One member of the settlement told the Kasparov.ru online newspaper that the dozens of residents on hunger strike are demanding that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin come to the valley to meet with them, since “nothing is being resolved on the local level.”

Negotiations are currently underway between the protesters and regional official Aleksandr Zhigalko. Police officers were also on the scene of the hunger strike on Wednesday.

Boris Nemtsov, a former Deputy Prime Minister and Sochi native who lost his April 2009 bid for Sochi mayor to Kremlin-backed candidate Anatoly Pakhomov amidst numerous fraud allegations, explained on his blog how the hunger strike should come as no surprise considering the travails put upon thousands of Imeretinskaya Valley residents since the region was picked to be one of the primary sites for the Olympics:

The reason for the hunger strike is that people are being required to pay 2 to 5 million rubles [$64-159 thousand] out of pocket for a forced move to new housing. For this, the authorities, in a way that is particularly perverse, are offering to “help” the disadvantaged by arranging mortgages for them.

The people have been driven to despair, which is understandable.

For long years they lived in their homes by the sea, grew fruits and vegetables on their plots of land, raised their children, worked, studied, and didn’t plan on going anywhere.

Then Putin decided to hold the winter Olympics in the subtropics, that is to say there in the Imeretinskaya Valley – in the warmest place not only of Russia, but of the city of Sochi.

Then the epic of resettlements began.

The draconian “Olympic law” was adopted that allows evictions from houses and seizures of land to be done by force. They began to intimidate people by saying that OMON riot police were going to come and throw them out all through the night. Then they built poisonous phenol houses in [the resettlement area of] Nekrasovka (they had a few victims in the Lame Horse [night club fire]). Then they valued the homes to be worth 33-35 thousand rubles [$1052-1116] per cubic meter, while the homes where the people live now are worth 20-25 thousand rubles [$638-798] per cubic meter. Then they demanded that they pay the difference.

The Olympics are a celebration.

The games themselves and preparations for them cannot be accompanied by harassment and violence. It contradicts the Olympic Charter and the spirit of the Olympic movement.

Whey must people suffer for Putin’s Olympic fraud?

It is worth noting that in March 2010, the newspaper Gazeta reported that workers building the resettlement homes in Nekrasovka were fired after striking in response to managers withholding their pay. The workers who remained, says the newspaper, have had to resort to selling their personal items to afford bread. Others have handed their passports over to store owners as collateral for food, making it impossible for the workers, some of whom hail from parts of Siberia, to leave Sochi before paying back their debts. The Nekrasovka workers went on strike after workers at a second resettlement site went on hunger strike for the same reason.

“We are bringing the city to a unified architectural look, and therefore, our roofs and fences must be identical,” said Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov at a session of the city administration on Tuesday.

To that end, the mayor ordered all private home owners to paint their roofs red. “All of the roofs must be red, and not blue,” he said, without clarifying what was wrong with blue.

Since winning the bid to hold the Olympics in June 2007, the Russian government has hoped to use Games to develop Sochi into an international resort destination. Up until now, vacationers in the coastal city have consisted almost exclusively of Russians, particularly high-ranking bureaucrats during the Soviet era. That Sochi will suddenly be facing a global audience seems to have motivated the mayor to reform his city’s aesthetic, for better or worse.

“This is Sochi – an Olympic capital, a world resort, and therefore there are large demands,” he said at the session.

In the same vein, Pakhomov proposed erecting “Boards of Shame” as part of the city’s ongoing battle against violations of public order. Billboards stationed throughout the city would feature photographs of litter heaps and cars parked in front of bus stops, as well as pictures of merchants who sell alcohol and tobacco to minors. While such displays were a common method of public shaming in Soviet times, they have since become a rarity in most parts of the country.

Anatoly Pakhomov, a member of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s leading United Russia party, was reelected to his post last April amidst numerous accusations of voter fraud. The runner-up, former Deputy Prime Minister and Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, would have posed a significant threat to the Kremlin’s control over preparations for the Olympic Games if he had been elected.