When dictators fail the taste test

From Imelda Marcos’s shoes to Muammar Qaddafi’s gold-plated pistols, often it is only when autocrats are deposed that the full extent of their profligacy is revealed and it becomes clear that while they may have run a police state, the style police were not on duty.

Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, looks at her famous shoe collection after opening the Marikina Shoe Museum in 2001. Joel Nito / AFP Photo

At the height of their power and authority, they command fear and respect. But a fallen dictator’s crimes often include not just those against humanity but also against good taste.

So it was this week, as the first street fighters tentatively made their way through the open gates of the official residence of Viktor Yanukovich, the fallen president of Ukraine.

Inside the Mezhyhirya estate, they found a private zoo filed with rare breeds of goat, a golf course and a garage full of vintage cars. Also in the grounds was a restaurant designed to look like a pirate ship, with the word “galleon” engraved on the prow.

In a country where the average wage is Dh48, such opulence was almost unimaginable.

Yet the exploitation of his country’s resources on extravagant whimsy is modest by comparison to the lifestyles of other tyrants exposed after their deposition.

As far back as the 18th century, the hungry peasants of France gazed in awe at the crystal chandeliers and silk wall hangings of Louis XVI’s palace at Versailles.

More than 100 years later, during the Russian Revolution, came the storming of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. The mob that looted the palace in October 1917 were fuelled by the some of the world’s rarest vintages they had pillaged from the cellars.

In 1977, Jean-Bedel Bokassa proclaimed himself emperor of the Central African Republic in a ceremony inspired by his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, that included a crown encrusted with diamonds estimated to be worth $5 million.

A crew from the BBC reached his former palace in the bush this month and found a swimming pool choked with algae and a rusting water slide. The ruins were guarded by army recruits who had been abandoned by their commanders and left to defend themselves against rebel forces with nothing more than wooden replica rifles.

Almost exactly a decade later, it was the turn of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, who fled the Philippines after a popular uprising prompted by allegations that the presidential election had been rigged.

Inside the Malacañan Palace, demonstrators found 15 mink coats, more than 1,000 handbags and, famously, an estimated 1,060 pairs of shoes, all belonging to Mrs Marcos. About 700 shoes later formed the centrepiece of a Marcos museum. The rest had been eaten by termites.

Two years later, the people of Romania rose up against the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who despite having an official salary of just Dh11,000 managed to construct a string of palaces in one of the poorest countries in Europe.

At the time of his death Ceausescu was in the final stages of building his vast 1,000-room “Palace of Parliament”, whose construction involved the destruction of entire districts in the capital, Bucharest.

Ceausescu’s death, by a firing squad on Christmas Day 1989, seems to indicate that the greater the extravagance, the greater the likelihood of an untimely death at the hands of those you oppressed.

American forces occupying Iraq in 2003 discovered everything from boxes of Cuban cigars and Oakley sunglasses to suitcases of uncirculated dollar bills totalling US$650 million, in a string of palaces used by Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay.

Crystal chandeliers and man-made lakes were standard fittings in the nearly 50 mansions that the US state department estimated Saddam had built since the end of the 1991 Gulf War and despite tough international sanctions. Others featured private cinemas and dolphin pools.

Uday and Qusay were killed in an assault by American forces in Mosul in July 2003. Saddam met the hangman’s noose in December 2006.

For outrageous bad taste, though, it will be hard to equal Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, whose overthrow in 2011 revealed a private world that featured fairground rides and a gold couch in the shape of a mermaid.

As looters helped themselves to everything from gold-plated pistols to racks of designer clothing, others picked through Qaddafi’s private photo albums and marvelled at the contrast with their own lives of poverty. Within weeks, Qaddafi was dead, after capture by members of a rebel militia.

Peter York, the British style guru, is the author of Dictators’ Homes: Lifestyles of the World’s Most Colourful Despots. Most residences, he says, follow three rules: make everything much too big; go for repro, for an imagined vulgarised, fake antique style; and “have as much gold as you possibly can”.

Writing in The Independent, York observes that “dictators, like flaky pop stars, install things they can never really use”, for example zoos, fairgrounds and replica galleons.

After looking at Yanukovich’s estate, he concludes it is “absolutely par for the course, which is chain hotels. The Kiev Sheraton circa 1975: put up a breezeblock and metal frame and slather it with as many cheap chandeliers and veneered panelling as you possibly can.”