The video of the Russian leader\u2019s $1bn secret palace reveals his terrible taste as well as his corruption<\/p>\n
Hero of the week, at the front of an exceptionally competitive field \u2013 the 22-year-old inauguration poet Amanda Gorman, the health workers who have been heroes for almost a year \u2013 has to be the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Not only did he voluntarily return to the country where he was almost killed by poisoning, but he marked his immediate arrest by getting his team to release the most politically devastating home makeover show<\/a> of all time.<\/p>\n The unwilling recipient of his Kevin McCloud treatment was President Vladimir Putin, the man who conceivably had something to do with Navalny\u2019s poisoning and imprisonment, who will be riled beyond measure by the film. It states that money skimmed from the purchase of medical equipment (among other sources) paid for a $1bn, 18,000 sq metre Italianate secret palace on a clifftop Black Sea estate several times the size of Monaco. Through the detailed use of satellite and drone footage, snaps by building workers and architectural drawings, the film brings to your screen the complex\u2019s tsarist eagles, its underground ice-hockey rink, its purple pole-dancing venue, its private theatre, its room for toy car racing, its \u00a340,000 side table with a built-in bar. As Lanfranco Cirillo<\/a>, the palace\u2019s hitherto obscure architect, has rightly said: \u201cThere is a big difference between an expensive home and a classy, elegant home.\u201d<\/p>\n