What the palaces of Stalin, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders looked like. Photo

While Soviet citizens suffered from repression, hunger, and shortages of food and clothing, their leaders built mansions in elite resorts. General Secretaries did not deny themselves anything even during the war and poverty, bathing in luxury. In the meantime, they promoted equality for everyone in everything.

Thus, ordinary people waited for decades for their turn to get housing, living in nothing but cramped communal apartments with cockroaches. OBOZREVATEL collected photos of the luxurious estates of the Soviet rulers.

• Lenin's estates

The Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin had apartments in Europe, palaces in Petropavlovsk (Kazakhstan), and estates in Moscow. Lenin received his first luxury apartment in the Senate building in 1918. The apartment had a reception room, a meeting room, an office, a switchboard room, and a telephone room. An elevator was built especially for him, which allowed him to go up to the roof with a gazebo.

The ruler began living in the famous estate in the village of Gorki in 1917. It was his official residence. During his stay there, Lenin went hunting and traveled to Moscow in a Rolls-Royce car. Vladimir Ilyich died in Gorki in 1924.

• Stalin's summer houses (dachas)

While millions of Ukrainians were dying of hunger, Joseph Stalin managed to appropriate and build 20 state dachas in different parts of the USSR. One of his residences was in the Massandra Palace near Yalta, south of the Ukrainian Crimea.

The mansion was equipped with luxurious chandeliers, paintings, and handmade furniture. He came there quite often and gathered guests to show off the luxury of the house.

The "Blizhnyaya Dacha" (also known as Kuntsevskaya Dacha) was built by order of Stalin himself in Moscow, and it was there that the General Secretary died. The building was erected according to his personal preferences. However, the architect of the house did not please the leader, and for this he was sent to a corrective labor colony for 10 years.

The pompous dacha in Sochi has survived to this day. Its interior impresses with the use of expensive and rare woods. Dozens of bedrooms were built inside the house so that the ruler could sleep in different rooms every night for fear of assassination.

• Khrushchev's residences

Nikita Khrushchev's main residence is located in Moscow on Vorobyovy Gory (Sparrow Hills). Inside, the house is decorated with marble and expensive wood. The mansion is separated from the outside world by high walls and heavy steel gates, but the windows of the upper floors offer a unique view of the capital. The building is now owned by Putin's friend Gennady Timchenko.

Khrushchev also had a dacha in the middle of a park in Kyiv's Lukianivskyi district.

• Brezhnev's estates

Before Leonid Brezhnev became General Secretary, he and his family lived in an elite estate on Krutohirnyi Descent in Dnipro. The dacha looked like a palace from the outside, but inside the walls, floors, and furniture were made of wood. When Ukraine gained independence, a kindergarten was opened in Brezhnev's former estate.

Brezhnev's former main residence in Moscow is now owned by Putin's adviser, Igor Shuvalov, so there are no photos of the building online.

In addition, Leonid Brezhnev once had another palace in Nizhnyaya Oreanda in Crimea. It had a dining room with 100 seats, a tennis court, saunas, a gym, an indoor pool, and a 700-meter-long private beach.

• Gorbachev's residences

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife were vacationing at the state dacha in Foros. In order for Gorbachev to enjoy the best views, builders cleared the foundation on the rocks of the Crimean Mountains with explosives. The work on the marble mansion lasted for three years.

The territory even had an escalator to the sea and its own sports ground on the beach. Another building was erected nearby to serve as a cinema, sauna, and indoor pool.

In 1986, Gorbachev's Moscow residence was completed. There were three separate buildings: for the president's family, for meetings, and a separate one for guests.