Until last November, Elizaveta “Luiza” Krivonogikh–exact age unknown, but reportedly born in 2003–had a pouty, moderately bling-y Instagram feed much like those of many thousands of nouveau-riche young ladies from around the world who have been kitted out by their parents with flashy designer wear and selfie sticks. They—the children of the moneyed and/or ruling elite from Guinea Bissau to Tokyo to Los Angeles–are members of a global cult that poses to become, in a foggy, inchoate-adolescent way, pop-culture icons, or at least leading acolytes thereof in thrall to various fashion brands. Elizaveta Krivonogikh was one of this young phalanx from St. Petersburg. But Luiza brings a little something extra to her posse. Her father is reported to be Russia's apparent president-for-life, Vladimir Putin.
That the Russian president would have what in the West might be called “a blended family” is not earth-shattering news. He's well and truly divorced from his former wife and the mother of his two older daughters, Lyudmila Shkrebneva, and is as free as any bird who has ruled the Kremlin for two decades can be, which may or may not be all that free. Ironically, the Russian authorities' arrest of crucial opposition figure Alexei Navalny after he stepped off the plane in Moscow from his five-months convalescence in Berlin from Novichok poisoning, and the resultant, massive demonstrations, have proceeded to toss Elizaveta's Instagram feed, along with the identities of several other alleged members of Putin’s extended family, into the blaze of international scrutiny as never before.
More demonstrations are planned. Navalny remains in custody. The situation hangs in a fiery balance, and it's only going to get hotter for everybody, very much including for the seemingly rock-solid Russian administration.
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On Luiza Krivonogikh’s Instagram feed, shots from which were strewn last fall liberally through various publications in Europe after she was outed, Ms. Krivonogikh had posted a shot of herself in her in her jeans, with, significantly, the double-headed Romanov eagle embroidered on the right rear pocket; another shot of herself as she sat on a bench in a travel moment in, one assumed from the caption, London; and a third cropped shot of her crossed ankles in a pair of presumably pricey jet-black gladiator-strapped stillettos, positioned improbably next to a fancy bathtub, and at least one, for Instagram anyway, obligatory smoky-eyed selfie.
The point is a well-known one, namely, that these epigrammatic mise-en-scene moments on this particular platform work as a pretend-grownup narrative frame, prosecuted with great success by actual grown-up actors, singers, politicians, as well as by teeny-boppers such as Elizaveta.
So far, so good. From what has been reported in Russia, Ms Krivonogikh's Instagram feed was breathtaking only in its ordinariness. Except: The Instagram account was led and fed under an assumed name.
One generation above these adolescent self-projections, the biography of Elizaveta's mom, Svetlana Krivonogikh, was attracting a more technical level of attention from an enterprising collective of Russian journalists known as Проект (translation: Project). Last November, they published their deeper spade work into the colorful and very well-heeled life of Svetlana Krivonogikh, which included, as a by-product, an analysis of her daughter's curious Instagram feed. To the Project journalists, the elder Ms. Krivonogikh had become a person of interest in the same way that, for the past three decades of Russia's pronounced robber-baron phase of capitalist exercise, many Russians of largely opaque professional and personal qualifications suddenly came into staggering fortunes.
Luiza Krivonogikh's mother Svetlana, now 47, a former cleaning lady from extremely modest St. Petersburg roots, had reportedly experienced, over time, a dramatic uptick in financial prospects in the late 1990s and early Aughts, coming into possession of a string of luxury flats, a minority stake in Bank Rossiya, a yacht, a majority stake in the Igora ski resort favored by the current president of the country, and a multipurpose commercial building in downtown St. Pete. All in all, the Krivonogikh fortune was estimated by the Project journalists to be in the range of 7.7 billion rubles, or about $100 million.
One other detail: Svetlana's daughter Elizaveta, who was born in 2003, has no identifiable father, according to the Project journalists. But her given patronymic — the official middle name in Russia, signifying the first name of her father — is Vladimirovna. As Project published its piece, Elizaveta Vladimirovna Krivonogikh's social media sites were reportedly stripped of shots showing her face, which, from the screenshots published in November, strongly resembles that of her putative father. Absent a DNA test or a statement from one of her parents, none of which is likely forthcoming, we'll just have to live with the winnowing paternity ambiguity in Luiza's case.
