Sochi Games called an ecological catastrophe
AKHSHTYR, RUSSIA — Twentyfour hours a day, seven days a week, trucks thunder through this tumbledown village bound for the Black Sea resort of Sochi with loads of crushed rock that is used to build facilities for this February’s Olympic Winter Games.
When it rains, parts of the road, which has been shattered in many places by the weight of the trucks, are a quagmire. When the sun shines the vehicles kick up great clouds of dust.
“We’ve been breathing this for four years,” said Alexander Krotov, whose family has lived for three generations in the narrow valley just below where several Olympic “snow” events are to be held. “During the summer the entire village is coughing.”
Selling fruit was one of the main ways people in Akhshtyr earned their living. But with dust now permanently coating everything, Krotov lamented that “nobody buys our fruit any more and we can’t eat it ourselves. The whole city is unlucky. The ecology has gone to nothing.”
The grime that coats Akhshtyr has been one of the ugly consequences of the Sochi Games.
Environmentalists have damned the Olympics as an ecological catastrophe while others have accused organizers of corruption and greed.
There have also been accusations by organizations such as Human Rights Watch that some of the 70,000 construction workers brought in to build the Olympic sites from scratch had been cheated of their wages, that several thousand residents had been evicted from their homes, sometimes without any compensation, and that those who have been critical of the Games have been harassed by the authorities.
But the government, the media and most Russians have shown little interest in such criticisms.
“Our press show palm trees and pine trees and nothing about people being in danger here,” Krotov said. “We have protested. We blocked the road twice. But we can’t stand around all the time protesting. People are really, really tired.”
Russians have been overwhelmingly supportive of the Sochi Games. However, there are very different views about the Olympic quadrennial along Sochi’s coastal strip and in the mountain valley where many of the competitions are to be held.
“I am born in Sochi and I do not know one person here who is happy about these Games,” said Igor, who had found work at the Olympics as a driver, and was therefore reluctant to have his full name published.
Over the course of an hour, he gave a blistering account of how in his opinion the $51-billion Games had made the lives of locals hell because all the resources were being diverted to make them a success. Among Igor’s complaints, many schools and homes in Sochi were without heat and water. Furthermore, he and other residents said that they had been warned that they will not be allowed to drive their cars outside their own districts during February.
There had also been widespread complaints that employees of small and medium-sized firms were being told they must take unpaid leave during the Games to lessen the city’s notorious waterfront traffic jams. There had also been rumours circulating that gas stations would be closed during the Olympic fortnight and that people would be ordered to stay far away from the sporting venues.
“From what I can see, they decided to do everything at once,” Igor said. “There is so much money around but it is not for the people of this city. It is for the pockets of others. We are an impoverished country. All this spending is just window dressing.”
Lyudmila Serebryakova resides in Sochi’s central district. The caterer was of one of the few locals with mixed views about the Olympics.
“We have not had hot water for eight months and no heating since autumn began,” Serebryakova said. “We also have problems with voltage swings in the electricity, which has burned out a lot of equipment.”
Nevertheless, it was a positive that “people who take part in the organization of the Olympics will learn something new,” she said. “Thanks to additional advertising for our city, more tourists will come next year, too.”
Svetlana Alyabyeva, who is 21 and works in a hotel, agreed.
“The city is growing, more people are coming, there are more jobs, more possibilities, more urbanization,” she said.
But hers was definitely a minority opinion.
The River Mzymta, which rushes down the mountains to the Black Sea from Krasnaya Polyana, where “snow sports” such as skiing, snowboarding and bobsled are to be held, had been badly affected by Olympic construction projects, said ecologist Olga Noskovets.
“We could drink water from the tap before and it was of good quality, but they have poisoned the river with construction waste and petroleumbased fuels and oil,” she said.
“Every forest, gorge and meadow around Sochi is covered in construction waste heaps. Black Sea salmon used to spawn in the river, but no more.”
There were fears of landslides in some of the mountainous areas where some Olympic facilities including road and rail tunnels had been built, Noskovets said.
Irina Burachkova had moved with her sister and their six children to a trailer a few kilometres from Akhshtyr in the village of Chereshni because there were severe cracks in the walls of their former house, which she attributed to the building of several gigantic electric towers just behind their property. She and her sister had already lost two court cases in which they had demanded compensation. The courts found that the damages to their home were solely because it was old.
Angry at being forced to leave her home and worried that the power towers may trigger a landslide, Burachkova said that she had tried to call President Vladimir Putin when he had an open-line TV show in which he answered listeners’ questions and had tried to reach him through the Internet without result.
“Organizers say they will look after us after the Olympics, but I think they will forget us,” she said.
Journalist Kiril Belyakov was sanguine about local dissent over the Sochi extravaganza.
“I have not met a single local inhabitant who is happy about these Games, but it is typical of Russians to complain,” said the Muscovite, who was sent to live for a year in Sochi by Sovietsky Sport during the run-up to the Olympics.
Belyakov’s own aunt had been forced to leave her seaside home in Sochi after it was expropriated by the government because organizers wanted to build apartments there next to the main Olympic cluster. She had been offered the choice of money or a home in a new settlement, he said. She took the money, which was used to buy a five-room flat.
“I asked her if she was sorry to be in her new flat and she told me that of course she was,” Belyakov said. “She had a house by the sea with a fruit garden and now she doesn’t.”
A retired teacher, who would only give her name as Tatyana, said the Sochi she remembered was “full of greenery and small houses. I do not recognize our city any more. We do not see so many highrises. It does not suit us. Many of us are against the Games because we are losing the city we have known.”
Although Alexander Krotov lives almost in the shadow of where alpine skiing is to take place, he and his family, like most Sochi residents, said they had no plants to attend any Olympic events. “I remember how happy we were when got the Games,” he said. “We were elated because we thought that civilization was finally coming to our country.
“But the Olympics are too expensive so we won’t be going. I won’t watch them on TV, either. I am not interested.”