‘It is size that matters. It’s all down to boys’ toys, surrounding yourself with ever more super-luxuries. You have to remember that all these guys know each other from the 1990s and it’s a man’s world; they compete with each other by showing off. The ladies go to a restaurant with the latest bag, but the boys do it with boats and planes. The guys are very competitive and ruling and one of the ways of beating the competition is to have something that is bigger and better than anyone else’s’
- Valerie Manokhina
THE FIRST ITEM ON THE LIST of ‘must-have toys’ for serious members of the Billionaire’s Club is the private jet. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the 1980s international tycoons were content with the corporate jet. Today, despite their massive running costs in an age of high oil prices, the super-rich buy their own. You can see why. There is guaranteed privacy, the ability to bypass the world’s increasingly congested hubs, and no baggage restrictions. And then there is the exclusive access to 5,000 airports - rather than the 500 suitable for commercial carriers and mere mortals.
Most London-based oligarchs soon acquired their own jet, including Boris Berezovsky, Evgeny Shvidler, and Oleg Deripaska. Most got by with one. Not Roman Abramovich. He was once content with a £40 million Boeing 737 - expensive enough to take him into the premier league of jet owners - but by 2006, he had added two more to his collection: a Dassault Falcon 900; and the crown jewel among private jets, a personalized Boeing 767 he calls the the ‘Bandit’. He is in elite company: there are believed to be only a dozen privately owned 767s in the world.
Both Boeings are kept at Farnborough Airport, only thirty minutes’ flying time from Battersea heliport and Fyning Hill, where he also keeps a brace of helicopters. One of them, a large, orange £6 million Sikorsky, has been sound-proofed so that Abramovich can watch videos and listen to DVDs in the passenger cabin. It is one of only five in the UK, three of which belong to the Metropolitan Police. The cost of running a jet does not stop at its purchase, however. Abramovich spent some £10 million equipping the interior of the ‘Bandit’ and even added missile-jamming technology similar to that used on the US Presidential aircraft, Air Force One. Originally designed to seat 360 people, the new airborne toy was finished in walnut, mahogany, and gold and fitted with every possible luxury: a gym, bathrooms, and plasma-screen TVs. Irina is said to have bought the cabin’s crockery at Thomas Goode in Mayfair.
Each jet requires two crews consisting of a pilot, co-pilot, and two air hostesses. The cost over and above fuel and maintenance will run to several million pounds a year. Not that Abramovich doesn’t put them to good use: in November 2003 he flew in 100 Russian friends to watch Chelsea play at home.
Not that long ago, most of the super-rich would have been content with renting a yacht for the summer, but today the super-yacht has become the next ultimate indulgence; an apparently mandatory status symbol that often turns out to be even more expensive than the jet. But, as with jets, even yachts in the super-league come with their own hierarchy, based on speed, power, luxury, and, above all, size.
Initially, Abramovich seemed content with his two relatively modest yachts - Stream and Sophie’s Choice - both bought from Berezovsky in 1999. But it was not long before yachting, or owning yachts, became an obsession. By 2008, nobody could match his ‘personal fleet’. In early 2003 he paid an estimated £50 million for the 370-foot Le Grand Bleu, one of the highest-tech boats afloat. The prestigious vessel requires a crew of sixty-five and carries a large aquarium, an arsenal of tenders, and water toys, including a 22-metre sailing yacht, two 60-knot Buzzi sports boats, and a landing craft to carry a 4x4 Land Rover. The boat leapfrogged Abramovich overnight into the ranks of the super-yacht owners, up there with Microsoft’s Paul Allen, with Oracle founder and racing yachtsman Larry Ellison, and with Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
You might think that owning one of the world’s most impressive super-yachts would be enough even for an oligarch, but a few months later in 2003, in conditions of the utmost secrecy, Abramovich completed another deal, one that propelled him into the ‘mega-yacht’ league. In October 2003 he took possession of Pelorus, which, at 377 feet, made it the tenth-largest private yacht in the world. The boat had been commissioned by a Saudi Arabian businessman, Sheikh Modhassan, but Abramovich spotted it and made the Saudi a multi-million-pound offer he couldn’t refuse.
