On Sunday evening, about 100 people gathered to protest across from the Sochi railway station, many with their children. Posters were raised that read “government of the RF, step down!”, “the government is scorning the people!”, “the Olympic law is against the constitution!” and others.

Addressing the crowd, lead protesters explained that entire families in Sochi were being thrown out onto the streets, their homes and land being taken away, and their belongings crushed by bulldozers – in their words, hundreds of Sochi residents have been made homeless.

Much was said about the lawlessness of the judicial and executive branches of government, corruption in the law enforcement system, and that the ruling party will use any excuse to drive out Sochi residents if it means there will be more room for the wealthy. The protesters also issued a call for people to not vote for the “anti-people” party United Russia in upcoming parliamentary elections.

Irina Brovkina, who organized the event, said local authorities have thus far ignored their protests because the group has been speaking out against the leading United Russia party.

Despite an invitation from organizers, no officials from the United Russia leadership showed up at the protest.

The protesters suffered from numerous provocations during their demonstration, with groups of young people verbally harassing them and two passers-by attempting to grab their megaphone and shout pro-United Russia slogans.

The preparations for Sochi to host the 2014 Winter Olympics have been fraught with violations to human and civil rights, labor rights, and the environment almost since day one. A federal law regulating the organization of the preparation for the games was passed in December 2007, which has then been amended to include provisions allowing land and property to be confiscated by the state if it lies in the way of plans for Olympic facility construction. According to the amendments, a property owner has one month to decide what amount of compensation he wants for his property, which will then undergo analysis by an independent assessor contracted by the state-owned corporation Olimpstroy and the Krasnodarsky Krai regional government. If the amount of compensation does not suit the owner, the case is to be looked at by a court, whose decision is to be immediately carried out.

However, many families have complained that the amount of compensation proposed by the authorities is low or that alternative housing – in rural mountain villages or adjacent to airport radar beacons – is incomparable to their homes in the seaside Imeretinskaya Valley.

Meanwhile, according to Kasparov.ru, Russian authorities say that the problem of compensating the evicted residents is practically resolved.

It should have been no surprise, then, that what could have been a uniquely lighthearted affair – a nationwide televised vote for Olympic mascot – has instead morphed into an Orwellian nightmare. The editorial team at Gazeta.ru explains:

Mascot of the Monarch’s Will
Russia has one voter – Vladimir Putin. The real mascot of the Sochi Olympics is him
February 28, 2011
Gazeta.ru

The nationally televised election for mascot of the Winter Olympics in Sochi became a telling model for Russian elections in general and a possible repetition in the upcoming Duma and presidential elections.

The elections aired on Channel One for Russians to choose the mascot for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi bore an entirely predictable result, albeit one that directly contradicted the population’s opinion. The winner was the snow leopard, with 28% of the vote. This only happened because Vladimir Putin, while in Sochi, spoke out in favor of the snow leopard right on the day of voting. It’s true that the Olympics had to be split between three mascots, since not one received more than half of the vote – the polar bear (18%) and bunny (16%) were added to the leopard.

Meanwhile, according to a VTsIOM survey conducted on February 5-6, 2011, Russians had no plans whatsoever to vote for the leopard. By all criteria [listed by VTsIOM as factors that could influence voters’ decisions – ed.], Russian citizens chose Father Christmas as the most popular mascot. Moreover, the dolphin and brown bear were on the shortlist of favorites.

With 20% of the vote, the leopard actually took second place (in first was the snowflake) for anti-mascot – ones that Russians definitely did not want to see as symbols of the Sochi Games.

Incidentally, Sochi residents themselves chose the dolphin as mascot for the games in 2008, although the Olympic organizational committee immediately warned that the opinion of these hosts of the Olympic Games was not going to be decisive.

It turned out like always. The decisive factor was the opinion of Vladimir Putin, lord of the Olympics and of Russia itself. It did not differ greatly in form from what happened, for example, with the verdict in the second Yukos case. Then, right on the eve of the reading of the verdict (it’s true that it was then postponed for two weeks) during his live annual broadcast, Putin not only said Mikhail Khodorkovsky was guilty of all incriminating charges, but also tried once again to pin him with murder. Naturally, the court took Putin’s retort as a call to action. This is exactly what happened with the leopard for Olympic mascot. Putin had only to state his personal preference for this adorable animal (which, in essence, has nothing to do with either winter sports or Sochi) for Channel One to immediately bolster this private point of view with the people’s supposed approval. At the same time, the mascot leading in public opinion – Santa Claus – was removed altogether from the ballot, as if he represented the non-systemic opposition. In this way, even a ceremony to pick a mascot for the Olympic Games, meant in principle to united the nation and remain bereft of political subtext, was turned into a triumph for the political will of the “national leader.”

Channel One has shown how the prime minister turned public opinion in his favor in a single word – before his retort, Russians categorically did not want to see the leopard as mascot of the Sochi Games, and afterwards made him the leader. Or how to manipulate the nation’s will – the Russian authorities have plenty of experience falsifying election results.

