Kim Jong Un appears to be summering aboard an 80-meter luxury yacht with a pool and water slides off North Korea, the latest chapter in a grim tradition of strongmen living large while ordinary people live under their rule.
Four large ships were spotted this summer in the coastal city of Wonsan, a playground for North Korea’s well-to-do and for the ruling family. Satellite images show an 80-meter vessel fitted with a 50-meter swimming pool and several water slides. The craft is believed to belong to Kim and his family.
The BBC has estimated the largest vessel at around £75 million. Kim also has a 29-meter Princess yacht valued at about £5.2 million. Daily Mail reporting notes The Telegraph’s account that the yachts are believed to be used by Kim’s family during the holidays, with the big boat seen repeatedly this year off the country’s coast.
Wonsan is not an outlier. Authoritarian rulers have long built private retreats far from the daily grind of the systems they ran. The pattern is old, cross-border, and stubborn.
Josip Broz Tito, the Yugoslav president and leader of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, spent summer months at Vila Bled on Lake Bled in Slovenia. He ruled for almost four decades. The residence is now a luxury hotel.
Tito hosted state visits there and took guests hunting in the surrounding national parks. Visitors included Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, King Hussein of Jordan, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and North Korean President Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Un’s grandfather.
Even in the Cold War, the guest list mixed ideology with comfort. The villa offered both.
Joseph Stalin used dachas as summer residences and kept five holiday homes. He reportedly would not tell officials which one he would use. All five stayed prepared.
His favorite villa sat in Gagra, overlooking the Black Sea. He also frequented properties near Sochi. A dacha at Lake Ritsa in Abkhazia, an autonomous region of Georgia, was built in 1947, hidden deep in forest and painted green. The Sochi site later operated as a museum.
Secrecy and redundancy were the point. The leader who demanded total control over a country also demanded total control over his own itinerary.
Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena ruled Romania from 1965 to 1989. They spent about a month each year at a private lodge on the Black Sea coast in Neptun, an upmarket seaside resort. Regular black-goat hunting trips took them to Villa Paltinu in the Carpathian Mountains.
Snagov Palace mattered more. The lakeside villa was converted into a luxury retreat. Ceausescu spent seven months of the year there. In 1989, the couple fled to Snagov Palace shortly before they were deposed and killed.
A 1978 photo placed them at Snagov during the years when the palace doubled as a presidential residence under the communist regime. The final flight there closed the circle: the same retreat that cushioned their rule became a last stop before the end.
Reports have pointed to secret mountain retreats in Siberia for Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Last year it emerged he had jetted off to the Altai Courtyard retreat. The complex has been described as including “blood baths” from stag blood. He was also pictured on a retreat in 2013.
The details are thinner than the older European compounds. The theme is familiar: distance, privacy, and facilities ordinary citizens will never see.
Saddam Hussein had a holiday home above Grasse near Cannes called Mas de St Croix, a stone villa later long abandoned and falling into disrepair. His half brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, owned a property on billionaire’s row in Cannes. Saddam’s men visited it frequently. It was not confirmed that Saddam himself stayed there.
The geography says enough. While Iraq sat under his grip, family-linked real estate reached the French Riviera.
Benito Mussolini spent the majority of his holidays in Italy. He favored Riccione on the Adriatic coast and Villa Mussolini for summer. For winter sports he visited Monte Terminillo. He was photographed skiing shirtless there in 1937.
Other stops included the Grand Hotel Feltrinelli on Lake Garda and the Hotel Campo Imperatore in the Apennines. The image-making was part of the lifestyle. So was the network of comfortable Italian destinations.
Former Ugandan president Idi Amin loved safari. His private retreat sat at Pakuba Lodge in Murchison Falls National Park. Legend held that he spent much more time at Pakuba than at the official presidential residence in Kampala.
The lodge became a State Lodge and welcomed his inner circle and international guests. Ruins can still be visited. Bizarre Globe Hopper has described the site and Amin’s use of it. The contrast with Kampala was the story: the formal seat of power versus the preferred escape.
Kim’s Wonsan flotilla, the 80-meter yacht with the long pool and water slides, the smaller Princess craft, the repeated sightings this year, sits in that same tradition. Tito had the lake. Stalin had five prepared dachas. The Ceausescus had Snagov for most of the calendar. Putin has mountain compounds. Saddam’s circle reached Cannes. Mussolini had the Adriatic and the Apennines. Amin had the park.
None of this required a public vote. None of it depended on a free press asking who paid for the pool, the hunting lodge, or the Riviera stone villa. The ships off Wonsan are a current snapshot of an old arrangement: rulers who answer to almost no one, vacationing on terms almost no one else can match.
Absolute power still books the best rooms, and the biggest boats.
