ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on fieldwork in Sochi 2007–2017 including regular episodic interviews with 22 residents in villages along the Mzymta River. It highlights the Sochi’s most expensive transport infrastructure intervention and focuses on the legacy period after the Olympics, and examines the government’s promises of development and regeneration and explores the degrees to which these promises were fulfilled. The mountain cluster was situated within the Sochi National Park, the only undisturbed mountain forest in Europe, adjacent to the Caucasus Nature Reserve, and protected as a UNESCO natural world heritage site. The New Krasnaya Polyana Highway is only part of the major transit intervention from the coast to the mountains. The chapter looks at issues of cost, corruption, and opaque ownership structures to explore the micro-level of what has happened to the people who are living in the aftermath of the Olympic development project.
