Sabtu, 22 Februari 2014

Holdout's Faith Rewarded Amid Olympic Makeover


SOCHI, Russia - It was a year ago, almost to the day, that Prokofey Drovichev stood in his mud yard and wondered what would happen to him and his family. The Olympics were coming, and he needed to get out of the way.


Families around him were moving, and their houses were being torn down. Down the ramshackle lane where Drovichev lived, Fisht Stadium was going up like an Erector set, being built for the opening and closing ceremonies. New housing and parks were planned for this area. Drovichev had been offered money to move, but he had turned it down. He wanted to wait it out.


He was born in the house next door in 1940. His parents and grandparents were buried in the nearby cemetery, soon to be an island obscured behind fencing and trees amid the Olympic Park. He spent 28 years as a tractor driver on a state-run farm that was covered in concrete and topped by monolithic arenas. He did not want to go.


'In the end, it's all the same to me,' he said through an interpreter that day in late February 2013. 'I'll live to the Olympics, and I'll live after the Olympics.'


The end has come.


On Friday afternoon, Drovichev, now 73, greeted visitors in his yard again. The mud had been paved over in concrete. The block house that he shares with his wife and their son's family had a new coat of yellow paint and matching aluminum siding. A room had been added, and a sign on the new fence offered a phone number for tourists interested in renting a place to sleep.


From his garden - beets, cabbage, carrots - Drovichev could see the Olympic torch. On Sunday, it will be extinguished. The Olympics will go. Drovichev will stay.


The Olympic movement came within 50 yards. There is a fence blocking the road there now, a border marking where the Olympic overhaul stops and the neighborhood begins. Drovichev received word sometime last spring that the authorities would not need his land after all. Construction would stop on his street and hopscotch around him. He could keep the house. And the house next door, where Drovichev was born and raised and where his younger brother now lives - well, that could stay, too.


'I'm here, my brother is in the next house, and beyond that is Olympic Park,' Drovichev said in Russian on Friday. 'You can say we were lucky - or not so lucky. But in the end, we didn't have to move. The most important thing is, I was born here. And I get to stay here.'


When the 2014 Winter Games were awarded to Sochi in 2007, the authorities began the unpleasant task of moving people out of the way. The Olympic Park was to be built on the site of an enormous farm next to the Black Sea that was abutted by strips of small shacks and worn houses.


Many were Old Believers, a purist sect of the Orthodox Church that largely left Russia centuries ago as a result of persecution, only to be invited back by Czar Nicholas II. Old Believers began to resettle on a low-lying patch of fertile farmland next to the Black Sea in 1911, and many of their relatives - like Drovichev, his children and his grandchildren - remained, generations later, living simple and quiet lives, when the Olympic development began.


Some people took offers of money or a new home nearby. Some held out for more. Some complained that their property had been undervalued, while the government said that many residents had no legal claim to the places they lived. The battle for relocation, a familiar tale in the Olympics movement, attracted the attention of the news media and advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch.


Drovichev, a thin man with happy eyes and a ragged beard, watched the upheaval around him. Families disappeared. Houses were demolished. Scavengers picked through the wreckage, and stray dogs roamed the ruins. Construction equipment clanked and hummed at all hours, in the shadows of the bright lights of Olympic Park.


But in the past year, apartment buildings sprouted up. A Radisson hotel jutted into the sky about a quarter-mile away. A cafe opened on Drovichev's street. A miles-long pathway was constructed along the sea.


Drovichev's sister lived a bit closer to the Olympic Park. She took the offer and moved, not far away, into a larger two-story house. She is happy, Drovichev said.


But Drovichev did not want to go.


'I was a little bit nervous,' he said. 'They were going to move us, they weren't going to move us. They were going to move us, they weren't going to move us.'


His parents and grandparents are buried in the cemetery. While Olympics organizers showed little hesitation in creating a clean canvas on which to build these Games, Russian law prohibited them from moving the graves. So they hid them. They built an iron fence around the cemetery, covered the fence with fabric, and surrounded the whole thing with hundreds of juniper-like trees. They are planted so close together that for Olympics visitors the view into the cemetery is fully obstructed.


Drovichev presumes that he will be able to visit the graves of his ancestors after the Olympics, when the security forces leave and the ring of temporary fencing around Olympic Park is dismantled. He wondered whether they would remove the view-obstructing trees surrounding the cemetery. He joked that the authorities might just cover the whole thing in asphalt when no one is looking.


He was in a fine mood. His house had a new fence in front, one that stretched all the way down the street, which has been smoothly repaved. Last year's surrounding rubble and the husks of old houses had been cleared away. There had been a two-story home next door that looked as if it had been bombed, stripped of its doors and windows and fixtures, leaving nothing but a concrete hulk. It has disappeared, and the 30-by-30-foot plot is for sale.


The mess of construction is a faded memory. The persistent cacophony of grinding and banging and crushing has been replaced by the renewed soundtrack of songbirds.


'Right now, it's almost like being in paradise,' Drovichev said.


His primary lament was the loss of many 100-year-old acacia trees across the street, he said, between him and the seashore. But a bike trail, with a rubberized jogging path, now hugs the Black Sea. It curves out of sight around Olympic Park. Drovichev rides his bike on it.


He does not know for sure that the construction has stopped permanently. He wonders whether the makeover was simply interrupted by the Olympics. But he is unconcerned. He survived this long.


'Come back in a few years, and it will be even nicer,' he said.


Then, with a smile, he added: 'Or maybe it won't be here.'


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