Navalny's documentary is gripping because it reveals both the immensity of the tsar's wealth but also the… — John Sweeney
Navalny's documentary is gripping because it reveals both the immensity of the tsar's wealth but also the shabbiness of his soul.
Dictators murder decor like they murder people. Idi Amin's sordid bungalow, Saddam's pre-cast cement palaces in Northern Iraq, Kim Il Sung's waxwork house, I've seen them all and they smack – how can I put this diplomatically? – of Cupid Stunt. [...]
The palace estate stretches out for 70 million square metres, is owned by the FSB, fully leased until 2068 for 'research and educational activities', boasts state-of-the-art communication towers, its own gas station and boilers. There is an almighty fence to keep out the riff-raff, an amphitheatre, a secret tunnel leading from the palace to the beach, a window cut in bare rock so that the dictator can admire a sea view just like a Bond villain from his lair.
p. 208Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
His first downfall came in late 2004 when Putin sacked him. Kasyanov was considered to have been a good prime minister, but in the late nineties he was first nicknamed 'Misha Two Per Cent', a reference to the two per cent stake he allegedly took from government deals. Kasyanov says Putin himself brought up the nickname during their last meeting in December 2004: 'Remember that name if you ever decide to go over to the opposition', was Putin's threat. His second downfall was the sex tape during which the couple, as every political couple does the world over, slagged off their allies, Navalny included. Kasyanov carried on for a bit, a bird with a broken wing, but his career in Russian politics was dead.
That left only one man standing: Navalny.
p. 149
The whole point of Putin sending Navalny to Yamal was to break his spirit and within a month of arrival, he was cracking jokes about keeping warm in minus 32 degrees C inside the carcass of a hot, fried elephant. Once again, one is left thinking how much Putin must have hated him.
p. 267
Roughly a year before [his assassination], I had interviewed Nemtsov about Putin's grotesquely corrupt Winter Olympics in Sochi, asking him about the $5 billion road-rail link resort from the coast to the mountain ski resort. Nemtsov replied that: 'It would have been cheaper to have lined this road with Louis Vuitton handbags'. Before meeting Nemtsov, I had spent time with the comically stupid Putinist mayor of Sochi. He had knocked back my question about how gay Olympians would be treated in a city where the Kremlin's homophobic laws held sway by proclaiming: 'There are no gays in Sochi'. When I told Nemtsov about this, he laughed and laughed and laughed for so long we had to trim it down in the edit. He had a beautiful sense of the ridiculous and when I heard he had been shot, I burst into tears.
p. 146
