, despite the noise, rubbish heaps, and pools of run-off from the former swamp turned construction site.

Here, people don’t talk. They shout. Whole families and their neighbors surround reporters, waving fistfuls of land-use and ownership documents, their unanswered questions drowning out the construction noise.

“We’ve lived here since 1953, my grandfather planted this tangerine tree,” says Svetlana Yakovenko showing a reporter her small garden next to the one-level house her family inhabits. “Now they want a luxury hotel here, right on the shore.”

Russia’s mainstream media invariably paint Sochi’s evictees as greedy profiteers trying to squeeze money from Russia’s budget, some receiving millions in compensation. Perhaps to counter this image, residents present themselves as destitute, which is also inaccurate: before the recent construction boom, the lives of most Sochi residents were better than the average Russian. Yet it is also clear that most are being forced to take a major loss because of the Olympics, an event they say they never particularly wanted and about which they had no say.

By any logic, they should be granted compensatory housing that is of similar value to what they are giving up. Yet even the poster cases of successful resettlement that were shown on state TV conceded to Russian Life that they had to drastically change their way of life after their garden was appropriated, and that their new, cookie-cutter house was not suitable for hosting summer tourists.

In late 2010, a lengthy report by Human Rights Watch concluded that “in most cases, expropriation takes the form of a forced sale,” in which Sochi owners have little say or control over what sort of property they receive in exchange. Making matters worse, most people are in document-limbo, having struggled for years prior to the Olympics announcement to get proper ownership documentation from authorities. Now, without documents, their chances for fair compensation are next to none.

“They are refusing to register our land now that they know our house is to be knocked down,” said Yakovenko last April. “We are the fourth generation living here, why should we leave?” Yakovenko’s family – there are three generations living in three different households – is being offered a one-room apartment in a village far from the Black Sea, in exchange for a detached house right on the shore.

The worst cases, like that of Vladimir Tkachenko, one of the last to be evicted, end in violence and confusion. For years, he too could not get all of the right documents for his property, refusing to bribe land use officials. When bailiffs came in unmarked cars and forced their way into his two-story house, which took him a decade to build, he was still waiting for a written court decision that ruled that his house was illegal. His family of four now lives in social housing, without any compensation, despite having paid taxes and utilities for years. His certificate of ownership provided by local officials did nothing to sway the bailiffs, who used a taser-like device to violently pacify the unruly father of two.

“They stood over us and screamed like fascists,” said Tkachenko, who had just a few hours to move all his belongings out. “At 2 a.m. they bulldozed the house, burying under the debris the things we didn’t have time to take.”

Few cities that host the Olympics meet all the stakeholders’ demands, and the tradition of moving the Games from place to place often raises environmental and social justice concerns. If one listened only to Russian officials, the preparations offer the resort city nothing but good, often providing those evicted with better public services. In August, Krasnodar Deputy Governor Alexander Saurin said in an interview with Kommersant that most people were glad to move out, adding that, for those who did not get the required papers in time, “this is no charity.”

According to official numbers, some 1000 families were evicted from the Imeretinskaya neighborhood and other areas under eminent domain. Only 359 received some type of housing in exchange. Another 364 were placed in temporary public housing after their eviction, while the rest received a monetary settlement for their property. It is not clear where the former Sochians will go, once the state stops providing them with public housing, or how they will manage if the compensation they received is not enough to purchase a new home in a real estate market that is now approaching Moscow prices.

The 200 billion rubles that is the official price tag for Sochi’s Olympic project,* pales in comparison to some of the infrastructure projects affiliated with the Games, namely the roads meant to alleviate Sochi’s traffic and to link its airport with the mountain venues. The latter, known officially as the rail and highway link from Adler to Alpica Servis Ski Lift, will cost an estimated R227 billion. The eye-popping figure prompted Russian Esquire magazine to run an illustrated feature of how much foie gras, black caviar, or Louis Vuitton bags could be bought for this sum to pave the 48-kilometer road.

Expensive or not, the road has also become Russian environmentalists’ Olympic Enemy Number One. They have repeatedly called for alternative means of transporting tourists to the ski events, because the road-building plan required clear-cutting the entire Mzymta River watershed, including hundreds of rare trees. The Mzymta River is Sochi’s largest source of drinking water, and was previously a wild river used by rafters and home to wild salmon. Now it runs in culverts constrained by highway fortifications. Periodically, clumps of unknown foamy substances float through what has become one long construction site, accumulating in strange white peaks on the shore.

