SOCHI, Russia — Six-year-old Kirill Dragan looked on silently as the wall grew. Just a few days earlier the spot where workers were stacking up cinderblocks on layers of mortar had been a roadway lined with the flowerbeds and grape trellises owned by Kirill's parents and 12 other families. But then the bulldozers and trucks moved in, submerging it all in dust and concrete. The boy watched as heavy machines dug holes, dumped mounds of gravel and sand, and unloaded more and more concrete blocks. The giant construction site for the 2014 Winter Olympics spreads all the way from the shores of the Black Sea to the snow-capped peaks of the Caucasus Mountains on the horizon.
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"Help! SOS! They're walling off people alive in here," reads a red banner stretched across the roof of Kirill's apartment building on Acacia Street.
For months, this neighborhood of dilapidated houses has been trying to fight back the tide of construction and cynical threats from officialdom. If you were wondering why a topless, obscenity-yelling woman protestor saw the need to confront Russia's president about human rights violations during his trip to Germany earlier this week, all you have to do is come to Sochi.
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You'll find many people with reasons to yell at Putin here. The rising concrete wall (set to be 12 feet high upon completion) is about to cut off Acacia Street's view of the mountains -- and, indeed, of the rest of the world. During rainstorms, bulldozers push mud into residential courtyards, where the dirty water floods residents' basements, destroying floors and furniture. Mold is creeping up the walls in homes, filling the air with a rotten-garbage smell. Last month, Sochi City Hall filed a lawsuit against Acacia Street inhabitants who haven't been willing to demolish their own outhouses, kitchens, and water pumps that happen to be in the way of the construction of a new federal highway.
Russian authorities are resettling over 2,000 families who happened to live in the path of huge Olympic projects. But there are many others who have received zero compensation, and continue to wait in vain for new apartments from the state. The people whose lives have been turned upside down by Olympic development have been given no alternatives. They've never received a word of explanation from government officials about the rationale for destroying their homes. On Ternovaya Street in nearby Chereshnya, construction of Olympics-related power lines has triggered landslides, resulting in severe damage to homes, including collapsed walls and cracks in foundations. No one has ever apologized. People were expected to submit to this treatment without a squeak. "We're concerned that all of the authorities involved on both the local and federal level are not respecting the basic rights and human dignity of these families, including many small children," said Jane Buchanan, a Human Rights Watch representative who recently visited Sochi.
"We're stuck in a ghetto between two highways and a railroad without water, without fresh air, without a single patch of land for our kids to play on," Sochi resident Nadezhda Kurovskaya told me. "And then, on top of all that, they sue us, the poorest of the poor." Last week, Kurovskaya's grandson accidently fell up to his shoulders in a pond of liquid concrete. Luckily, neighbors pulled the child out before he sank -- though his rubber boots remained buried in the gray mush.
So what precisely is happening to Sochi, a place of palm trees and beaches that generations of Russians once viewed as the ultimate spot to get away from it all? Back in Soviet days, thousands of people escaped here from the dark Siberian winters and colorless industrial cities to see magnolias in bloom, listen to birds sing, relax on the beach, and recover their health and psychological well-being in Russia's only tropical resort. State-funded vacations typically lasted for weeks. And though not many local residents of Sochi had stable jobs, they were proud to hear visitors even from places like Moscow and St. Petersburg sigh and pronounce: "It's like paradise." (You might ask why a place with such a balmy climate was chosen precisely for the Winter Olympics. Russian officials respond by pointing to the nearby Caucasus Mountains, which boast considerable snowfall during the winters. If natural winter proves insufficient, the authorities have promised unspecified "innovative technical solutions" to make up the slack.)
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