Udaltsov was detained when he and a group of protesters attempted to march toward the presidential administration building in Moscow at the end of a routine Day of Wrath protest last week, intending to deliver a list of grievances to government officials. While the rally was sanctioned by city authorities, the march was not; Udaltsov was arrested along with three others. He was convicted of disobeying police and declared a hunger strike in protest.

An ambulance was first called for Udaltsov on October 15, and a blood analysis showed that the activist’s blood sugar level was lower than normal. At the time, Udaltsov declined to be admitted to the hospital.

The next day, doctors claimed that a second test showed that Udaltsov “is not yet in such a critical condition” as to require hospitalization. However, doctors declined to admit him despite Udaltsov’s requests; apparently, he felt that his condition had worsened significantly.

When Udaltsov asked to file a complaint against the head doctor for denying him admittance to the hospital, police turned him down.

Finally, on the night of October 16th, the activist was admitted to the therapeudic wing of Moscow’s Hospital #12 with complaints of low blood sugar, heart pain and “noises in his head.”

Further updates on Udaltsov’s condition will be related through the Left Front’s press service and theOtherRussia.org.

The Caucasian Knot newspaper reported on Friday that the strikers have reached an agreement with the local authorities, who have promised to look into each individual case of eviction and deal with them accordingly.

A group of ten residents of the valley declared their hunger strike on May 19 to protest what they say is the unfair amount of compensation being offered to them in exchange for their property, which falls within the construction zone for the 2014 Winter Olympics. At least five of the strikers left the protest before Friday’s deal was reached.

Approximately 700 families are being affected by the evictions, which will make way for a number of ice facilities

Human rights advocates, ecologists, geologists, and other experts have been unequivocal in denouncing the environmental damage and flagrant rights abuses that have occurred during the course of preparation for the Olympic Games in Sochi.

On Wednesday, the Tverskoy District Court in Moscow handed down the sentence to 56-year-old Sergei Mokhnatkin, finding him guilty of assaulting a police officer during a December 31, 2009, rally that was part of the opposition’s Strategy 31 campaign in defense of free assembly. In the yearlong history of the rallies, he is the first person to receive an notable term of confinement.

Mokhnatkin’s supporters insist that he had nothing to do with the protest. According to United Civil Front representative Aleksandr Khatov, the now-convicted man was detained when the rally was broken up by police. “He was just a passerby on his way to Red Square in order to meet the New Year there,” said Khatov. “But then he saw that police had seized a woman and were dragging her towards a bus.”

Mokhnatkin came to the defense of the elderly woman and, as a result, was detained and put in a police bus with nine other rally participants. There, Khatov went on, the man was handcuffed to his seat and beaten in front of all those present.

70-year-old Raisa Vavilova, the woman who Mokhnatkin tried to help, testified as a witness for the defense during the trial. She told the Interfax news agency that Mokhnatkin had never previously appeared at any demonstrations by the extra-systemic [those denied the right to operate in the political system – ed.] opposition. “He was an accidental passerby who stood up for me when I was detained on Triumfalnaya Square. They thought he was one of us,” confirmed the elderly woman.

According to Khatov, Mokhnatkin testified that the incident with the police officer took place in the police bus where he was put after being detained. There, said the defendant, a policeman attempted to choke him. The court ruled, however, that the officer did not use any violence against Mokhnatkin, as an examination had found no signs of trauma on his body, and the officer, meanwhile, had a broken nose.

“He couldn’t have hit anyone, because he was handcuffed to the seat,” said Khatov. “Maybe he turned clumsily while he was being beaten.”

Mokhnatkin turned out to be the only one of the 60 people detained at the rally who met the New Year in police confinement; all others had been let out before midnight. After being released, the man filed a complaint with the police department demanding that the officers who beat him be punished.

On June 1, Mokhnatkin was summoned to a police station where, he was told, he would have a chance to identify his assailants. Instead, said Khatov, police wanted to fingerprint the Tver resident. When Mokhnatkin refused, he was arrested and sent to a pretrial detention facility.

