But you would not know any of this from reading the foreign press coverage of the project. Perhaps this is unsurprising at a time when relations between Russia and much of the West were considered to be at their lowest since 1991, and would become still worse after Ukraine descended into civil war in the weeks immediately following the Games. A project that was supposed to have helped renew Russia’s reputation was instead a lightning rod that attracted all kinds of assaults on our government’s foreign and domestic policies.
Much of the criticism was directed at the construction of the infrastructure. We received scrutiny from Russian politicians and businessmen, and from every corner of Russian society. There were, of course, many objective people who provided necessary criticisms of a number of aspects of the organisation, planning and implementation of the Sochi Olympic Games project, but they were joined by other less circumspect people whose only aim was to secure popularity for themselves by passing on scurrilous rumours.
It is only now that I know for sure that there were powerful interests working to undermine the image not only of the project, but of the President himself, the man who was the driving force behind the whole Sochi enterprise. A vicious campaign, orchestrated by a Western PR company that was paid with money from Russia, was waged in the mass media against us, and it led to all kinds of aspersions being thrown on the actions of myself and Russian Railways. I have always believed that the press should at least try to provide a fair and complete picture of what went on, but with Sochi, I never had the feeling that the foreign mass media wanted, really and objectively, to understand the actual situation with the construction, or to provide useful criticism that might have been a spur to improvement. There was never any acknowledgement of the size of the task, the tightness of the deadline, or the unbelievable efforts the staff of Russian Railways made to complete their work. They never talked about the horrendous difficulties posed by the tunnel drilling, or the high standard of the accommodation we provided for those building the infrastructure.
I certainly never heard of any journalist coming to one of our building sites and asking the workers, ‘Are you proud of what you are doing? Are you happy with the conditions in which you are living here?’ All we heard was that Russian Railways had polluted the environment, that they had incurred costs that were absolutely abnormal, that their every transaction was infected by the most invidious strains of corruption. Those reporters knew the story they wanted to write before they ever asked their first question, and they never questioned whether there was any real substance behind it. But then it is so easy to talk when you have no responsibility for anything yourself; you can publish what you like and never give a second thought to the consequences.
You would also be surprised how rarely, if ever, they used professional sources. Even when they were able to talk to somebody who had a direct connection to Sochi operations, they were invariably a person who could shed light on only a small element of the entire project. No information they provided was ever put into proper context. So someone can check the internet, compare the costs of the construction of the Adler–Krasnaya Polyana railway line with the ‘Canada Line’ built in Vancouver, and see that we spent more. And from that small nugget they can draw all kinds of outlandish inferences about corruption and incompetence. However, if they had taken into account, for instance, the fact that our rail and road infrastructure was approximately six times the length of its Canadian equivalent, and that it was built despite huge geological and topographical handicaps, then their calculations would immediately begin to look completely different.
This cavalier approach to legitimate information was combined with deliberate attempts to introduce disinformation into discussions about the project. (Boris Nemtsov’s claim that $30 billion was stolen was the most egregious example. We had decided to challenge his allegations in the courts, and were confident of winning, but his tragic murder stopped us in our tracks. We thought it would be appropriate to abide by an old Russian saying: ‘If you have nothing good to say about the dead, then say nothing at all.’ In retrospect, this was perhaps a mistake.)
There seems also to have been a widespread assumption that there was something opaque about the way we functioned; that we presented the state with our plans, took their cash and then worked in secrecy until we eventually presented them with the final results. In fact, the opposite was true.
For a start, we were working alongside Dmitry Kozak and Olympstroy’s supervisory committee, and during the five-year period Russian Railways were engaged on this project, we were subject to over 1,500 inspections. There were visitors from the prosecutor’s office, the tax office, the audit chamber of the parliament, law enforcement organisations – representatives from almost any branch of the federal and municipal governments you might care to mention. They came every day, they checked every part of every job, whether that was the price we were paying for a particular material or how we were approaching a particular engineering issue. It was a constant process of proving that our planning and our work were effective and in accordance with the particular demands of the Olympic Games, and also in accordance with Russia’s construction laws.
The inspections were often the result of malicious gossip, but inevitably they had real consequences. For instance, one day I saw a very strongly worded letter from an FSB representative to the President, which informed him that, rather than installing special filters, we were pumping the waste water from our activities directly into the river. As soon as I read this letter, I called the Head of the Security Services and we arranged a group to go there to take samples of the water. We found out that it was completely false information.
It is also true, however, that although Sochi was, overall, a success, this does not mean that everything we did was perfect. How could it have been under the circumstances? We had so much ground to cover, so many challenges to overcome. But as much as the memory may still sting, I believe that it is important to spend time contemplating what went wrong, and why. There is little to be gained from pretending that one is infallible, and much more to be lost if one does not learn from the times when projects go awry.
There were logistical missteps that wasted valuable time and resources, such as the water pipe we built to supply a remote village that was destroyed as soon as heavy trucks began to drive over it. Other scenarios were more complex – reminders both that any intervention in a community’s economy can have a welter of unforeseen consequences, and that the Russian government is not omnipotent, no matter what some people might believe. For instance, before the Olympics came to Sochi, the taxi services there were run by a kind of local administrative mafia who exerted a menacing level of control. During the construction process, when 25,000 law officers descended upon the region, the mafia became invisible. So much so that we allowed ourselves to believe that they had disappeared for ever.
But once we had moved on, we began to hear stories about train drivers being intimidated by men who told them that if they performed their services as usual, then they would return home to find their houses burnt down. The infrastructure we built brought many benefits to the local community, but the fact that train journeys were twenty times cheaper than travelling by taxi meant that the cab drivers’ livelihoods, as well as those of the mafia who purported to represent their interests, had been hit hard. The local administration have been able to do little to reassure potential train drivers that they will be protected if they carry out their duties, so we have been left with an almost brand-new rail network on which very few people feel safe enough to work. Without any drivers, there can be no trains.