At the same time, President Dmitri Medvedev did not express his own preference for mascot. But then, in a move no less telling of role casting in the tandem, he brought attention to the disparity between the election results for Olympic mascot that were held on television and online. At a session of the Commission for Modernization and Technological Development of the Economy, the president called for deliberation to be carried out – including over the internet – over the design of a universal electronic card for Russian citizens. “I hope that it turns out fairer than the consideration for our Olympic symbols was,” Medvedev said. “In any case, there won’t be the kind of discord as there was between votes on television and votes over the internet,” Medvedev added.

The problem is not that the Olympics are going to have three mascots at the same time, none of which are the ones that the hosts of the Games in Sochi or the majority of Russian citizens wanted to see. The problem is that neither the wave of revolutions against kleptocratic regimes in the Arab world nor the abundant history of revolutions and plots by the elites in Russia itself is going to teach the Russian government. As before, it is prepared to falsify public opinion on any matter to satisfy the personal ambitions of its leader.

In this sense, it is critical for Russia that the elections for Olympic mascot not resemble the coming elections for the Duma – or, especially, for president.

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

On Monday night, the victim, Mikhail Vinyukov, explained the situation to a correspondent with the Kasparov.ru news portal. Vinyukov says he was walking to the store around 9 pm that night when an adult man came up and began whacking him with an metal bar for no ostensible reason. Vinyukov initially managed to fight back, but another man with a metal bar then approached him from behind and began hitting him over the head. The rights advocate eventually managed to escape and ran to a hotel and office complex, where an ambulance was called for him.

Vinyukov was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with “a concussion, a closed head injury, contusions and lacerations of the scalp,” as well as puncture wounds near his shoulder and bruises and lacerations on both legs, according to trauma nurse Mira Kheyshkho. The rights advocate was told he would have to remain hospitalized for an extended period of time.

Additionally, Vinyukov’s mother said that she was called after the attack by an unknown man who asked where her son was.

The activist said he believes that the attack was “organized by a criminal gang” that is working “against those who hinder corruption within government agencies” in the area.

Mikhail Vinyukov is the head of the local Public Service for the Defense of the Rights and Interests of Citizens. About two months ago, he was threatened with murder after releasing an audio recording of a conversation between the city’s resort service and tourism department head, Vladimir Shiroky, and the director of the Lazarevsky Otdykh tourism company, Gavina Panaetova. The recording resulted in Shiroky’s arrest on August 26 for taking bribes from Panaetova.

The recording itself was later posted on the website of well-known whistleblower cop Aleksei Dymovsky. It was recorded by accident when a local resident, sitting in a park near the Lazarevsky Otdykh building, overheard the conversation while making a recording of nature sounds. Dymovsky said the attack on Vinyukov was no doubt “an ordered crime. People don’t just attack people with iron bars. The task was either to kill him or cripple him.”

A host of social activists expressed certainty that the attack on Vinyukov was connected with his efforts to fight corruption, which has risen as a result of preparations for the upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Valery Suchkov, founder of the Public Assembly of Sochi, said that Vinyukov’s attack was extremely similar to other recent attacks on anti-corruption public figures. “The cases known to the whole public of reprisals against Communist Party Deputy Lyudmila Shestak, Mestnaya newspaper Editor-in-Chief Arkady Landerov, and now the case of human rights advocate Mikhail Vinyukov, speak to the fact that these attacks were ordered,” he said. “Moreover, all the crimes have the same signature. The public must demand that both the perpetrator and the person who ordered the attack be found, and the situation be put under public control.”

The prime minister arrived in the Black Sea city of Sochi on Wednesday to check on preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics. As part of his visit, Putin inspected housing being built for the evicted Imeretinskaya residents – approximately one thousand families coming from 628 houses and 369 apartments.

The residents have been protesting the unfair conditions of their eviction for years, holding demonstrations, hunger strikes, and filing suits with the European Court of Human Rights. The complaints range from the unlawful basis of the evictions to unfair compensation for their confiscated property.

At the same time, Prime Minister Putin has assured officials from the International Olympic Committee that the evicted residents are content with their new housing.

“The people are satisfied. I have to speak honestly: many of these people didn’t live in these conditions earlier,” said the prime minister. The new housing plans by Olympstroy, the state corporation responsible for Olympic construction, provide for 526 houses and several apartment buildings.

The evicted Imeretinskaya Valley residents were given the choice to take either the new housing or monetary compensation equal to the value of their property. If the new housing is worth less than a family’s previous property, then it is also entitled to additional compensation.

However, many residents say that the Olympstroy housing – located in mountainous villages near airport radars – is simply unacceptable compared to their own, high-quality homes closer to the sea. Moreover, many say that the monetary compensation they’re receiving is far below the actual market value they should be getting.

