Does Vladimir Putin Have a Dance Dance Revolution Room in His Secret Palace? An Investigation
January 25, 2021Two weeks ago, Vladimir Putin's top critic and opposition party leader Alex Navalny returned to Russia and was subsequently jailed. The day after he was jailed, Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation released a two-hour video delving into the specifics of Putin’s apparent seaside palace. The video and website released alongside it claims the mansion, which includes eleven bedrooms, two helicopter pads, a church, and an underground hockey rink , cost $1.3 billion.
Most interesting to us, however, is a detail that came an hour and four minutes into the video, as Navalny takes viewers from Putin’s (alleged) private casino to the billiard room to the game room.
“The first thing that impresses us is that our president is no stranger to simple entertainment,” Navalny says as a 3D camera sweeps through a door, revealing a giant screen and two Dance Dance Revolution dance mats laid atop an ornate carpet. “He loves to dance. A dance machine with a huge screen is installed here.”
So, is Putin’s Dance Dance Revolution setup real? We haven’t been inside Putin’s secret palace, which has been reported on, on and off, since 2011; the figures who are said to have financed the building of what is colloquially called Putin's Palace are featured in the Panama Papers. But we looked for clues nonetheless.
First off, the palace itself is real, but Navalny’s videos rely on blueprints and architectural renderings. Aric Toler, secretary at investigative journalism site Bellingcat, said that the palace is visible on Google Earth, and that the blueprints leaked to Navalny match what's visible on the app. By comparing shots of the site over time, we can see development in some of the gardens and in parts north of the palace.
The DDR machine is also visible on these blueprints, which includes the game room and slot machines shown in the video from the Anti-Corruption Foundation.
"[The Anti-Corruption Foundation] imply that the 3D render was given to them by the architectural firm that designed it, which corresponds to the floor plans that they also received," Toler said. On the Dance Dance Revolution machine itself, Toler noted that in two different images from two different angles, the game displayed the exact same screen, which is a pretty good giveaway that the set up is a render.
Putin has no special interest in dancing or DDR, two experts on Russia told Motherboard, though Mark Galeotti, a writer and expert in Russian security, did say that Putin's daughter, Katerina Tikhonova, "is or was a competition-level acrobatic rock'n'roll dancer." A LexisNexis search for DDR and Putin did not return any relevant results. A 2014 fanfiction from Fanfiction.net does speculate at Putin's DDR skills, though in this derivative work, Putin's success as a dancer is stymied by his father Joseph Stalin.
Even if Vladimir Putin himself isn't rocking out to "Butterfly" in this seaside mansion, it's nice to imagine someone taking advantage of this proposed game room.
"There are an insane number of luxuries in the mansion that I doubt Putin will ever even think of using, let alone even go into the rooms. Probably for guests or kids of guests," Toler said.