“They chose the worst possible path, destroying Russia’s biggest growth of the wingnut tree, destroying the river’s natural bed, completely cutting off migration routes of several mammals, and opening up to tourists and business portions of the river that were previously protected zones,” said Suren Gazaryan of Environmental Watch of North Caucasus (EWNC). Gazaryan is an activist and bat researcher who often did field work in the Mzymta valley. Russia’s biggest and possibly only colony of an endangered bat species was wiped out when an illegal quarry destroyed the colony’s cave, Gazaryan said.

Throughout the road construction process, EWNC, Greenpeace, and the World Wildlife Fund met with Olympic construction officials, attempting to lobby them to minimize the damage. “Not one demand was met,” Gazaryan said. Exasperated, both Greenpeace and WWF publicly opted out of the process, causing a minor public relations scandal. Perhaps to counteract the damage, the Sochi Organizing Committee has carried out highly publicized on-camera plantings of trees, including the wingnut. Environmentalists that came to observe were detained by border police. “Plantings will do nothing to recreate the ecosystems that were destroyed,” Gazaryan said. “You might as well plant these trees in the city.”

Truth be told, environmentalists were strongly opposed to holding the Games in Sochi from the outset, because the mountains above the city are almost entirely an environmentally protected zone. The Sochi National Park borders the city and runs across the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. Higher up, in immediate proximity to the alpine skiing venues, is the Caucasus Reserve, part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Despite organizers’ claims that Russia will make Sochi 2014 a “green” Olympics, evidence reveals major miscalculations and apparent lack of concern for the region’s wild nature. Environmentalists estimate logging to have impacted between 1000 and 1500 hectares, mostly clearing what was formerly the Sochi National Park. Trees cut for the Gazprom Ski Resort (which will host the biathlon and ski racing events) rotted in the open air, and, during a recent tour of the biathlon complex, company representative Vladimir Makarenko boasted about construction to capture a wild river in an artificial riverbed. “Some organizations say we are ruining the environment, but this is not the case,” he said.

Environmental NGOs argue, however, that developers are missing the point, painting their own convenience as caring for the environment, and regional organization EWNC has argued in vain that fortifying rivers leads to deep changes in its flow and its animal life.

The UN, in its latest mission to Sochi, recognized “slow progress” in the greening of the development, adding that Russia is not following its environmental watchdog UNEP’s recommendations.

As of January 1, 2012, the Sochi 2014 Olympics are just 768 days away. RL

* While top officials like Putin and his deputy Dmitry Kozak use the R200 billion ($7 billion) figure, other federal officials have publicly used figures as high as R950 billion ($32 billion). There is no single, audited estimate, as some infrastructure costs are not considered “Olympic,” while others are concealed as “private” investments made by companies like state-controlled Gazprom.

Arriving at the total cost of an Olympics game is difficult, because of the problem separating expenditures on stadiums from things like infrastructure improvements. The 2008 Beijing Olympics had a direct cost budget of around $2 billion, but estimates are that some $41 billion was spent on indirect investments. Winter games are decidedly smaller than summer games. One estimate of the overall direct+indirect Vancouver 2010 winter games costs put the figure at $9.2 billion.

Знал бы прикуп, жил бы в Сочи

This popular Soviet-era saying has earned a wider meaning. Its literal meaning (“Had I know my draw, I would’ve lived in Sochi”) comes from poker, where players receive a “prikup” – cards dealt face down, which the player is not allowed to look at until after betting. It has taken on a wider meaning that one cannot know all the circumstances of a situation, so should plan ahead accordingly.

Card games were prevalent in resort-rich Sochi, and Ostap Bender types were always on the lookout for tourist-marks who had a silly inclination to play. But the saying also implies that anyone who knows the score would naturally choose Sochi – with its tropical climes and lush greenery – as a place to live.

The Far East Precedent

While Sochi is two years away (and Soccer’s World Cup six), many are looking further east to gauge how Russia will handle hosting a massive global event. In November Russia will host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vladivostok. Indeed, for years Russian officials have mentioned the APEC summit in the same context as Sochi: Russia is on its way to global prominence, taking on bigger challenges to develop infrastructure for international events than ever before. (vladivostok2012.com)

The summit is to be held on Vladivostok’s Russky Island, formerly a sparsely populated territory full of military garrisons linked to the mainland only by a ferry. In deciding to locate the summit on the island, the government also made a pledge to build a record 1104-meter-long bridge across the Eastern Bosporus strait, so as to better host the expected 10,000 guests.

