Palace in Wonderland

“Putin’s palace is a toy—a gigantic Lego project of a deranged, obsessive mind. In his film, Navalny stresses that some of the most absurd elements of the project—such as a seven-hundred-euro toilet brush for a bathroom in one of the vineyard houses on the outskirts of the palace complex—serve no practical function; they were placed there in case Putin ever has the occasion to acquaint himself with that implement in that particular room in that particular corner of an estate the size of a small European country. In fact, the whole project was built not for pleasure, and certainly not for show, but to satisfy some insatiable fantasy of wealth. Putin will never sit on the twenty-six-thousand-dollar leather couch or dine at the fifty-thousand-dollar table.” The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen with a very interesting look at Putin’s palace and the mind of a dictator. Putin’s Unchanging, Unthinking Response to Alexey Navalny.