The yacht, built by the leading German yacht-builders Lürssen, at its Rendsburg yard on the Kiel Canal, is the work of two internationally renowned British designers, Tim Heywood and Terence Disdale. After a major refit, it is the epitome of luxury. As Disdale described the design, ‘We try to do beach house now rather than penthouse - lots of natural materials like rattan, leather, and stone instead of marble. It’s nickel taps instead of gold.’ It has a swimming pool with an artificial current, a spa pool, and an owner’s cabin with 180-degree panoramic views and a private deck. The boat comes with top-of-the range engineering. Its six decks can accommodate twenty guests, attended by a crew of forty-two, and has a range of 6,000 nautical miles and a top speed of 20 knots. As well as the bullet-proof glass and a missile-detection system, it also has two helicopters and a submarine.
The deal may have been done in top secrecy, but it was only a month before yacht-watchers spotted Abramovich aboard his new acquisition on his way to Italy to watch Chelsea beat Lazio in the European Champions League. Photographs were helpfully posted on www.yachtspotter.com, which charts the movements of the world’s classiest boats. The secret was out.
After acquiring Pelorus, Abramovich bought two more yachts. In 2006 he took delivery of Ecstasea, also designed by Disdale, who introduced a Chinese theme with lots of bamboo. At 282 feet, it is the only one of his ‘fleet’ that he personally commissioned. Built in conditions of extreme secrecy under the codename ‘Project 790’, it is the most stylish of his boats, is propelled by five engines, has a top speed of 35 knots, and cost £70 million. Next came the smallest and fastest of his personal fleet: Sussurro. Small it may be, but there is nothing basic about the boat. It was once lent to Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard as a reward for being voted the club’s player of the year in the 2004-5 season. ‘We had ten staff, including a chef, five fantastic bedrooms, and five-star food,’ said Lampard. ‘Then you are pulling up in St Tropez and you feel half-embarrassed. I was absolutely blown away by all the facilities.’1
In November 2006 Abramovich gave away Le Grande Bleu to Evgeny Shvidler. As a result, Shvidler - who already owned the £28 million Olympia - jumped into the two super-yacht category. But a top oligarch is not easily satisfied. Rivalry among the super-rich goes back centuries, and owning the world’s biggest yacht seemed to become something of an obsession for the Russians. To the delight of builders and designers everywhere, they started to commission bigger and ever-more luxurious ones every year - as ever, in conditions of the utmost secrecy.
According to Valerie Manokhina, this infatuation with possessions such as yachts is down to the Russian male’s obsession with competition: ‘It is size that matters. It’s all down to boys’ toys, surrounding yourself with ever more super-luxuries. You have to remember that all these guys know each other from the 1990s and it’s a man’s world; they compete with each other by showing off. The ladies go to a restaurant with the latest bag, but the boys do it with boats and planes. The guys are very competitive and one of the ways of beating the competition is to have something that is bigger and better than anyone else’s.’ Some question the claim that it is about the pleasure of sailing and the sea. ‘When a yacht is over 328 feet, it’s so big that you lose the intimacy, said Tork Buckley, editor of The Yacht Report. ‘On the other hand, you’ve got bragging rights. No question that’s a very strong part of the motivation.’
Abramovich is only too aware of what one industry figure describes as the ‘battle for size’. In 2006 conscious that his position in the rankings was slipping as other multi-billionaires commissioned ever-larger yachts, he ordered yet two more vessels. One was a 120-metre boat with lots of toys to replace Le Grande Bleu. The other, Eclipse, built by the German shipyard Blohm & Voss, was due for delivery in 2009. It is said that this boat will be the last word in luxury and, for an owner obsessed with security, will also come with heat-and-motion sensors to detect intruders and missile-detector systems. Abramovich has also commissioned a 65-foot Nomad 1000 submarine, which will dock on Eclipse. This is smaller than his other submarine, a 116-foot Seattle 1000, which cost £13 million to buy and costs £1 million a year to run.
Eclipse’s cost, according to one well-placed insider, will be in excess of £300 million, making it by far the most expensive boat ever commissioned. At an estimated 160 metres, it is one and a half times the length of a football pitch and, unless someone else gets there before him, will easily catapult Abramovich into first place.
