Since this morning, a link to a thread on YaPlakal (a popular Russian internet forum) where photos were posted of the country estate of Russia’s top railway boss, the great state patriot Yakunin, has been making the rounds online.
There is no documentary proof that this estate really belongs to Yakunin. But the fact is that the link was taken down within three hours after it started spreading widely. Thanks to the wonderful nature of the internet, you can’t scrub photos from everywhere. Here is the text of the original post: I recently worked at Yakunin’s country estate. It’s several dozen hectares of forest near Domodedovo, where they dug their own lakes, built a “small” garage for 15 cars, a separate bay for a Maybach, and constructed one and a half kilometers (1.5 km) of underground passageways from the main house to the garage. There’s also a modest little bathhouse, 1,400 square meters in size, and the house has a full 50-meter swimming pool. All the buildings are packed with every kind of electronics. I worked on the “smart home” systems, home theaters, and other high-tech stuff. There are about 30 service staff living there alone, working in shifts. Each of them earns no less than 40,000 rubles a month. The owner himself shows up at the estate once a month, or even less often. There will be lots of photos, but very little description, because I’m not much of a writer. The quality of the material isn’t very good, since I shot some of it on a phone and some of it on whatever I had at hand. Once furniture, belongings, and paintings were brought into the house, security at the entrance started confiscating anything capable of taking pictures. Naturally, the images can’t convey all the splendor, but believe me—there’s a huge amount of valuable and interesting stuff there; the atmosphere is like a museum, damn it! And one more thing! I re-photographed many of the interiors from a magazine with 3D visualizations. The resemblance to what’s actually there is 100 percent! I had to do it that way because security at the entrance was confiscating everything that could take pictures and watching us very closely throughout the day. So, let’s begin! To start with, I’m posting a satellite photo of the estate so you can get an idea of how it fits into the landscape.
Main house:
Guest house:
Staff house:
And there were also a whole bunch of photos of various kinds of interior luxury.
Home theaters with white leather seats, mosaic-lined pools, bathhouse complexes, and other little necessities that any self-respecting head of a state company simply must have at his country estate. Perhaps the only thing especially worth mentioning is the “prayer room. The room has a ventilation system with a special microclimate for expensive icons and books. Lots of humidity, temperature, and other such settings”:
That does sound very much like Yakunin. He is well known here as a devout Orthodox Christian. Apparently he feels the need for a quiet place where he can sit and reflect on whether nanotechnology and Skolkovo (Russia’s state-backed innovation hub) might somehow help squeeze a camel through the eye of a needle and solve a few related problems along the way. As for Yakunin’s wealth, there is of course no doubt about that. The man is a dollar billionaire. It could hardly be otherwise. Yakunin is a patriot and honors tradition, and after all, Saltykov-Shchedrin (a classic Russian satirist) long ago established: In all countries, railways serve for transportation, but in our country, they serve for theft as well. Who is Yakunin to argue with Saltykov-Shchedrin? Still, we should not pin this estate on him too hastily. Photos of the houses themselves can no longer be found online. That is good. Photos of the interiors can still be found, which is bad. At least one of the interior photos was taken from the website of a design firm. Or maybe vice versa—it’s impossible to tell anymore; they’re always swiping photos from one another. It’s a large property. A lot of people must know about it. Let’s try to find some of them. Questions: Where is this property located? What are its coordinates on satellite imagery? Obviously, many people around Domodedovo should know. Does Yakunin (or his relatives) visit the property? Are there people who worked or work there? Maybe someone provided services, delivered goods, etc.? If anyone can shed light on these questions, please write to fbk@fbk.info (under strict conditions of anonymity). If you know someone who might know something about this, please forward this post to them. Thank you. Update. This is what crowdsourcing can do! The property has been found; its coordinates are 55.305121,37.745342
Well then, now we just need to find someone from the village of Akulinino. People there surely know whose estate this is. Tomorrow is Sunday. Maybe someone could drive out to Akulinino? Get some fresh air, walk along the fence, talk to the neighbors? Update 2 A correspondent for the magazine Rybak Rybaka complains that he is not being allowed into Akulinino and also reports on Yakunin’s estate:
Update 3. Once again, all glory to crowdsourcing. Now we even know exactly what kind of stone Yakunin’s estate is made of. Yakunin’s indeed. No doubt about it. Several people have already reported that the property belongs to the modest head of Russian Railways. Well, formally it belongs to who-knows-who, but in reality—to Yakunin. The limestone for the finishing work was brought in for our hero from Germany, and the granite from Kazakhstan. Presumably by rail.
Update 4 If you thought the ponds at Yakunin’s estate were dug with an ordinary excavator, you were deeply mistaken. A true servant of the people and loyal friend of Vladimir Putin could not possibly have some vulgar quarry pits on his estate. Here is a video showing how the ponds were made:
First you can see them driving under the very same barrier gate that appears in the Google photos. And in this shot, the house itself is visible too