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Upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia help politicians to find common ground and encouraged one Russian city to reassess the past.

The preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi are in full swing with eleven sports venues already built and being tested since the beginning of 2013. The XXII Olympic Winter Games will be celebrated from 7 to 23 February 2014 with ninety-eight events in fifteen winter sports being held. Both the Olympic and Paralympic Games are organized by the Sochi Organizing Committee (SOC).

In many bigger cities, a countdown clock was installed to count how many days, hours, minutes and seconds are left until the Olympics commenced (263 days, 13 hours, 44 minutes and 53 seconds left at the time of writing this newsletter). These clocks are installed in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Khabarovsk, Yekaterinburg and some other cities. The latter mentioned is interesting with the fact that the clock replaced a memorial dedicated to Lenin, who is still broadly worshiped in Russia. This act may imply that the modern Russia is reflecting on reassessing its past.

Construction in preparation for the Games involve the building of new venues, modernising the telecommunications, power, and transport infrastructure of the area. Russia provides nearly 327 billion rubles (approximately US$10.85 billion) for the total development, expansion and hosting of the Games. Financing from non-budget sources (including private investor funds) is distributed as follows:

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