Karina Vamling

When the party is over: developments in Sochi and Russia after the Olympics 2014

Abstract The 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, were during the preparations and run-up phase intensely followed by the global community and were generally associated with a vast array of problems: political, democratic, economic, ecological and security-related. When the hosting of a mega-event such as the Olympic Games has been awarded to a site in an authoritarian state, the global community has moral responsibilities to live up to. There is a need and an obligation to raise one’s voice and criticize where criticism is due also after the Games are concluded. For Sochi, as for sites of all major sports events, continued critical attention is therefore warranted also after the competitions. It is essential to try to gauge the extent to which predicted problems materialized, what happened afterwards and what have been the more long-term consequences and local effects. This is the general perspective that brought the authors of this volume together.

Fifteen minutes of fame long gone: Circassian activism before and after the Sochi Olympics

Abstract In this article we discuss the effects of the Sochi Olympics on the indigenous Circassian population in North Caucasus. The Circassian situation was paradoxical in the sense that whereas this indigenous group fiercely opposed the organization of the Winter Games in Sochi, the Games themselves denoted a rare opportunity for them to make their voices heard internationally. During the run-up to the Olympics, they all of a sudden had a global audience for their claims for recognition of their cause. This was quite simply their ‘fifteen minutes of fame’, a rare and short-lived period of celebrity and worldwide attention. The paper will look into whether the anti-Sochi activism helped to unite Circassians in the diaspora and abroad around common claims, and to what extent the Circassians managed to use media attention to make their cause more widely known by international society.

Vanished in the Haze: White Elephants, Environmental Degradation and Circassian Marginalization in Post-Olympics Sochi

This chapter focuses on three areas that before the Sochi Olympics were often discussed as holding particularly acute problems. The first is related to infrastructural investments in the region and the risk of them being turned into so-called white elephants, costing a lot of money and being of no actual use, neither by the local population nor by tourists. The second theme regards the feared environmental degradation due to the organization of the mega event and the extent to which the prognosticated problems have come to materialize. The third, which enjoyed substantial attention before the Olympics, deals with the indigenous Circassian population and the extent to which its members were maltreated, marginalized and squeezed out from the geographical area which constitutes their homeland. The basic reason for bringing up the three subjects in the chapter is the same: to argue the need for continued attention to perceived trouble-spots even after the close of the Games.