Every totalitarian regime leaves behind palaces filled with gold, works of art and obscenely expensive furniture after its fall. But why do dictators, tyrants and other authoritarian leaders love luxury and kitsch so much? Political scientist Klim Bakulin (pseudonym) talks about the wildest dwellings of former top officials, what these households have in common and what political conclusions we can draw from palace walks.

Sergey Karpov is a director and co-founder of the documentary studio pole.media - a research laboratory in which anthropologists, sociologists and documentarians spent two years understanding what a feeling of home is. Oyat Shukurov is a famous Russian young architect who built the building of the National Library of the Republic of Tatarstan, a former teacher at MARCH and the editor-in-chief of the architectural samizdat “Abraxas”.

David Lynch. Collage On January 15, David Lynch died, one of the most important directors in the history of cinema, an author who was loved by everyone: critics, cinephiles, and the mass audience of the Twin Peaks series. In the summer of 2024, Lynch announced that he had been diagnosed with emphysema and could no longer leave his home. He died after leaving his home due to wildfires in Los Angeles. Lynch was 78 years old. Film critic Andrei Kartashov recalls him for Republic-Weekly.

One of the most terrible words in the dictionary of any language is “genocide,” that is, the deliberate, deliberate extermination of a population. This word is written into history books, politicians and propaganda use it for their own purposes, everyone knows this word. Few people know the term “urbicide”.

Hello, my name is Maxim Zagovora*. I'm the editor of the Republic-Weekly. This is the eighth issue of the magazine. It seems that modern man - in the broadest sense, that is, not even a person, but humanity - still had a favorite director. His name was David Lynch. There have been and remain many great ones, several geniuses, but the beloved one, well, there is only one.

On December 30, Republic-Weekly published a text by musician and activist Kirill Medvedev* about his experience of leaving Russia and subsequent return. Journalist Rimma Polyak wanted to respond to this publication, but not to argue with it, but to tell her own story of re-emigration. Polyak left Moscow long before the war, repressions and Putin’s presidency - in 1996, and returned before the onset of the 21st century. Now she continues to live in Russia. Here is her story.

Director Masha Chernaya and Milyutinsky squat For more than 30 years, in the center of Moscow, not far from the Chistye Prudy metro station, there has been the Milyutinsky squat - a large commune of underground artists, musicians, directors, as well as labor migrants and so-called semi-criminal and criminal elements. Almost every day there are festivals, exhibitions, concerts, illegal fights, brawls and drinking bouts.