For the Kremlin's part, the Project journalists report the following hilariously terse response: "Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that this was the first time he had heard the name Krivonogikh."
As with much out of the Kremlin, it's difficult to put a quotient of truth on the statement. It stands a chance of being true, but it would mean that Mr. Peskov would have to have wholly missed last November's publication of Svetlana Krivonogikh's profile by Project, although the publication made news within the country. Far likelier, from the Kremlin's point of view, is that Ms. Krivonogikh is simply a bit player in the distant past. The settlement of the assets, as documented via Project, has long been stamped, sealed, and delivered. To the fraught extent that they were together during the late Nineties and early Aughts, according to the rumor mill, Svetlana Krivonogikh and Vladimir Putin "broke up" some years back.
Despite its splash in Russia, the Project investigation garnered scant attention in the West last November, obsessed as it was with the then-uncertain aftermath of the US elections.
Enter Alexei Navalny, who has not been idle during his months-long convalescence in Berlin from his Novichok poisoning last summer in Russia, to give the narrative of Svetlana and Luiza Krivonogikh and Luiza's storied, putative father some push. As soon as he physically could, Navalny and his team set to work producing his two-hour video documentary, released on January 19, detailing the labyrinthine maze of finances surrounding a massive Black Sea villa that, according to Navalny's paper trail, has been built by a network of oligarchs at the behest of the Russian president. To date, the video has drawn some 100 million-plus views, with more clearly en route.
The production is a bold, rollercoaster affair, laced with satire and occasional bursts of shtick, but there is no mistaking Navalny's seriousness within his locomotive-like delivery as presenter. He opens the film by narrating outside Putin's former flat in a prefabricated concrete apartment building, perched just a short walk from the cliffs over the River Elbe in Dresden, not far from the former Soviet Army barracks and the KGB villa in which he, Putin, worked from 1984-89. In a riveting "by-the-time-you-are-watching-this" segment, Navalny explains that the video will only be released after his return to Russia, so that its import cannot be undermined by the accusation that he, Navalny, released it while in the (relative) safety of Germany.
Put another way, the video is Navalny's opening move in this first round of post-Novichok chess that the opposition stalwart is playing against his nemesis, and this time, Navalny's message is, it's going to get personal. Navalny's second pointed joust before returning to Moscow was to scam an FSB agent belonging to the "cleaning team" — who, post-poisoning, worked on removing traces of the poison from Navalny's clothes — into revealing in a recorded phone call that Navalny was poisoned via an application of Novichok to his underwear. Portentously, Navalny has entitled his documentary production Дворец для Путина, which translates as: Palace For Putin.
After identifying several of Putin's cohort from his salad days in Dresden — and in the newly-renamed St. Petersburg of the early Nineties, as the young former KGB officer joined the mayor's office — Navalny's production diagrams the main players as they cooperate with Putin for lucrative city and state contracts. He then proceeds to take us on an actual (drone) tour and a virtual (3D) tour of the villa in question on its bluff above the Black Sea.
This central segment of the production is what we might term the prurient, real-estate-porn of the documentary. Navalny has a detailed set of plans from the construction workers, and, from the Italian manufacturers, images of pretty much every piece of the custom-made furniture, so, his observations on the gargantuan 190,424-square-foot villa, its outbuildings and well fortified 168-acre grounds on the promontory overlooking the sea are mindbogglingly precise. Outsized, over-gilt, and resolutely vulgar in execution, the property is on the far side of satire, festooned with emblems of the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs, its faux-French garden allees lined with sculptures. There are, Navalny notes, no less than forty gardeners tasked with maintaining the grounds. There is an in-house casino, a vineyard, a jolly in-house hookah bar with an even jollier stripper pole, and a neighboring estate with further vineyards. The surrounding 27 square miles is, according to Navalny, owned by the Russian state security apparatus, the FSB, leased to the corporation that owns the villa.
