In a documentary posted online, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny alleges wide-scale corruption on the part of Russian president Vladimir Putin, including the building of a £950 million palace on the Black Sea coast
Who’s Alexei Navalny?
According to the Wall Street Journal he’s “the man Putin fears the most”,. A former lawyer, Navalny picked up the mantle of activist shareholder, anti-corruption campaigner and blogger in the 2010s, a decade in which he was regularly arrested, tried, jailed, and assaulted. In August last year his opponents went one step further and poisoned him with what has since been identified as a nerve agent from the Novichok family of biological weapons. He was evacuated to Germany where he recuperated and where he recorded A Palace For Putin: The Story Of The World’s Biggest Bribe, a near-two hour online expose of what Navalny alleges is wholesale corruption on the part of the Russian president. Released on Navalny’s You Tube channel on January 19 in Russian with English subtitles, it has since racked up over 86 million views.
Where is Navalny now?
Navalny himself returned to Russia from Germany on January 17 and was immediately arrested. Two days later the film was released and called for a day of protest to be held on January 23. This duly happened in cities across Russia and resulted in the arrests of thousands of demonstrators, Navalny’s wife among them. Navalny himself has been jailed 30 days at which point he will likely be sent to prison for a parole violation relating to his previous misdemeanours. In some quarters he is now being billed as Russia’s Nelson Mandela.
And what is this about a palace?
Navalny’s documentary includes a great deal of detail about a dacha near the resort city of Gelendzhik, though dacha is a cute term for this monstrous Italianate palace which covers nearly 18,000 square metres. The building is known as the Residence at Cape Idokopas and the estate it sits on is said to be 39 times the size of Monaco (though unlike Monaco it doesn’t have its own football team). In his film Navalny goes into close detail about the money trail he claims leads back to Vladimir Putin and which means he is, essentially, the owner. A Kremlin spokesperson has countered by saying the Russian president has no palaces.
It sounds like a des-res fit for a king, whoever owns it ...
It is. Pictures of the lush interior were leaked during construction in 2011 but Navalny’s film has new material including drone shots and floorplans. Among the features the Residence is alleged to boast are a pair of helipads (because one is never enough), a tea-room, an underground ice palace (whatever that is), a church, a casino and even a strip club. But it’s the £580 Italian toilet brush in the plush marble bathroom which has really grabbed the imagination: many of the tens of thousands of Russians who took to the streets at the weekend turned up brandishing much cheaper plastic versions of the same. The act made the point perfectly.
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