In response, Mokhnatkin declared a dry hunger strike – no food, no water – which Khatov says the man has now sustained for eight days. While dry hunger strikes are known to sometimes last as long as a week, most people cannot survive more than three days without water. When the trial began on June 8, his supporters found that he looked quite ill and feared for his health.

The verdict handed down today noted that the court considered only the police officers to be credible witnesses, dismissing all those on the side of the defense as persons of interest.

“It’s notable that the testimony from defense witnesses was not accepted for consideration,” Anastasia Rybachenko, an activist with the opposition movement Solidarity, wrote on her blog. “The judge felt that she couldn’t trust them, since they entirely refute the testimony by the prosecution’s witnesses – police officers.”

While prosecutors asked Mokhnatkin to be sentenced to the full five years allowed by Russian law, the court, according to Gazeta.ru, took “all circumstances of the case” into consideration and ruled that it was possible to hand down a lighter sentence.

Mokhnatkin’s lawyers do not plan to appeal.

“He was given a state lawyer who didn’t even show up at the verdict reading,” said Rybachenko.

Renowned rights activist and Strategy 31 co-organizer Lyudmila Alexeyeva said that the defendant had turned down legal aid that rights advocates had offered him.

“We sent Makhnatkin a lawyer. For some reason, he turned him down; it’s possible that he didn’t understand that it was free aid,” Alexeyeva said on Ekho Moskvy radio. “He’s something of a strange man, this Makhnatkin.”

“Not only does he not deserve two and a half years, but those police officers who fabricated this case deserve punishment,” she added.

Alexeyeva explained that police at the rally had taken Makhnatkin “for one of [National Bolshevik Party leader and Strategy 31 co-organizer Eduard] Limonov’s guards and was very glad that a guard of Limonov allowed himself to hit a police officer,” she went on. However, “when it became clear that he had nothing to do with Limonov, it was already too late.”

Alexeyeva said she would work to ensure Makhnatkin’s release.

“The man is innocent and we are going to get him released,” she said.

Solidarity bureau member Sergei Davidis said that his movement is looking into getting Makhnatkin a lawyer to appeal the court’s verdict.

Speaking to Ekho Moskvy, former Deputy Prime Minister and Solidarity bureau member Boris Nemtsov denounced the case as a show trial.

“This is an act of intimidation; it is aimed at making it so that the people who more and more gather on the 31st date become afraid of winding up in prison,” he said. “It is a show trial, done so that all the rest who plan to come out on July 31 in Moscow and St. Petersburg, stop.”

Alik Le, head of a union of local residents, said that five of the ten original hunger strikers are currently continuing the protest that they began on May 19.

While local law enforcement representatives and doctors are present on the scene, no local or federal media has even remotely touched on the story, Le said.

“The regional media is blocking all information about us. Nobody in Russia knows what’s going on. Foreign journalists have come to us, called, are supportive,” he said.

About 700 families in the Imeretinskaya Valley are affected by the evictions, which residents say violate their constitutional rights and lay waste to generations of labor and cultivation. Meanwhile, the construction of six ice facilities for the games is already underway.

The continued hunger strike looks set to collide with the Official International Olympic Committee Debriefing in Sochi that begins on Sunday, where organizers of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics will discuss with future organizers what lessons they learned from holding the games. Whether the media blockade will hold up with the influx of foreign journalists remains to be seen.

Criticism of Olympic preparations in Sochi has come not only from human rights groups, but from ecologists and geologists who warn that mismanagement by the Russian state-owned corporation in charge of the games, Olympstroy, has already caused irreparable environmental damage and could easily lead to much greater catastrophes.

Information about the consequences of the ongoing construction in Sochi has been virtually absent from the Russian media, leading many of its victims to take drastic measures to make their stories known. The Imeretinskaya Valley residents’ hunger strike is at least the third protest of its kind to have been held since the beginning of the year; the other two involved construction workers forced to work months without pay. In April, the BBC reported that a senior scientist critical of how Olympstroy was failing to conduct proper geological surveying had fled the country out of fear of persecution.

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.