By 2009, Admiral Abramovich will have five boats, four of them in the mega- or super-class league, and two submarines. Why he needs a private navy bigger than some entire nations’ has been a source of much industry speculation. One head of a major charter firm described it as ‘a nonsense; he doesn’t need that many. That’s what you do when you’ve got everything; you’ve already got the super-yacht, the amazing ski chalet in Aspen, you’ve got a Gulfstream. You have to go one step further, get a bigger yacht, get a Boeing. Next it will be an Airbus.’ Another industry insider commented, ‘It’s clear. It’s to upstage everyone else. Nobody needs a boat that size.’ And one broker said it was to have ‘a boat available at a moment’s notice in every major yachting location - the Med, the Caribbean, South America, and the Pacific’.
Of course, a fleet of private jets, helicopters, and yachts ensures he can meet anyone anywhere at short notice and never needs to miss a Chelsea game. On one occasion he travelled to Stamford Bridge via helicopter and plane from one of his yachts off Alaska. But the fleet is also motivated by the need for asset diversification: by transferring cash into assets via SPVs in different offshore jurisdictions all over the world, his wealth is protected from sequestration and seizure.
On the road Abramovich’s fleet contains top-performance cars, among them two customized bomb-proof Mercedes Maybach 62 limousines and a £1 million Ferrari FXX racing car, one of only thirty produced. In the five years after buying Chelsea, his capital outlay on property, jets, yachts, and cars alone would have exceeded £1 billion. The annual cost of running his yachts, his homes, and his jets alone would have easily topped £100 million. And then there is his expenditure on football. Its accounts in 2007 to 2008 showed that Chelsea carried debts of £736 million, more than £500 million of which was owed to Abramovich in a series of loans after he had bought the club.
Spending on this scale would be beyond any but about one hundred people on the planet, but it will barely have dented Abramovich’s fortune. Between 2000 and 2003 alone, dividends from Sibneft totalled over $2 billion while, since 2000, he has netted billions more from asset sales. In 2003 his holding company, Millhouse Capital, not only held a substantial stake in Sibneft but also a 26 per cent stake in Aeroflot, a 50 per cent share in the world’s second-largest aluminium producer Rusal, as well as stakes in car manufacturer GAZ, the Orsk-Khalilovsky Metal Combine, Avtobank, insurance giant Ingosstrakh, a hydroelectric plant in Kraznoyarsk, and the Ust Llinsky pulp and paper plant. In early 2003 he sold his shares in Aeroflot and then, following Khodorkovsky’s arrest in October 2003, offloaded a large chunk of his stake in Rusal to his business partner, Oleg Deripaska. In the next two years he sold off most of the rest. Most significantly, in 2005 he sold his remaining stake in Sibneft to the state combine Gazprom for a massive £7.5 billion.
In 2008 the Sunday Times estimated his wealth to be £11.7 billion, almost 70 per cent more than that of the richest Briton, the Duke of Westminster. After the sale of Sibneft, he invested widely in Russia and Europe, adding a 41 per cent holding in the Russian steel group Evraz and a 44.6 per cent stake in Eurocement, Russia’s largest cement and construction conglomerate. In September 2008 Eurocement Holding AG, its Swiss affiliate, bought a 6.5 per cent stake in Holcim Ltd, a Russian construction material company with a Swiss subsidiary. Like Berezovsky, he has gone to great lengths to ensure his financial deals and holdings have been kept secret. To ensure this, most of his assets have been registered in the British Virgin Islands.
Despite Abramovich’s immense wealth, not everyone succumbs to his offers when he goes shopping. In 2003 he tried to buy a chalet in Courchevel, the luxury French ski resort invaded by nouveaux riches Russians every January. After flying in by helicopter with his wife and bodyguards, he asked to see the best private homes in the area. He then asked the resort’s director of tourism, René Montgrandi, to telephone the owners and offer whatever it would take to persuade them to sell. ‘I knew what they would say in advance,’ said Montgrandi. ‘We have no more land that can be developed and our owners are very happy to have a house. Mr Abramovich said he would pay double or triple, but each owner declined.’2
This is not the only time Abramovich has missed out. His purchase of Chelsea FC came with access to two of the special millennium boxes at the stadium that sit on the halfway line. The others cost up to £1 million a season to rent. As he often invites a crowd of friends to watch the games at Stamford Bridge, Abramovich tried to buy the special box next to his own. He offered considerably more than £1 million. The owner refused and so he upped the price several times. The answer was still no. Some hot property is simply not for sale - even to Abramovich.
