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Everything we learnt about Putin's palace from Alexei Navalny's video

As Putin continues to deny this property is his, his opponent has put together a convincing case against the President and dished out all the details in the process

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By House & Garden | January 29, 2021 | Video

Picture: YouTube/Alexei Navalny

A few years ago, news broke that President Putin was building a palace of the scale not seen since rulers like Louis XIV and Peter the Great. The news was not well received and it was subsequently reported that the palace and vast plot of land had been sold and Putin has denied any involvement with the whole affair. However, the President's biggest opponent, Alexei Navalny, has done some very deep digging to carve out the truth and it is far bigger and far more extravagant than perhaps anyone had imagined.

On his return to Russia having recovered from a poisoning, Navalny was arrested but instructed his team to release a two hour film on YouTube, which has to date been viewed by 91.5 million people. The content of the film? An exposé about the real owner of the palace –Putin – and its true size. The plot on which Putin's palace sits is 39 times the size of Monaco – 70 million square foot – and is described by Navalny as ‘the most secret and guarded facility in Russia, without exaggeration. This is not a country house, not a dacha, not a residence - this is a whole city, or rather, a kingdom. It has impregnable fences, its own port, its own guards, a church, its own access control, a no-fly zone and even its own border checkpoint. It is an actual separate state within Russia.’

The palace itself is the main attraction, a vast marble, gold, stuccoed, colonnaded Italianate affair that has had to be rebuilt due to a mould problem from poor planning the first time around – meaning a fortune in marble was thrown out and new marble put back in. Inside, there is an entire spa floor, with a swimming pool, saunas, hammam, steam rooms, massage room and an outdoor smaller circular pool bar. There's a music parlour, three different games rooms for toy car racing (the President's favourite past time), dance machines, slot machines, billiards and more. In a country where gambling is illegal, Putin's palace has his own private casino, as well as a hookah bar – another favourite leisure activity – complete with a pole dancing pole. The super rich enjoy a home cinema, but this palace has an actual theatre, with a bar outside for interval drinks, as well as a separate cocktail lounge elsewhere in the property.

The details which Alexei Navalny found on the palace are extensive; a contractor gave him a blueprint of the estate, which even plots the furniture with SKU codes so that Navalny's team were able to do a digital reconstruction complete with all the furniture and take viewers inside the closely-guarded palace. He also used drone footage to get a sense of what else Putin has had built there, which turns out to be quite extensive. An underground ice hockey rink, two helipads, an enormous guest house, a church, wineries, ampitheatre, oyster farms and on the list goes.

The palace and surrounding lands are subject to a no-fly zone overhead, boats have to go a mile out to see to pass by the cape and the fence surrounding the property means no one can see the slightest detail. The two hour film is quite an undertaking, but skip to 25 minutes in for the first overview of the property, then on to 59 minutes for the full interior reconstruction of the palace. Putin maintains that the palace does not belong to him.

Written by Charlotte McCaughan-Hawes.

This article originally appeared on House & Garden UK.