Fifteen minutes of fame long gone: Circassian activism before and after the Sochi Olympics

Abstract

In this article we discuss the effects of the Sochi Olympics on the indigenous Circassian population in North Caucasus. The Circassian situation was paradoxical in the sense that whereas this indigenous group fiercely opposed the organization of the Winter Games in Sochi, the Games themselves denoted a rare opportunity for them to make their voices heard internationally. During the run-up to the Olympics, they all of a sudden had a global audience for their claims for recognition of their cause. This was quite simply their ‘fifteen minutes of fame’, a rare and short-lived period of celebrity and worldwide attention. The paper will look into whether the anti-Sochi activism helped to unite Circassians in the diaspora and abroad around common claims, and to what extent the Circassians managed to use media attention to make their cause more widely known by international society.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the years 1924–1945, this included a fourth Circassian autonomous territory, the Shapsug Cherkess.net National District (Polovinkina undated).

2. The website was hacked shortly prior to the opening of the Games in Sochi (Bacchi 2014) and is not available on the internet anymore. Material by the nosochi2014 activists may be found on their Twitter (https://twitter.com/nosochi2014) and YouTube accounts (https://www.youtube.com/user/NoSochi2014).