The irony is that at least one of Abramovich’s personal boxes is often empty, even more so in 2007 and 2008. One prominent PR consultant who was at Stamford Bridge for a big match asked a Club executive why the box was empty. ‘I could have filled it several times over,’ said the PR man. It was empty, the executive explained, because Abramovich liked to keep it in case he needed it at the last minute. ‘To Abramovich, throwing away the £30,000 fee he could have received by letting it out was neither here nor there,’ said the PR consultant.
It has often been asked why Abramovich has been allowed to strut the world’s stage with his private armies of bodyguards, fleet of yachts, and squadron of jets while other oligarchs have been forced into exile or incarcerated in Siberia. After all, the Chelsea owner was also a beneficiary of the questionable privatization deals of the 1990s.
In the early days of Putin’s presidency, Abramovich’s relationship with the Kremlin was somewhat ambiguous. While others seemed initially to be favoured over him, the astute billionaire soon learnt to play by the rules. Abramovich’s biographers describe him as a man with multiple fronts, ‘With as many personas as there are figurines in a Russian doll’.3 The answer is relatively simple: he has learnt to play a dual role - a London-based émigré and a Russian patriot. Under Putin, he had to develop another side to his personality. He turned himself into the model oligarch. Trading subservience for freedom is the primary reason for the leeway he came to enjoy.
Unlike Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky, he has steered clear of politics. ‘As long as he does what he’s told, he will be fine,’ one Putin adviser explained. He agreed to stand as governor of Chukotka, in Siberia’s far east on the Arctic Circle. When his term was up in 2005, he sought to relinquish the post, but in a personal meeting at the Kremlin he reluctantly yielded to Putin’s request to stay on. He has handed over his assets to the Russian state when asked to do so. It is even claimed that Abramovich was always reluctant to divorce Irina and only agreed to do so under pressure from Putin. According to Chris Hutchins, one of the oligarch’s biographers, ‘Abramovich and Putin are incredibly close. Putin regards Abramovich as something of a favourite son. When the rumours about Abramovich’s private life started surfacing, Putin told him to get his act cleaned up. Putin is a real family man and did not approve of Roman’s relationship with Daria or the publicity it has generated. He…made it clear Abramovich should settle his personal affairs.’4
On top of this, Abramovich has spent lavishly on patriotic and social Russian projects, contributing to various political authorities, notably £200 million to Chukotka. As Putin set up a number of tax havens inside Russia, the investment also brought generous tax breaks in return.
David Clark, special adviser to former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and Chair of the Russia Foundation, says that Abramovich’s lifestyle has been tolerated because he has made himself useful. ‘There is a sense in which Abramovich is the acceptable face of Russia, a global businessman who is non-threatening, and thus helpful to the Russian authorities by portraying an image of football and fun,’ Clark said. In this way he can be seen as Russia’s public relations globetrotter offering a more acceptable image of the typical oligarch.
Abramovich’s exalted status is also in part due to his purchase of Chelsea FC. ‘What better way to cover yourself in protective armour than to buy a high-profile British football club?’ commented one Russian analyst. ‘It was a masterstroke, a brilliant piece of public relations. He doesn’t need a PR company. He has Chelsea.’ Another called it ‘the cheapest insurance policy in history’. He was the first Russian to buy into British football, acquired an international reputation by doing so, and thus bought himself a degree of protection not enjoyed by others.
When Abramovich bought Chelsea FC, however, he received considerable criticism within Russia. Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, called the move a ‘slap in the face for Russian football’. The head of Russia’s Audit Chamber said he was lavishing too much money on English football at the expense of the Russian game. The criticism may have stung Abramovich because, through Sibneft, a few months later he invested £30 million in CSKA Moscow. He later gained more political kudos when he bankrolled Russia’s football federation, contributing heavily to the £4 million salary of the national coach, the Dutchman Guus Hiddink, and investing in a new Russian football academy. When Russia beat England 2-1 in Moscow in October 2007 in a critical qualifying game in the European Championship, Abramovich was seen cheering Russia on and was much in evidence congratulating the team as it left the pitch, a patriotic gesture not lost on the Kremlin.
While Abramovich ostensibly remains the Russian patriot par excellence, he has also expanded and cemented his roots in London. In 2005 he transferred the ownership of most of his UK properties from Caribbean offshore companies into his own name - a highly unusual move for any Russian oligarch and one designed to improve his image as the most secretive oligarch. But, unlike Berezovsky, he has largely shunned the London social scene and English high society - and not for want of opportunities. The purchase of Fyning Hill offered him the perfect entrée into the world of polo but he never mastered the sport (despite hiring the captain of the English polo team to tutor him) and is rarely seen at the polo festivals during the season.
