Voice of America, January 30, 2014
Yuliya Savchenko
On Thursday, in the National Press Club, Russian opposition activists in association with the Institute of Modern Russia presented the English-language publication of the report Winter Olympics in the Sub-Tropics: Corruption and Abuse in Sochi.
Boris Nemtsov, a well-known leader of the opposition and a coauthor of the report, emphasized that were there free press and open discussion in Russia, “the Olympics would have been considerably less expensive.”
“In July 2007, when a presentation was organized in Guatemala, Putin promised to spend $12 billion on the Olympics. Other contenders to host the Olympics at the time—Austria and South Korea—could not compete with such a sum,” Boris Nemtsov reminded the audience.
According to the opposition leader, official figures for the cost of the Olympics that are being presented today have nothing to do with reality.
“Russian officials justified the outlay on the grounds that the necessity of heavy spending was explained by the absence of infrastructure. However, if corruption were not so huge, the expenditures would have been incomparable to what eventually became a multi-billion-dollar bill ffofor the Olympics,” Nemtsov stressed.
Leonid Martynyuk, an opposition activist from the Krasnodar region and a coauthor of the report, pointed out that Krasnaya Polyana would never become a winter resort as initially planned by the Russian authorities. As a result, essentially, all expenditures were pointless, the activist noted.
When talking about specific Olympic sites, Boris Nemtsov cited as an example the most expensive project—the 48-kilometer Adler–Krasnaya Polyana Highway, which cost $9 billion. “expensive than the U.S. Mars flight program,” Nemtsov concluded.
According to the opposition leader, who is now a lawmaker in the Yaroslavl legislature, “structural risks of the Olympics could be even greater than terrorist risks.”
“Most workers used in the construction of these sites were representatives of Central Asia, who were not skilled enough and often were not paid for their work. State control over the construction quality was lacking as well,” Boris Nemtsov summed up.
During the event, the Institute of Modern Russia also presented an interactive website entitled “Sochi 2014: The Reverse Side of the Medal.”
In his exclusive interview to the VOA Russian news service, Boris Nemtsov talked about how he and his coauthors managed to get information for the report.
