Hunger strike called in Sochi in protest against evictions.
The residents of the Imeretinskaya Valley in the Adler District of Sochi staged a rally yesterday to protest their eviction from their plots of land. The protestors say that the situation at present is critical: the construction of Olympic projects has moved right up to their homes and they have nowhere to be relocated. After the rally, ten people in the Imeretinskaya Valley started a hunger strike which they will not end until Prime Minister Vladimir Putin meets with them. MK has been given an account of the problem by the local residents.
"Construction has reached our homes. But we have nowhere to go. The last assessment of the cost of our houses has been so low that people cannot afford the properties offered in exchange. The houses and land have been assessed at 75% below their market value. The representatives of the state corporation Olympstroy admit that our houses have been undervalued, but they are doing nothing and are telling us to look for something cheaper. My own case is an example: 0.15 hectares of land at the seaside plus a house and a shop have been evaluated at 8 million. Do you think I can buy an equivalent property in Sochi with that money? Of course not. We are offered relocation to Nekrasovka where they have built houses, but people will have to pay extra for them. A million or two million roubles. How is that possible? One square metre of housing in Nekrasovka is evaluated at 50,000 roubles and in Imeretinka at 20,000. But Imeretinka is much closer to the sea. Olympstroy suggests that we buy second-hand housing. But many cannot afford even that. Prices have soared several times after the city was named the capital of the Olympic Games. Why are they treating us in this way? To cap it all, nearly half of the evaluators from the state corporation turned out to be fraudsters and Olympstroy admits it. But that is that. Nobody cares about us. We have tried to get through to Putin on his phone-in programme and leave a message, but without success," one of the organizers of yesterday's rally, Dmitry Drofichev, an Old Believer, complained.
"What are you going to do?"
"We will no longer haggle and will simply not leave our land. The people of the Imeretinskaya Valley will resist until the last. We are fed up with empty promises and we are going on an indefinite hunger strike. Until a meeting with Vladimir Putin is arranged for us, ten people will join the hunger strike every ten days. We have been driven to despair."
MK correspondents have contacted the head of the relocation department of the Olympstroy state corporation, Alexander Naumik, but he refused to comment on the situation over the phone and said that the corporation was working on every individual case.
About a thousand local people were taking part in the rally at Motocross Stadium in Adler. They were met by first deputy governor of the Krasnodar Territory, Dzhambulat Khatuov, deputy governor Alexander Saurin and the Mayor of Sochi, Anatoly Pakhomov. They admitted that problems existed, but said that in general everything was fine. Those gathered were just a few disgruntled apostates.... The protestors said that in spite of repeated invitations no member of Olympstroy management bothered to meet with the protesting residents of Imeretinka.
Yekaterina Petukhova