Russian prisons have a historically high rate of violence, in part resulting from the rare practice of housing convicts together without regard for the severity of their crimes. While the government has finally decided put that practice to an end, the deputy prosecutor general said that facility reviews ordered by President Dmitri Medvedev exposed a significant number of cases where prison guards have abused both their own authority and the rights of prisoners.

“In facilities in the Omskaya, Orenburgskaya, Sverdlovskaya, and Chelyabinskaya regions, as well as several others, personnel have been using physical force and tactical equipment in ways that are not always lawful or well-founded,” said Zabarchuk.

When asked about conditions regarding prisoners’ health, the deputy painted a grim picture of the situation: In 2009 alone, 4150 prisoners had died in Russian correctional facilities. “What’s worrying is not only the high rate of disease, but the depressing death rate among convicts,” he said. “This is a problem that I would particularly like to single out, since the basic prison contingent is not made up of very old men or young children, but able-bodied people who are, you could say, in the prime of their lives and strength. Nevertheless, many of them do not live out their sentences, or they leave disabled.”

One reason for the mortality rate was the failure of correctional facilities to provide prisoners with proper medical care. And even when they do, said Zabarchuk, medical equipment is outdated and medical personnel often lack the proper education for their jobs.

However, said Zabarchuk, a series of recent prison reforms have succeeded in decreasing the number of prisoners overall. This was a key task for the penal system’s management, as a sharp increase in female prisoners has recently contributed to the already overwhelming overcrowding of Russia’s facilities. A recent decision by the Russian Supreme Court regarding procedures for bail, house arrest, parole, and other lighter forms of punishment has allowed more convicts to carry out their sentences outside of correctional facilities. As a result, the number of prisoners in Russia was 861,687 prisoners as of Spring 2010 – 29 thousand less than a year ago. Zabarchuk said that the decrease can be credited to the fact that, for the first time ever, the problem of abuse in Russian correctional facilities was being dealt with at the highest levels of government, with president Medvedev in particular pushing for reform.

Even so, the situation in Russia’s prisons remains dire, and not all reforms necessarily have any chance of success. Zabarchuk blamed the Federal Penitentiary Service itself for “ineffectively exercising departmental control” over rampant corruption. “Therefore, the negative situation that has developed is not changing,” he concluded.

Russian prisoners themselves have made a number of recent attempts to draw attention to the conditions of their treatment. In January 2010, prisoners in the southern Rostovskaya region announced an indefinite hunger strike in response to what they said were irresponsible medical personnel and other rights abuses. In November 2009, five prisoners in the Chelyabinskaya region wrote a letter to law enforcement agencies alleging continuous beatings and psychological abuse from prison guards, and also went on hunger strike.

The workers in question were brought in from all over Russia, including parts of Siberia, to building cottages for residents now being evicted from their homes to make way for new Olympic construction in Sochi’s picturesque Imeretinskaya Valley. The contractors and subcontractors who hired them have received millions of rubles from the government since December 2009, but have not paid their workers in more than three months.

The general contractor for the cottage project, Mosconversprom, said that the delays in paying the workers were largely a result of “dragged-out transfers of documents to subcontractors.” They also placed blame on Olympstroy, Russia’s state-owned corporation tasked with managing construction for the Olympics, for not sending Mosconversprom its allocated funding.

The contractors said on Monday that they were able to convince some of the workers to end their hunger strike, promising to pay them on March 24. Others continued their protest, which has now been ongoing since March 11.

Russia’s plans for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi have been controversial since then-President Vladimir Putin made the bid in 2007, but they have been pushed into the spotlight in the wake of Russia’s poor performance in the Vancouver Olympic Games. Critics have questioned the viability of holding the Olympics in Sochi, given its status of a small resort city that largely lacks the infrastructure needed for the games. Residents of hundreds of buildings in the Imeretinskaya Valley region have been protesting their eviction and the destruction of their homes, some of which have seen seven generations of the same families, for years now. The World Wildlife Foundation recently withdrew its support from the games because of ongoing environmental damage being caused to Sochi’s unique natural environment, with UNESCO and Greenpeace also vocal with similar criticisms.