Vladimir Putin’s birthday picture

John Borstlap says:

There is a special shop for white dictator piano’s in St Petersburg on the Nevski Prospect 666, produced by Input Harmonia Inc., which was specially set-up by Stalin in 1937 and has florished since. After the fall of the Soviet Union their market drastically changed from inland towards foreign costumers, and the only piano they sold to a Russian over the last decennia was, indeed, the one for Mr Putin. But everywhere in the world the Input Harmonia pianos are popular, in spite of the high prices, and not only with dictators, also politicians with powerful ambitions have a profound desire to possess one. African dictators get them delivered with exclusively black keys (still keeping the white frame!), South African ministers in the Apartheid era got them with exclusively white keys, and Chinese leader Mr Xi has a pentatonic one with only the black keys, the white ones being considered a western imperialist invention. Khadaffi had an Input Harmonia grand piano with golden keyboard, an instrument enlarged to 5 meters, with an extra keyboard in silver at the back side but without a string frame inside, because he used to sleep in it in his desert tent, closing the lid when the occasional rain shower choose his abode.

The custom stems from Hitler who used to lay down under the instrument while he forced a famous pianist to play Wagner arrangements, during which he suffered fits of extasy.