Another route into English society was provided by a well-connected private banker, Roddie Fleming. In 2001 Fleming assembled a group of aristocratic investors, among them Lord Daresbury and the Earl of Derby, to buy a 34 per cent stake in a Siberian goldmine. Called Highland Gold, Abramovich acquired a large stake in the company, an investment that paid off handsomely as the value of their original stake grew fivefold in eighteen months. It provided a golden opportunity for Abramovich to cultivate a circle of establishment contacts, but it was one he declined. ‘We invited him in and that’s the only time I’ve met him,’ said Fleming.5
Abramovich prefers privacy to high-profile socialising. Staff at Chelsea say they find him distant, while others say that if you approached him he would often stop you dead with his bland, almost ghosted look. Although this may be partly down to his poor command of English, he is clearly not comfortable in social situations, especially with people he does not know.
His ex-wife, Irina, by contrast, is a natural socialite, so much so that the pair often led relatively separate lives. She loved shopping on Sloane Street, being ferried around in limousines, jetting off to St Tropez, and lunching in Mayfair restaurants with celebrities. With the advantage of speaking better English, she threw herself into society in a way her former husband could not. She was a regular on the social calendar and even retained a PR company, Platinum Entertainment Services, to advise her, provide introductions, and secure invitations. It was Irina who was believed to have encouraged Kristin Pazik, the model wife of superstar AC Milan striker, Andriy Shevchenko, to persuade her husband to move to London to play for Chelsea (an ill-fated move: the Ukrainian failed to make his mark at Chelsea and returned to the rossoneri in 2008).
Abramovich could occasionally be seen, bodyguard in tow, at top London restaurants such as Marco Pierre White’s Luciano’s in St James’s, Nobu on Park Lane, and the River Café in Hammersmith, but otherwise he rarely made public appearances, stayed behind tight security, and limited his socializing mainly to a small circle of wealthy, fellow London-based Russians. These included Oleg Deripaska, Ralif Safin, one of the founders of Lukoil, as well as the trusted Evgeny Shvidler and Eugene Tenenbaum. He also remained close to Tatyana Dyachenko and could be seen dining with her at Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons in Oxfordshire.
Abramovich had developed British associates, some of whom could be espied in the directors’ box at Stanford Bridge. One regular was Lord Jacob Rothschild, while other visitors included Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone, Gregory Barker, former investor relations manager at Sibneft and Conservative MP, and Mohamed Al Fayed (owner of Fulham Football Club, Chelsea’s near neighbours in west London), who was introduced by Irina after one of her marathon shopping expeditions to Harrods.
Despite his property empire, Abramovich’s interest in London has not ranged much beyond Stamford Bridge, City investors, and his children’s education. His national loyalties have remained with Russia alone. London has been used as a base for football and for depositing and growing his wealth. Although Irina and their children became more firmly based first in Fyning Hill and then Chester Square, when the two oldest children started to attend London schools from 2004 and 2005 respectively, Abramovich spent more time in Russia than in London. A court judgement in 2008 revealed that he spent little time in London before he bought Chelsea (ten full days in 2000, seven in 2001, and only one in 2002). After that he spent an increasing amount of time there, rising from sixty-seven full days in 2004 to 110 in 2006 before falling back to fifty-six in 2007, a year when a combination of tensions in Russia and his new relationship with the Russian fashion designer Daria Zhukova meant he missed an increasing number of Chelsea games. He has remained a Russian citizen and has entered Britain on a business visa. In a rare interview in December 2006 Abramovich implied that he does not regard London as his home. ‘I live on a plane,’ he said.6 A comment no doubt designed to please Vladimir Putin, who was beginning to display a growing coolness towards a Britain he accused of ‘harbouring criminals and terrorists’.
A main London attraction has been his children’s education and security. ‘I want my children to go to school in England,’ Abramovich said in August 2003. ‘I’m satisfied they will get the best education in the world here.’ He sent his eldest daughter to a prep school in Belgravia from 2004 and then to an all-girls’ independent school in London. In 2006 he made a substantial donation to the school.7 He once looked into Charterhouse, near Godalming in Surrey, for his sons.
