Vladimir Putin has revamped his £1billion clifftop palace, getting rid of his pole-dancing boudoir and installing a church with a “throne” for his personal use.
The dictator, 71, was stung when investigative journalists discovered the gaudy Gelendzhik castle overlooking the Black Sea three years ago. Amid a scandal over misuse of state funds, the Kremlin claimed it belonged instead to his childhood friend Arkady Rotenburg, 72, who told reporters he was creating a sumptuous “apart-hotel”.
But Putin-watchers saw this as a smokescreen and now a new leak appears to show the changing tastes of the dictator amid an opulent makeover of the sprawling palace, which includes a 16-storey underground complex - built inside the cliff - compared with the lair of a James Bond villain.
The latest embarrassing disclosures about the palace come as Putin today is inaugurated as Russian president for the fifth time following his “victory” in a March election widely seen as rigged. Out goes the dictator's notorious striptease stage and pole-dancing hookah hall, casino, gaming room and ‘aqua disco’, for which he was mocked and shamed in the 2021 disclosure.
Possibly they are not seen in keeping with his recent drive for traditional values. Out, too, is the garish gold noticed in the previous exposé of the Putin pile. In comes a church-inside-the-palace complete - like Russian emperors used to have - with its own wooden throne for Putin, along with sacred religious icons and images.
One depicts canonised Prince Vladimir the Great - the same name as Putin, and his historical hero - who more than one thousand years ago was credited with uniting Ukraine and Russia. “This is probably the only room where the name of the real owner of this palace is directly indicated,” said the investigation by outlets FBK - formerly associated with ‘murdered’ opposition leader Alexei Navalny - and Proekt.
Epic paintings of historical war scenes have appeared - showing a heroic Russia, for example at the 1812 Battle of Borodino when Napoleon suffered grievous losses. One includes part of a prominent Kremlin painting called “Whoever comes to us with a sword will die by the sword!”
The investigation was based on disclosures from a worker on the palace redesign who slipped his FSB minders to film the gargantuan palace dripping in luxury. The probe with inside sources confirms this is no apart-hotel, as written on the paperwork, but “a palace built for Vladimir Putin”.
It revealed: “The reconstruction of the facility was carried out in the strictest secrecy. Workers were transported to work on chartered buses but were often not immediately allowed onto the premises. They arrived at the checkpoint but were forced to wait for several hours without food or water.
“Apparently someone important had arrived, they concluded. Inside, they prohibited the use of telephones.” Secret services officers constantly monitored their work. Earlier it was Navalny who exposed the scandal over the secret cliff-top residence in a film called “Palace for Putin. The story of the biggest bribe.’
The new investigation revealed: "Shortly before the end of the work, one of the builders walked around the almost-finished palace. Contrary to strict prohibitions, this man brought a phone inside and…filmed the second floor, on which there are 11 bedrooms, and then went down to the first - the one where there used to be rooms with a pole, a casino, a gaming area and an aqua discotheque.”
These had been replaced, it concluded, while the church had appeared. They found French carpets costing £87,000 “in this type of Louis XVI” and chandeliers valued at ten times this amount. Special phones were installed akin to Putin’s other palaces.
The largest bedroom overlooking the sea has a figurine of a bear. There are treatment rooms possibly to be used for “medical and cosmetic procedures”. Earlier a mining engineer who worked on the construction said it had indeed been built for the president and “there is a whole anthill in the rock under the house” including a nuclear shelter.
The subterranean maze includes a cliff face loggia overlooking the sea and a vast wine cellar. Its construction was more ingenious than Dr No’s bunker in James Bond, he said. It was "a balcony - literally a loggia hanging over the sea” built into the cliff, from which the owner can enjoy wine tasting from the palace stocks, he said.
In August 2023, General Gennady Lopyrev, 69, once close to Putin, who was the keeper of the secrets about the palace’s construction died mysteriously in jail. He suddenly became ill - gasping for breath - and was told by doctors he had previously undiagnosed leukaemia. Suspicions arose that he was poisoned just as he became eligible for parole. The general was jailed for ten years in 2017 by a military court accused of bribe-taking and illegal possession of ammunition - charges he always denied.