Maximizing the view, we learn that the villa itself is in the commanding position on the promontory closest to the sea, but, spread out on the acreage around and behind it are the heating plant, a house for the estate managers, the communications mast, housing for the construction workers, a 26,000-square-foot "Tea House," which doubles as a guest house, a tunnel down through the bluff to the beach, and of course, dual helipads. There had been three helipads, Navalny notes, but one was taken out and replaced with a grass-covered mound. Navalny and his videographers found a satellite picture of that patch of ground as it was opened during construction. Underneath the mound is a full-sized underground hockey rink.
At key points in his narration — again, as part of the chess move that the story of the villa forms for Navalny — Navalny resolutely refuses to pull punches, elevating the imagery to the ultimate, personal level against his antagonist. In the post-Novichok-poisoning time frame, it's all ad hominem now.
"Finally, looking inside," he tells us, before taking us on the 3-D gilt-furniture odyssey through the the main house, "you will understand that the president of Russia is mentally ill."
Not many people inside Russia would utter such a sentence. It's at moments like this that — knowing from the get-go that Navalny is in Russia, in custody, and that the demonstrations for his release are enormous and ongoing — that the production rises far above a "gotcha" account of a massive real-estate boondoggle and becomes a different, more weaponized joust.
For his part, Vladimir Putin laconically professed only to have seen parts of Navalny's production, which he termed a "compilation" and a "montage" before declaring it "boring." According to the BBC, he told a group of students via video, ironically, as he was warning them not to attend the many pro-Navalny demonstrations, that "Nothing that is listed there as my property belongs to me or my close relatives, and never did." Arguably, he's telling the truth. The vast complex is not, according to Navalny, privately owned.
The question of the villa's ownership took a timely turn with the sudden January 30 announcement, from Russian billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, that he bought the property two years ago. Mr. Rotenberg, a childhood friend and judo partner of the president's, is a construction magnate who engages in large infrastructure projects, and who has been under sanctions since the Crimean invasion in 2014. Given the fact that the Navalny video production and its maker remain a blazing flash point for demonstrations against Putin and the regime, Mr. Rotenberg's announcement is considered especially well-timed as a parrying propaganda blow.
Mr. Rotenberg's announcement — aptly, given the Navalny video's current lightning-rod role in Russian politics — was made via video on Telegram's Mash channel. The statement managed to be both oddly worded and laconic. Mr. Rotenberg did not seem to feel the need to back up his claim by supplying any sort of evidence on camera.
He said: "Now it will no longer be a secret, I am the beneficiary. There was a rather complicated facility, there were a lot of creditors, and I managed to become the beneficiary."
The denouement of Navalny's documentary is no less entertaining, and no less ad hominem. At approximately the 1-hour-40-minute mark, he begins a section called "The Women," in which Svetlana and Elizaveta Krivonogikh both appear, followed by Mr. Putin's rumored current partner, the former gymnast and media manager Alina Kabaeva, who is widely assumed to be the mother of a further Putin brood, numbering possibly four, or two, depending upon which set of rumors one chooses to believe. Whatever the number, the Kabaeva children have been kept under deep cover and none has ever been publicly confirmed, including the recent, rumored pair of twin boys.
The jury's out on whether any of that offspring math is right, and Ms. Kabaeva, for her part, is as mum as is her predecessor Svetlana Krivonogikh on the subject of children or their possible paternity. But, counting his elder two daughters from his marriage — Maria and Katerina, born in Moscow, and Dresden, respectively — and counting Luiza Krivonogikh of St. Pete as legitimate, the Kabaeva children would bring Putin's (rumored) lifetime stats into the superdaddy echelon with a head count of five, or possibly seven.
Given the wattage of the klieg lights focused on her for the last three months, especially in the days since the Navalny video has dropped, young Elizaveta Vladimirovna "Luiza" Krivonogikh has been demonstrating grit. She did not resign from Instagram after her initial outing, surprising even the Project journalists who found her. Now, as a result of her second, far more intensely public cameo in the Navalny documentary — the video has pulled well north of 100 million and is going strong — she is massively trolled, according to Project. The nom de guerre on the feed no longer provides even the barest shred of protection — she has a reported 91,000 followers. But she has doubled down, refusing to budge and, in fact, now follows Navalny himself, putting herself at a tremendous disadvantage among his very vocal cadre. Admire her or not, if it is she who is still responsible for her Instagram presence now, this is one tough girl.
Perhaps, it's just in her DNA.