Human Rights Watch and other groups like the Environmental Watch on the North Caucasus have chronicled a range of abuses, including the gross exploitation of migrant laborers, many of them shuttled in from abroad. While Russian officials dispute the accusations of corruption, the evidence has mounted to the point that even a member of the International Olympic Committee, Gian-Franco Kasper, told Switzerland’s SRF radio this month that roughly a third of the spending on the games had been lost to embezzlement.

Many of the stadiums, the Alpine ski courses, the sleek new bobsled track, are ready and have already been tested in international competitions, but construction work has continued up to the last minute, with complaints from organizers that hotels and other amenities might not be ready in time. When I visited the site of the freestyle ski events, the surrounding area was a muddy mess, cluttered with construction equipment and debris. Aleksandr Savilov, the site’s manager, said the progress that had been made was almost unimaginable. “Two years ago, there was almost nothing here,” he told me. “It’s like mushrooms after the rain.” It was late November, and it still had not snowed, the weather in the mountains being so unpredictable that organizers had stockpiled snow from last winter and built the world’s most extensive system for making artificial snow. Looking from a platform over the work still underway at the village where athletes will stay, he shrugged off the delays. “Even if it’s not finished,” Savilov said, “the snow will cover it.”

Despite all the criticism, the games in Sochi will take place, and they will most likely be deemed a triumph, a validation of Putin’s leadership, unless of course disaster strikes in the form of terrorism or some other tragedy.

In his office overlooking the coast, Dmitri Chernyshenko, the president of the Sochi Olympic Organizing Committee, acknowledged that it was “a very risky decision” for the international committee to choose Sochi, but that Russia had succeeded in using the opportunity to redevelop the only subtropical seashore it has. “We need such a project to unite the nation,” he said.

Like Chernyshenko, Pakhomov has little patience for the critics, especially his former challenger. “He must be ashamed,” he said of Nemtsov. “When he was running for mayor, he said, ‘It’s impossible — nothing can be built here.’ Now he can see that everything has been built.” Pakhomov complained to me that Russia remained burdened by old stereotypes, recalling a visiting foreign official asking him, “What else do you have except vodka and bears?” He said Russia was a different place from the Soviet Union when it held the Summer Games in 1980. “Even now the goals are different,” he told me. “We want to be open to the entire world and to show the world our hospitality, our culture, our love of sport, our beauty, the cleanliness of our streets. And of course, we would like to get rid of the drivel that we have endured and is not so pleasant.”