Sochi Letter: Battle for coveted Black Sea land repeats through Russian history

The train line and highway between the Black Sea beach city of Sochi and the ski resort of Krasnaya Polyana are recent additions to this scenic stretch of southern Russia, but the villages and valleys they snake past tell a much older story.

Their names – Akhshtyr, Dzykhra, Chvizhepse, Mzymta – were given to them by people who lived here long before the Russians finally subdued the Caucasus after decades of fighting.

The last highland people to fall to Tsarist troops were the Circassians, who after defeat in 1864 were subjected to what today would be called ethnic cleansing.

Circassians who refused to pledge allegiance to the Tsar, or were a hindrance to Russian settlers who wanted their land, were forced down to the coast around Sochi and deported to the Ottoman Empire. Hundreds of thousands of them died as a result of violence, starvation, drowning and illness.

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One hundred and fifty years after Russia held a victory parade on conquered Circassian territory, it staged the Winter Olympics in the same area, Krasnaya Polyana (Red Meadow), which according to one version of local history was named for the Circassian blood that was shed there.

Groups in the Circassian diaspora, which is concentrated in Turkey and the Middle East, used the sporting spotlight on their homeland to raise awareness of their history and some called for recognition of the 1864 expulsions as genocide.

Russia added a token "Circassian House" to the Olympic Park but otherwise ignored the furore, which President Vladimir Putin called a foreign attempt to sully his nation's reputation and its Games; just weeks later he would order the occupation of Crimea, wrecking ties with the West and completely overshadowing events in Sochi.

The 2014 Games were the most-costly Olympics ever, with a bill running to more than €40 billion due to the scale of work needed to turn down-at-heel Sochi and Krasnaya Polyana into suitable venues and to build completely new transport links, but also because corruption sucked a fortune from the budget.

Evictions

The Games did nothing for the Circassians and delivered eviction notices to thousands of Sochi residents, who were moved to new properties as their homes were flattened to make way for new arenas, hotels and roads.

Some people complained that the terms of their eviction were unfair, while others said shoddy construction work and illegal dumping badly damaged their houses or land, and both groups said they had no real way to challenge a national mega-project that had Putin’s personal approval.

For them, and for migrant workers who said they were robbed of pay and put at risk on Olympic building projects, the Games were another chapter of dispossession and injustice in Sochi’s history.

Yet for many others, including those who were happy to trade their old properties for new homes and compensation, the Olympics were a boon.

New hotels and other facilities made Sochi a modern resort city and transformed Krasnaya Polyana, and the fast links between the two turned the region into a year-round destination for Russians on a range of budgets.

Sochi is now Europe’s fifth fastest-growing city, pulling in people from all over Russia, including sun-seeking retirees, freelancers wanting more beach and ski time, and labourers confident of finding steady work on its plethora of big building sites.

The pandemic has further boosted Sochi’s pull as a top domestic destination for Russians, and high-end apartment blocks now dwarf what little remains of old Sochi: modest landmarks like the Pushkin library, founded in 1899, and the nearby bust of the poet, erected in 1937 in a park of palm trees and oleander close to the Primorskaya hotel, which opened its doors a year earlier.

Many Sochi sanatoriums that welcomed workers from across the Soviet Union are now too expensive for most Russians, and several of the biggest are controlled by the Kremlin administration and branches of the security services, whose employees have regained much of their Soviet-era status under Putin; it is a similar story down the coast in Abkhazia, a Moscow-backed breakaway region of Georgia, where well connected Russians have been snapping up prime property.

And now a new battle is brewing for a piece of Sochi: courts recently seized nearly 5,000 hectares of land that allegedly belongs to a national park outside the city, to the dismay of thousands of people who insist they bought their plots legally and fear their dachas face demolition.

It is not yet clear whether the state, the city or rich businessmen want their land. But the locals know from Sochi’s history that power usually prevails in this coveted corner of Russia.