Mother Jones
My first stop at Sadovaya Prison Colony No. 2 in central Russia is the visitors’ intake center. I’ve traveled for 14 hours on an overnight train that reeked of fetid socks to see my imprisoned friend, environmental activist Yevgeny Vitishko. By my noon arrival at the colony, I’m already running late, and reams of red tape await before I’ll be able to see him.
I’ve come to these cold mud flats 440 miles south of Moscow for the first interview Vitishko has given in the seven months since February 12, 2014, the day he was sent away in the midst of the Sochi Winter Olympics.
In the years leading up to the event, Vitishko had emerged as one of the competition’s fiercest critics. Along with his little-known organization, the Environmental Watch on North Caucasus (EWNC), Vitishko protested the ecological destruction and crony Kremlin corruption that fed the $51 billion games, the most expensive in history. Now, a year after the closing ceremonies, his dire predictions of environmental havoc have come true—and Vitishko sits in prison. He has been described as the only prisoner of conscience associated with the Sochi Olympics.
Vitishko and I immediately hit it off when we first met in January 2014, in his hometown of Tuapse, 75 miles northwest of Sochi on the Black Sea. A Krasnodar court had recently sentenced him to three years in the Sadovaya penal colony on charges that he’d painted an environmental message on a fence. He remained free on the condition he not leave Tuapse until a long-shot February 12 appeal was set to be heard at a regional court.
We met up at my hotel, one of the town’s neglected Soviet-era spas. The 41-year-old geologist’s white turtleneck and tan made him look like he’s just stepped off a yacht. I hopped in his car and he sped down the narrow hill roads to his favorite coffee joint.
His looming prison sentence gave him, Vitishko said, a “nothing to lose” freedom with his words. With the opening ceremony just 13 days away, Vitishko sipped his cup of Turkish blend and rattled off the Games’ disastrous effects. The Myzmta River, once Sochi’s main water source, was poisoned by toxic construction waste. Wells had dried up, thanks to illegal quarries and dump sites; the weight of newly paved roads, trafficked nearly 24/7 for years by heavy dump trucks and digging machinery, ruined the region’s aquifers. The traffic inundated villagers with dust, affecting residents’ health, livestock, and farms. Sochi’s seaside stadiums decimated the Imereti lowlands, turning a major migratory stopover for endangered birds into a strip of Olympic venues and construction debris. But the longest lasting damage, Vitishko warned, would come from the way the government rewrote environmental law to accommodate Olympic construction.
Bridges over what’s left of the Mzymta river in Sochi Nils Bøhmer/Bellona
After seven years of gumshoeing, Vitishko was preparing to publish a report detailing such findings, cowritten with his friend Suren Gazaryan, once the Olympics kicked into full swing. (Full disclosure: I helped translate EWNC’s report into English.)
“I’m not afraid to go to jail for what I’ve said, and I probably will,” Vitishko told me that day. “If it draws the world’s attention to how the Olympics have destroyed the Black Sea area, I’ll sit in a cell. It’ll just be part of my journey.”
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