Putin: During and After Sochi

If there is any human rights activist in Russia whose work is likely to have some sympathy from the Russian public, it may well be Khabarov. Police corruption is one aspect of the current system that the average Russian citizen encounters on an everyday basis—to a point where it can be hard to distinguish police officials from the crooks they’re supposed to be pursuing.

.. I speak of the Circassians, the local ethnic minority that tried to use the Games to draw attention to the historical injustices committed against them by the tsarist empire in the mid-nineteenth century (and largely ignored by the world). After fighting a long war of resistance against advancing Russian troops, the last Circassian fighters finally surrendered at Krasnaya Polyana (which also served as the venue for alpine sports during the Winter Olympics) exactly 150 years before the opening of the games. Most of those who had survived the Russians’ scorched-earth counterinsurgency tactics were then deported to the Ottoman Empire under profoundly inhumane conditions. Some scholars estimate the number of Circassian deaths between 1860 and 1864 at around 1.5 million. Some have referred to it as the first modern genocide.