Vladivostok is far from Moscow, and information about construction (done largely by migrant workers) has been rather limited over the past three years. So Sochi residents were particularly interested when Viktor Ishayev, the Kremlin’s envoy to the Far East, suddenly said in September that “if we don’t build the bridge in time, it’s no tragedy... foreign delegations can be brought to the island by boat.” To make matters worse, local media has reported that one of the head engineers on the bridge project, Vyacheslav Polyanskikh, who committed suicide in 2009, left behind a suicide note saying he “didn’t want to be responsible when the bridge collapses, causing massive casualties.”

Days before this issue went to press, a massive fire engulfed the bridge to Russky Island, destroying some 500 meters of construction.

Historic Sochi

Looking at Sochi’s shiny new stadiums, Soviet-style spas and beach crowds, people don’t always realize that just 150 years ago the region was an amazing melting pot, with dozens of ethnicities, none of which were particularly friendly to the Russian tsar.

The sliver of the Black Sea coast between Sukhumi and Taman was enemy territory for a long time after Russia acquired the lands from the Ottoman empire. Pacifying the Circassian, Achipsou, Ubykh, Abazin, Abadzekh, and various smaller tribes was the last stage of the decades-long Caucasus War that did not end until 1864.

In the 1830s, the many tribes in the region united into what they called Circassia, which had a government based in Sochi and received European ambassadors. Their push for independence was in vain, however, as the Tsarist Army uprooted the scattered tribes from the best river valleys, resettling most of them to Russia’s muslim neighbor Turkey. The last military campaign ended, ironically, in Krasnaya Polyana, today home to Russian leaders’ favorite ski resort.

The human toll of the resettlement was huge; disease and hunger during the voyage and in the Turkish quarantine killed even more people than military skirmishes. The Ubykhs, who lived along the coast, watched their language slowly die out; its last native speaker passed away in 1992. The Ubykh way of life and the anguish of their resettlement is the subject of the book, The Last of the Departed, published by an Abkhaz writer in Soviet times. It is available online in English at bit.ly/ubykhs

The resettlement of local tribes effectively depopulated Sochi’s mountainous region for years to come. The government finally encouraged other, more peaceful, ethnic groups to settle there. In this way, Greeks came to Krasnaya Polyana, and Estonians settled in Esto-Sadok, a smaller village even higher up, the last settlement before the picturesque slopes of the Caucasus Major range. Estonians who arrived at the upper reaches of the Mzymta a decade after the native Achipsou left, found their orchards intact.

Today, the area’s only testament to its ancient inhabitants are geographical names: the rivers Mzymta, Psou, and Shakhe; the communities known as Vardane, Bytkha, Khosta, and many others – all are names derived from languages spoken by the Russians’ predecessors.

Russia is showcasing Sochi as its winter wonderland without any mention of the tragic history. This irks many Circassians both inside and outside Russia. Russia’s unfriendly neighbor Georgia recently declared the tsarist-era deportation “genocide.” In the U.S., descendants of Sochi’s original peoples have lobbied vocally for a boycott of the games.

Circassians living in Russia are, for the most part, more compromising, but they too would like to see the government use the games as a way to atone for past misdeeds and seek peace with history, instead of sweeping it under the carpet.

The spread of resorts on the coast of Sochi after the nineteenth century Caucasus War can be in part explained by the tsarist government’s desire to populate the land. As part of a special decree at the end of the nineteenth century, the Black Sea coast was legally separated from the larger Kuban region and remained so until recent years, when its federal status was revoked despite protests from locals, who consider themselves culturally distinct from those living in the flat fields of Krasnodar.

At the turn of the century, scientists from Russia and Europe studied the springs and mountains of Sochi, laying the groundwork for major spas. The first, called Caucasus Riviera, was opened in 1909. Subsequent construction booms in the 1930s and 1950s established dozens of socialist sanatoriums, and by the time of perestroika, the city was receiving so many tourists each year that the coast could no longer sustain them.

Additional Reading: Fyodor Tornau, Memoirs of a Caucasian Officer (Russian only); Leo Tolstoy, Hadji-Murat and
Prisoner of the Caucasus; Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, “Ammalat-Bek” (Russian only); John Augustus Longworth, A Year Among the Circassians; Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A history of the Caucasus; Bagrat Shinkuba, The Last of the Departed.