The Russian interest in British public schools began in the 1990s, though not all Russian students were welcome then. At the time some of those arriving were the offspring of members of Russia’s burgeoning criminal gangs whose tentacles reached into big business and politics. Huge volumes of money were being made by the Russian mafia from narcotics, people trafficking, prostitution, bribery, and the ongoing fleecing of state businesses.
More than one British school came to suspect that at least some of the fees paid were the product of criminal activity. In 1994 a representative of Isis - the Independent Schools Information Service - that had started running recruiting trips to Moscow admitted, ‘We don’t screen the mafia out because you can’t. You don’t know where their money is coming from.’8 From the mid-1990s, there were several reports of problems arising with pupils from families of the Organizatsiya - the Russian mafia, those involved in the big crime rings. There were even alleged incidents of mini-mafia infighting between pupils. On one occasion a head teacher in East Anglia asked the local police to investigate whether two Russian pupils’ fees had been paid through a money-laundering operation.
During the 1990s, stories of parents turning up at the beginning of term with large bundles of cash in payment for the entire year circulated regularly at gatherings of teachers and headmasters. One head teacher of a small public school stated that ‘Students from Russia and the former Soviet Union always seemed to have plenty of cash to splash around. They were all from affluent backgrounds and were never without the latest gizmo.’ Headmasters, including John Rawlinson of Oakley Hall prep school in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, tell of how they used to turn parents away who arrived at the school with cash in hand. For most Russians, of course, this was not about buying favours - it was merely the way Russians conducted their affairs: they simply preferred paying the school fees in cash.
In 1990 the number of Russian children in British schools could be counted on the fingers of one hand and these were mostly children of government ministers. In 1994 the Russians made up only 3 per cent of overseas students at private schools. By 1999, that number had swelled to 20 per cent, a remarkable rise. One pupil who used to shuttle between London and Moscow during the school holidays recalled travelling on the first and last days of term, ‘The British Airways flights were like school buses filled with unruly Russian children, commuting between their English public school and their Russian home.’
Among the Russians, the oligarchs proved especially keen on a British education. Berezovsky’s four children from his first two marriages attended schools in Britain. Oleg Deripaska’s wife Polina was educated at Millfield School in Somerset. Mikhail Gutseriyev, the billionaire former President of the Russian oil company Russneft, who was forced to flee Russia in 2007, sent his two sons to Harrow. Tatyana Dyachenko sent her son, Boris, Yeltsin’s grandson, to Millfield and then to Winchester College in the mid-1990s.
Like British estate agents, the public schools themselves soon spotted the Russian potential. Shrewd headmasters started advertising their schools in Russian newspapers in the 1990s. Some schools took their marketing to Russia itself with a steady stream of representatives attending events in Moscow and St Petersburg recruiting students. John Rawlinson attracted eighteen Russian pupils for the autumn term of 1993 after giving a seminar in Moscow and advertising in a Russian financial newspaper. The parents of those pupils included a banker, the owner of a pharmaceuticals company, and the director of a Siberian factory and hailed from Kazakhstan and Ukraine as well as Moscow and Siberia. As Rawlinson explained at the time, security was a key factor: ‘People are getting killed for having a lot of money in Moscow. Coming to school in England removes a child from the dangers.’9
Other schools that have sent missions to Russia include Roedean, Harrogate Ladies’ College, and Dulwich College. Marianne Sunter, Deputy Headmistress of Box Hill, a small coeducational independent day and boarding school in Mickleham, Surrey, for children aged eleven to eighteen, made three marketing trips to Russia between 2005 and 2007.
In 2006 there were about a thousand Russian pupils being educated in British public schools, though the schools themselves are cagey about how many Russian students they have on their books. While Russian parents like British education for the quality of the schooling and the opportunity to learn English, that old bugbear security remains a key factor. In Russia it is still not unusual for the children of wealthy parents to be kidnapped and held to ransom. In 2005, 15-year-old Elizaveta Slesareva, newly enrolled at St Peter’s, a boarding school in York, died along with her parents when their Mercedes was sprayed with bullets during the mid-term break back in Moscow. Her father was the owner of Sodbiznesbank, which had its licence withdrawn by the Central Bank amid accusations of money laundering.
Another British aristocratic tradition that has attracted the Russians to Britain is the ‘season’ - the extended series of spring and summer social and sporting events. Today it is more ‘open season’ where old money and minor royals mix openly at events like Ascot with Britain’s new business elite, celebrities, and assorted hangers-on. The people who get most excited about it, however, are often those with foreign money.
