Word: sochi
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...full wages since September. "After a week or so, the bosses stopped feeding us until we called off the strike, so a few brigades have now gone back to work," says Igor Pechorin, 48, who left his family in Siberia in order to operate a cement mixer in Sochi, thousands of miles away. "I went to see a prosecutor to complain ... But he just stared at me like a zombie." (See pictures of the Vancouver Olympics...
...Grim stories like these have been showing up in the Russian press with increasing regularity in the past two weeks, prompting prosecutors in Moscow to go into damage-control mode. In a statement released March 17, the prosecutor general's office said it had already forced private contractors in Sochi to shell out 1.2 million rubles (about $40,000) in back pay. But Pechorin says he hasn't seen any of the back pay yet, and neither have any of the workers he knows...
...problems extend to the construction of the facilities. Sochi is known primarily as a sleepy beach resort on the Black Sea, not a skiing village. So not only will the Russians have to revamp much of the decaying Soviet infrastructure in the area - everything from roads to power lines - but they must also build six stadiums from scratch, along with an elaborate sports complex in the mountains outside the city. (See a TIME postcard from Sochi...
...despite all the problems, Putin insists that everything in Sochi is fine. "So far, both the timeline and the financing [are] going according to plan," he told RIA Novosti last month. For him, the stakes are enormous, as he made it his personal mission two years ago to win the Olympics for Russia. He even delivered a speech to the International Olympic Committee in English - a first for a Kremlin leader before a Western audience - and promised members that the Sochi Games would be "safe, enjoyable and memorable." He even guaranteed that there would be snow. With the Olympics...
...Sochi Olympics: A Win for Putin...