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.

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 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.

The document was written by two of Solidarity’s co-leaders, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov. As Nemtsov puts it, the pamphlet is meant “to tell the truth about the results of the rule of Putin and the tandem,” as the relationship between the prime minister and president is commonly referred to.

Immediately after the authors presented the report, its host website was hit by DDOS hacker attacks that rendered it completely inaccessible. Then, on Tuesday, police in St. Petersburg seized 100 thousand copies of the published report, a tenth of the total million that were printed by the organization.

As the Moscow Times reports:

Police seized pamphlets criticizing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on the eve of a high-profile business forum showcasing Russia, opposition leaders said.

St. Petersburg police confiscated 100,000 copies of a new report on Putin’s decade in power co-authored by Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, said Olga Kurnosova, head of the local branch of the opposition United Civil Front.

Kurnosova and Nemtsov contended that police were trying to keep the 32-page report [in PDF form; 48 in MS Word form – ed.] from the public and visitors at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which started Thursday.

“The police had the task of preventing the distribution of the report during the forum among its participants and citizens,” Kurnosova said.

St. Petersburg police declined to comment.

Police held the driver of the vehicle that was delivering the pamphlets for several hours, Kurnosova said.

She said police told her that they had sent the pamphlet to be checked for evidence of extremism — a tactic that opposition politicians say authorities sometimes use to stifle criticism — and that the check would take two or three days.

Nemtsov has co-written several reports highlighting corruption and other problems that he contends have gotten worse since Putin was elected president in 2000.

On Thursday, Nemtsov wrote on his blog that another 100 thousand copies of the report had been confiscated from the printing house by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers:

Instead of arguing with the theses in the report, denying the basis of the theses, they decided to show their effectiveness by acting in a Putin-like manner. Grossly violating citizens’ right to information, they decided, like in the good old days, to liquidate the opposition’s literature.

The reason is that facts and figures of the true results of Putin’s rule are laid out in the report. They tell us that they’ve built an effective state, while in fact, the level of corruption has reached monstrous proportions (on the level of the most backward African countries) in these ten years of rule. They assure us that the birth rate is rising, and that the death rate is falling – as a matter of fact, under Putin, Russia has been losing half a million people per year. They tell us that he has gained victory over the oligarchs and poverty – actually, there are more than 60 billionaires in the country, and 20 million poor. They tell us that Putin has pacified the Caucasus and gained victory over terror – as a matter of fact, in the ten years of his rule, the number of terrorist attacks has risen six times, and the regions of the Caucasus, receiving many millions in subsidies, have wound up outside of the Russian legal realm.

This is the truth that, in Putin’s opinion, Russians mustn’t know. This is where the actions of the security officials come from.

While distribution of the pamphlet started in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Solidarity is planning to release copies of the report all over Russia. For now, and especially given that police have apparently seized 1/5 of all of the printed pamphlets, the organization is encouraging citizens to print their own copies and distribute them in samizdat fashion.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is available in Russian by clicking here.

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.

“A modern transport infrastructure is the real road to Russia’s future,” said then-President Putin to a gathering of highway construction workers in the city of Krasnoyarsk in late 2007. And yet, not a single highway or expressway and only a smattering of smaller roads have been built in Russia over the past two decades. By comparison, China has laid more than 40,000 thousand miles of high-volume roadways over the same amount of time. “Naturally,” said Latynina, “this raises the question: Has anything been built in Russia with this money? And if yes, then what?”

It turns out that something was.

“For example, the presidential residence in the city of Yekaterinburg, which cost 1.2 billion rubles [about $40 million] to construct, and which President Medvedev has stayed in once,” said the journalist. A similar example was Konstantinovsky Palace in St. Petersburg, a crumbling historic landmark that Putin ordered be renovated in 2001 for use as a presidential residence. The official cost of renovation: $250 million.

There were more. One new presidential residence was constructed just two years ago. Another called Lunnaya Polyana is now in the works, blocked off from public view. An Olympic residence in Sochi is also planned for construction. All in all, said Latynina, Russia has built thirteen official residences for its president. Compare this, she proposed, to the number of official presidential residences in America: there are but two. And neither the White House nor Camp David is anything to rival the grandeur of Konstantinovsky Palace. “My point is that if you consider the number of residences, then Russia is a superpower and the United States just gets these two little things,” the journalist said.

On the topic of superpowers, Latynina questioned Putin’s declaration that Russia is a superpower in the raw materials market. “It’s very interesting to compare Russia with the production of natural gas in the United States,” she said, and followed to rattle off a list of figures: In 2008, Russia extracted 640 billion cubic meters of gas, 550 billion of which were from the state-owned company Gazprom – the latter figure being the more telling, as that’s what gets sold abroad. American production of gas totaled 582 billion cubic meters during the same year – less than Russia, but more than Gazprom. Then there’s the revenue: American gas sales totaled $185 billion in 2008, while Russian sales to Europe, its primary source of export, totaled only $47 billion. In addition, Russian production fell in 2009 to 575 billion cubic meters of gas, with 460 from Gazprom. America’s grew to 620 billion. “So why is Russia called a raw materials superpower?”

