Ilya Varlamov: "The Last King of Mari El"
“To be honest, I admire this man. A romantic, a madman, the last king of Mari El, a dictator, delightful, extraordinary, unsurpassed... I don’t know how to describe him to you. A man of enormous ambition, who, by the will of fate, found himself in the cage of Russian reality. Leonid Igorevich was clearly born in the wrong place and at the wrong time. He should be a Saudi prince or an African dictator. There he would have more opportunities for self-expression.