Sochi poem

#Sochi2014 is almost here. Write a haiku about Sochi with hashtag #sochihaiku - the best will get published on a special blog on RBTH!
— RBTH (@russiabeyond) January 17, 2014

Russia Beyond the Headlines is an international outlet for le poutinisme, somewhat less sophisticated than Russia Today—it features stories like

Put Putin on your fridge door

 and

Olympic beauty: Sochi girls to meet world famous athletes

Their haiku project backfired a little bit, leading to a "special blog" on BuzzFeed instead, and poems quite unlike the ones RBTH presumably envisaged:

Krasnaya Polyana, Sochi. Via Wikipedia.

Welcome to Sochi Let's hope nothing starts to fall Except for Putin #sochihaiku #Sochi2014
— Lara Chicofsky (@laracchi) January 18, 2014

A prominent subtheme in that trend was that of the most famous event in Sochi history, the massacres of Adyghe people (also known as Circassians) at the height of the genocidal campaign of the Russian Empire to expel the indigenous peoples of the coastal Caucasus (Adyghe, Ubykh, Abkhaz, and Abaza), in 1864, or exactly 150 years ago, possibly in the same Red Glade (Krasnaya Polyana) where the Russian generals announced the end of the wars that year, and where the skiing events are scheduled to take place in February's Winter Olympics—as if the Games had been meant to celebrate the sesquicentennial.

That's not as much of a stretch as it may sound: beating up on Caucasians, especially Chechen and Dagestani, is a huge part of the way the Putin government establishes its neo-Tsarist cred. Indeed, there is now a connection, in the video produced by an otherwise unknown Dagestani "Ansar al Sunna" claiming responsibility for the suicide bombings that killed 34 people in Volgograd in December and threatening to disrupt the Games:

“We’ll have a surprise package for you,” one of them says, addressing Russian officials. “And those tourists that will come to you, for them, too, we have a surprise.”

Amazingly, the poutiniste newspaper Russia Today has a story about the new Volgograd video that doesn't mention Sochi at all, not so much burying the lede as dissolving it in lye and dumping it in the Caspian—headlined along with two stories about how Sochi is the safest place in the entire known universe. A person who loves talking about terrorism so much he has often been suspected of inventing it, Putin really doesn't want this connection to be made at all in the case of the Olympics.

The movement to remember the Circassian genocide, though, which you can check out at www.nosochi2014.com, is strictly nonviolent, preferring to fight its battles as I prefer myself, with scholarship and art. They are good people to think about today, as we commemorate the 85th birthday (last Wednesday) of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They kindly retweeted my contribution to the #sochihaiku festival, with a helpful annotation.

“@Yastreblyansky: Snow in the Red Glade: artificial, but will hide whatever it must. #Sochihaiku #Sochi2014” even bones #NoSochi
— No Sochi 2014 (@NoSochi2014) January 20, 2014

(Needless to say, I hope and indeed expect that Sochi really will be perfectly safe, and even that Billie Jean, for whom my admiration and respect are undiminished, will have a great time.)