Russia, Latynina explained, has virtually no chemical industry. The United States, on the other hand, has the world’s most highly developed chemical industry. Thanks to its more energy-efficient facilities, she explained, the States are able to sell gas at a much higher price than Russia with its long, cold, ineffective pipelines. Meanwhile, instead of building more effective facilities, Gazprom built an exact replica of Konstantinovsky Palace for its CEO, Aleksei Miller. “I invite you to think about the philosophy of the matter,” said Latynina. “Bill Gates could not allow himself to build a Konstantinovsky Palace, because it’s a different philosophy of life… But Aleksei Miller could.”

Frivolous spending on the part of the Russian elite brought about the question of why the Russian government tells its citizens that “the West doesn’t love us.” If that were true, asks Latynina, then why would Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, Putin’s right-hand man, keep his plane in Helsinki and buy three different villas in Sardinia? Why are oligarch Roman Abromovich’s yachts registered in the West, including the $50 million one he gifted to Vladimir Putin? Why do all of the people who tell Russia’s citizens that the West doesn’t love them send their children to study in England? “Why don’t they keep their money in the banks of Iraq, North Korea, Venezuela, or the other wonderful countries that are friendly to Russia and love us a great deal?” asked Latynina.

In some cases, they do. On October 17, 2009, Prime Minister Putin announced the government’s decision to make a $500 million purchase of microprocessors with 90 nanometer process technology from the primarily government-supported French-Italian firm STMicroelectronics. Two weeks before this happened, Intel had announced that they were going to begin producing microprocessors with 32 nanometer technology. What was the point of buying something so expensive that was already out of date? According to Latynina, it was simply a way of transferring money abroad.

“In fact, for me it turns out to be a very sad story,” she went on. “It’s the story of the technical degradation of the foundation that we had from the Soviet Union.” While the STMicroelectronics purchase was sure to hinder the pace and efficiency of Russian industry and development, other instances of such degradation represented more direct threats to the safety of ordinary Russians. Poor construction and shoddy upkeep lead to the deaths of 75 people on August 17, 2009, when an old turbine in the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric dam spun out of control, breaking open the ceiling and flooding the facility. On the night of December 4, 2009, more than 150 people died in the Lame Horse club in the city of Perm when, having violated “every single possible fire safety regulation,” it shot up in flames. But most of the dead bodies dragged out of the club, Latynina pointed out, had no burn marks: the victims died almost instantly from smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning that resulted from burning foam polystyrene insulation. A commission set up to investigate the fire released its findings on March 9, concluding that the club’s own management was to blame. “But the scariest part is that it said in this report, verbatim, that ‘we cannot establish how harmful the foam polystyrene insulation was, how chemically harmful it was for people, for the reason that there was a lack of men on whom we would have liked to conduct experiments.'”

Really? “After the fire in the Lame Horse,” Latynina went on, “the government made quite a big fuss, especially President Medvedev. He loves to stomp his feet, crying ‘I’m going to deal with it,’ he always yells in future tense. ‘We must put an end to terrorism; we must put an end to corruption.’ I still haven’t heard that we’ve put an end to it, so it’s always in future tense.” It was clear, Latynina said, that the government wanted the situation to go away, and suppliers of construction materials had paid off the commission to keep silent about the foam. “So it turns out that they don’t have any men,” she said. “The president stomps his feet.”

Thus, in a nutshell, was Latynina’s dour prognosis of Russia’s current state of affairs.

During the questions that followed, Latynina was asked who would make a worthy Russian president. Her response: “Khodorkovsky,” the former oil tycoon currently sitting in prison. And what is to become of him? “He’ll sit in prison as long as Putin is in power.”

Latynina played down the audience’s fears that her safety was at stake for criticizing the Russian government. Arguing that Russia lacks internet censorship (as opposed to China) and allows Ekho Moskvy radio to broadcast whatever it wants, Latynina linked fears that free speech was being suppressed to the legacy left over from Soviet times. Back then, she said, people were arrested or murdered for speaking out against the government. “The maximum now is that they turn off the broadcast.” When numerous members of the audience objected that Russia figures as the third most lethal country in the world for journalists, Latynina countered that Russia was a lethal country for everyone. “It’s more dangerous to be a citizen of Russia than to be a journalist,” she said. “If you drive down Leninsky Prospekt and meet Lukoil Vice President Barkov, he’s not going to ask if you’re a journalist or not.”

That said, Latynina was skeptical of the effectiveness of initiatives by the Russian opposition, including a petition calling for Putin to resign that has so far gathered more than 18,000 signatures.

Asked for her opinion on Moscow’s plan to put up posters of Josef Stalin for Victory Day celebrations in May, Latynina replied: “Every person who wants to has a right to march for Stalin, because unlike Hitler, Stalin was never sentenced for having committed any crime – there are no laws saying that he was a criminal. But when it’s state-sponsored… You know, when dealing with these situations, I always think: What would Stalin do with Putin? He would put him up against the wall!”

It became apparent during the question and answer session that Latynina’s cynicism had frightened at least some members of her audience into considering the prospect that democracy in Russia was simply not possible, leaving Putin’s regime as the only viable choice. She was quick to dispel this notion, and delivered a more hopeful version of events then one might otherwise have come to expect. “First of all, I maintain that democracy in Russia is of course possible,” the journalist said in response. “But, you know, democracy is like a refrigerator. You can’t say that a certain refrigerator doesn’t work in Russia; it’s just that in Russia the electricity flows different. No – the refrigerator works in Russia if it has the particular electrical wiring for the place where you want it to work. If it doesn’t have the wiring, then it isn’t going to work.”

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.