Despite these ongoing issues, the Russian authorities have told Olympic officials that the problems surrounding the eviction of the Imeretinskaya residents have already been resolved.

Construction for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi includes plans for 13 new or reconstructed sports facilities, 4 ski resorts with tracks more than 150 kilometers in length, 8 kilometers of ski lifts, and more than 100 hotels with 27,000 rooms.

The Russian authorities have been severely criticized by not only evicted residents, but by ecologists, geologists, human rights organizations, oppositionists, and numerous other experts for a host of problems ranging from unprecedented damage to Sochi’s unique natural environment to rights abuses against construction workers. Ecologists note with particular concern that parts of the Caucasian State Nature Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has already undergone irreparable damage.

Plans for the Sochi games have been criticized by environmental activists, scientists, human rights advocates, and other experts for a host of problems that ranges from unpaid and abused construction workers to irreparable damage to Sochi’s unique natural environment. Dr. Sergei Volkov, who fled Russia out of fear of persecution, has voiced concerns particularly about the road in question. “It’s a potentially dangerous area,” he said. “There have been big landslides in the past and there are large deposits of mercury, uranium and other potentially dangerous minerals. But all scientific advice is being ignored.”

While any potential geological disasters are still, thankfully, only theoretical, the money being spent on the Alder-Krasnaya Polyana road is quite tangible. Aside from the fact that the project requires a great deal of intensive construction work – boring through large chunks of mountain, for example – much of the cost is suspected to be eaten up by inefficiency and corruption. To illustrate the absurdity of such a high cost – whatever its reasons may be – the Russian imprint of Esquire magazine has calculated the amount of caviar, foie gras, or mink coats that could be bought for the same sum of money – and how thick the Olympic road would turn out if it was built from the purchased goods.

All images copyright Esquire Magazine. The original article in Russian is available by clicking here.

Oysters……………………………………………………….6.37 cm
Based on the price of oysters in a standard Moscow restaurant ($4 a piece).

Black caviar……………………………………………………1.1 cm
Based on the wholesale price of a 30 gram can of beluga caviar ($42).

Ground-up Louis Vuitton handbags………………………….9 cm
Based on the price of the ‘Knightsbridge’ Louis Vuitton handbag ($1,372).

Foie gras……………………………………………………21.90 cm
Based on the price of foie gras in the French supermarket Carrefour ($88 per kilogram).

US Dollars………………………………………………….0.028 cm
Based on $100 banknotes (each being 0.014 cm thick).

Fur coats………………………………………………………4.7 cm
Based on the Moscow price of a mink coat 90 cm in length ($4,900).

Truffles……………………………………………………………6 cm
Based on the mid-range seasonal price for a kilogram of black truffles ($1,300).

Hennessey Cognac……………………………………..13.85 cm
Based on the Moscow price of one liter of Hennessey VSOP ($111).

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.

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.

“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.

Speaking to the BBC, Volkov said that construction of major Olympic facilities in Sochi is being done “too hastily, without a proper system for the engineering research that would be appropriate for these environmental dangers.”

Numerous ecologists have been voicing concerns for years already that Olympic construction in Sochi will lead to irreparable damage of one of the world’s most unique biospheres. In February, the Russian bureau of the World Wildlife Foundation issued a scathing press release slamming Olympstroy’s failure to heed objections and warnings made by their ecologists, and decrying preparations for the games as “out of control.” Meanwhile, residents have complained of forced evictions to make way for new facilities, and some unpaid workers have staged hunger strikes to draw attention to their plight.

But as a geologist, Dr. Volkov is primarily concerned about plans for a combination road and railway that will link the coastal center of the city of Sochi with the mountains in Krasnaya Polyana, where most of the Olympic events are planned to take place. When then-President Vladimir Putin won the bid in 2007 to hold the games in Sochi, only a very rudimentary roadway connected these two areas. With its $8 billion price tag, the new one is the most expensive Olympic project of all, and Volkov argues that its construction could lead to a series of geological disasters.

“It’s a potentially dangerous area,” said the geologist, writing an open letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev from his hiding place in Ukraine. “There have been big landslides in the past and there are large deposits of mercury, uranium and other potentially dangerous minerals. But all scientific advice is being ignored.”

Dr. Volkov also says that he has repeatedly appealed to regional authorities in the Southern Federal District as well as Olympstroy management, but to no avail.

Speaking to the BBC – which notably happened upon an active landslide in the Krasnaya Polyana mountains during its research on this report – Krasnaya Polyana Mayor Sergei Avdeev said that he shared Dr. Volkov’s concerns. “When the International Olympic Committee awarded the games to Russia, they knew full well that Russia did not have enough time to do proper research and build all the facilities in line with international environmental and construction standards,” he said. “I pray to God that there will not be any consequences. The only thing we can do is pray and hope.”

A video report on Dr. Volkov by the BBC can be found by clicking here, and a photo gallery by clicking here.