Russian authorities have recently announced that around 70,000 persons of various professional backgrounds will serve during the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, a Northwest Caucasian seaport city with a population of 350,000 in the Krasnodar province. Within this number, an army of 25,000 volunteers, predominantly young men and women coming from all over Russia, will be established. This and other factors, coupled with the increased activities of the Western wing of the self-proclaimed Caucasus Emirate raise a range of security concerns ahead of the upcoming Olympics.

BACKGROUND: As Moscow seems to consider a smooth completion of the Olympics as a major opportunity to improve the country’s image abroad and invests billions of dollars into the preparations, some groups within Russia are less happy with the upcoming games.

This first and foremost concerns the North Caucasian insurgents. Having declared a war of attrition on Russia, they do not hesitate to indiscriminately attack targets in Russia proper, regardless of civilian fatalities. Recent terrorist attacks in the Moscow subway (March 2010) and Moscow’s Domodedovo airport (January 2011) testified to their ability to carry out full-scale operations even in a remote and hostile environment, with the Kabarda-Balkaria-Karachay jamaat becoming one of the leaders of the insurgency (see the 03/02/2011 issue of the CACI Analyst).

Second, Adyghe/Circassian nationalists regard the Sochi area, and especially the location called Krasnaya polyana where the core of the Olympic infrastructure is to be built, a mass grave containing the bodies of thousands of indigenous Adyghes, mostly women and children massacred during what they call the Circassian genocide of the nineteenth century. The event is believed to have claimed the lives of over a million Circassians and exterminated some Adyghe tribes completely. Virtually all Circassians were ethnically cleansed from the area and hundreds of thousands of the survivors were expelled to the Ottoman Empire – symbolically through the seaport of Sochi. Representatives of Adyghe nationalist organizations point to the fact that the Olympics are to take place on the 150th anniversary of the end of the Great Caucasian War. Indeed, the Russian army celebrated its final victory over the rebelling Adyghe tribes of what is now the Krasnodar province in Krasnaya polyana on May 24, 1864.

Third, even though local inhabitants are generally eager to benefit financially from the wide range of opportunities during the upcoming event, some of them are deeply concerned with what they view as a serious ecological catastrophe as Olympic infrastructure is built on the territory of the unique North Caucasus biospherical national reservation. Archaeological sites dating back thousands of years are routinely being destroyed in the course of constructing highways. It is not uncommon that Olympic infrastructure is built with little respect for the private property rights of ordinary Sochians, whose houses and lands are appropriated with inadequate compensation, the most notable case being the ongoing conflict between the inhabitants of Sochi’s Imeretian valley and authorities.

IMPLICATIONS: Russian authorities are obviously fully aware of the terrorist threat during the upcoming Olympics and will do their best to reduce any risk of terrorist attacks to a minimum. As construction works are proceeding, Russian security forces carry out strict control of people, transport and goods using advanced technologies. An unofficial ban has recently been placed on the participation of North Caucasian companies in public tenders for construction works in the Sochi area. Moreover, Olympic construction projects do not hire workers from the ethnic autonomous regions of the North Caucasus, a fact that has already stirred some inter-ethnic tension in the region. The precise requirements for selecting volunteers are as yet unknown as the official recruitment is to start in 2012, but it is likely that similarly discriminating criteria will be applied to ensure that potentially unreliable natives of the North Caucasus are kept away from the Olympic infrastructure.  

It is likely that a special regime will be introduced during the Olympics in the entire Krasnodar province, which will be upheld by members of the federal security forces transferred specifically for this purpose from Russia proper to minimize the risk of insurgents infiltrating the Olympic staff. Russian secret services are aware of the general unreliability of local security forces and prefer acting on their own, avoiding informing locals of forthcoming major anti-terrorist raids, as was the case during a massive anti-terrorist assault in Ingushetia this March. The Russian security forces would obviously prefer to put an end to the Caucasus Emirate before the Olympics start, but given its generally ineffective methods and the very organization of the Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus, this task is likely unachievable.

Whether the North Caucasus insurgents will be considering terrorist attacks against the Olympics will mainly depend on their actual agenda and technical capabilities in 2014. Considering the internal radicalization of the North Caucasus insurgency movement in recent years and the limited sympathy from the outside world for the movement, attacks can be expected to be rather high-profile and indiscriminate. The completion of an event of this magnitude in the immediate vicinity of insurgency centers is unique as it provides the insurgents with a welcome opportunity inform the entire world know about themselves and their political aspirations, moreover on territory they consider their own.

From a Russian perspective, the 2014 Olympics will test the contested ability of federal security forces to effectively coordinate the work of dozens of thousands of people grouped in a wide range of agencies. This has traditionally been their weakest point, a fact frequently proven during massive anti-terrorist raids. Widespread corruption, especially in the ranks of police forces, remains a major problem and it is very unlikely that it will disappear overnight in Russia’s probably most corrupt region.

As Sergey Markedonov points out in this regard, “as long as the major goal of [Russian] police is wearing down ordinary people and the secret forces deal with mythical ‘Orange revolutions’ and foreign NGOs, the Olympics will be extremely vulnerable”. Since Islamist insurgents mostly rely on suicide bombers to carry out massive terrorist attacks, and thus have no concern for the terrorists’ exit routes, it will be an extremely difficult task for the authorities to routinely control hundreds of thousands of guests on a relatively large territory to ensure that there is not a single bomb blast in crowded areas.

The authorities’ desire to reduce the risk of terrorist attacks by preventing native North Caucasians from taking part in construction projects is also questionable. In the Krasnodar province in general and the Sochi area in particular, they are rather strong demographically. After all, the Krasnodar province contains the Adyghean autonomous republic within its borders. Numerous North Caucasian natives cannot simply be isolated from the area for the period of the Olympics. Besides, carrying out overtly discriminating measures against them is likely only to further stir already latent interethnic tension between on the one hand groups of North Caucasian natives, forging their internal solidarity, and on the other local Russians, strengthening the support among North Caucasians for Islamist insurgents. Importantly, recent years have brought about reports of a stronger role of Salafism in Krasnodar’s Adyghea autonomous region fueled by increasing Slavo-Adyghean antagonism. A general disaffection among local inhabitants with what they consider unfair activities by the authorities related to the construction of Olympic objects further fuels the conflict potential in the Sochi area.

CONCLUSIONS: The upcoming Sochi Olympics entail a number of serious security concerns that should not be underestimated. Particular segments of the North Caucasus Islamist insurgency are very likely to consider the 2014 Olympics a historically unique opportunity to gain global publicity. Since the Western wing of the Caucasus Emirate comprises members of Adyghe ethnicity, nationalist motives could also play a role in rallying militant Islamists and Adyghe nationalists as the implementation of the Olympics in the Sochi area is regarded by many Adyghe as a humiliating lack of respect for their massacred and ethnically cleansed forebears. Last but not least, through their heavy concentration on the Sochi area, Russian authorities risk providing the insurgents with easier opportunities to strike in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, or elsewhere in the North Caucasus or Russia proper. As the entire world will be watching the Olympics, any major attack on Russian soil would bring about massive media attention worldwide.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Dr. Emil Souleimanov is assistant professor at the Department of Russian and East European Studies, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of “An Endless War: The Russian-Chechen Conflict in Perspective” (Peter Lang, 2007).