No. 143: The Sochi Olympics

With the XXII Winter Olympics Games underway, this edition examines the development and construction of the Sochi Olympics mega-project. In the first article, Martin Müller considers the transformation of a city known as the summer capital of Russia into a global winter sports resort, highlighting that this gigantic programme of investment has resulted in a massive waste of money, enormous environmental damage and infrastructure grossly out of proportion to the everyday needs of the local population. In the second article, Robert Orttung details how the state corporation Olimpstroy, which was responsible for overseeing the construction of the Sochi games, provides a useful case study of how well-connected elite insiders benefit from the country’s current political and economic system. In the third article, Sufian Zhemukhov examines the experiences of the migrant labourers that worked on the construction of the Olympic infrastructure. He notes that in contrast to the Kremlin’s initial promise that the Sochi games would provide opportunities for migrant labourers, both official and unofficial means were used to restrict the number of foreign migrant workers, while there were numerous cases in which both foreign and domestic workers were exploited, culminating in a campaign by the Krasnodar authorities to deport migrant workers before the games begun.