While some of the season’s appeal may have been lost on the old money in Britain, the Russians, long deprived of such ‘aristocratic’ tradition, are especially enthusiastic. For them, the season offers a chance to rub shoulders with assorted members of the British establishment, something that brings a good deal of cachet.
Today the season attracts not only many British-based moneyed Russians but also a small army of visitors from the ranks of the country’s emerging professional middle classes - bankers, financiers, and entrepreneurs. ‘The Russians are very taken with British high society,’ reiterated Aliona Muchinskaya, who arranges trips for groups of sixty or more Russian clients at a time. In 2005 her company Red Square organized a dinner party for seventy guests at Spencer House, the eighteenth-century mansion in London’s St James’s Place. The four-course dinner was prepared by the Rothschild’s private chef and was served with Dom Perignon and £300 bottles of cognac. Later the guests enjoyed a private concert by Liza Minnelli.
That same year, Red Square launched the first of what was to become the annual Russian ball. In June, some 400 guests, many arriving in limousines, vintage Rolls-Royces, and Bentleys, gathered for a sumptuous evening in the grounds of Syon House in west London. It was an opportunity for the London-based Russian community to mingle with the Moscow jet set, many of whom had flown in for the occasion, as well as British high society. For a ‘diamond table’ for ten costing £3,000, guests got to meet Count Nikolai Tolstoy (a historian related to Leo Tolstoy), Prince Gregory Gallitzin, producer of Gallitzin champagne, Alsou Safina, singer and daughter of Ralif Safin, and Nat Rothschild, the son of Lord Jacob Rothschild and close friend of Oleg Deripaska, who arrived in his private helicopter with his Russian girlfriend Zhenya.
London and the Home Counties soon became an integral part of Russia’s social map, offering a UK-based parallel Russian social calendar. This involved balls, charity auctions, exhibitions, exclusive parties, and events that often brought the Russian and British elite together. Kensington Palace, a royal residence for 300 years, was regularly hired by Russians for wedding receptions, lavish parties, and charity events, such were its upper-crust connections.
The ‘new Russians’ loved nothing more than to be a guest at one of the season’s glitziest gatherings - the Cartier International Day at the Guards Polo Club in Windsor Great Park, held on the last Sunday in July, which attracts its fair share of aristocrats and international celebrities. Indeed, several Russians have gained entry to the polo set. Vladlena Bernardoni-Belolipskaia, a professional polo player for the Royal Berkshire Polo Club who set up her own team called Vladi-Moscow, has become a Cartier regular. Another enthusiast is Sergei Kolushev, the Managing Director of a Canary Wharf-based events company that hosts the annual Russian Economic Forum, once the largest gathering of Russian business leaders outside Moscow and St Petersburg. Kolushev arrived in London in 1989 with little money and built up a business that also organizes social events such as the Russian Winter Festival. He claims that 200 Russians attended the Cartier in 2005 and many more would have liked to.
‘The Russians want to show off,’ said one Russian living in London. ‘They love all that pomp and ceremony and the dressing up, and are desperate to be seen hobnobbing with members of European royal families, the British aristocracy, and the new moneyed elites.’ Another Russian émigré, a jewellery designer whose clients include the American actress Sharon Stone and who came to Britain fifteen years ago and lives in St John’s Wood, described her first visit to Ascot as ‘magical’. ‘It was like a scene from a novel - Anna Karenina, to be precise,’ she recalled. ‘I felt like Anna in nineteenth-century Russia, in the time of the tsars…I felt great nostalgia for all the beautiful events that were banished during the Soviet era.’10
Such is the interest and excitement it generates among Russians that at least two documentaries were filmed for Russian television at Royal Ascot in 2005. According to one well-placed Russian commentator, the presence of Russian television crews at such events is usually enough to frighten off the richest Russians, especially those whose fortunes are ‘a little vulnerable’. They are afraid that they may be spotted by the Russian authorities that have been trying to track them down for questioning over the source of their sudden wealth.
London has already hosted a number of society weddings involving Russians and Britons. Assia Webster, who came to London from St Petersburg in the mid-1990s to work at Christie’s, married the top London jewellery designer Stephen Webster, who made Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s wedding rings. Later Assia set up her own PR company, Rocks. Savile Row tailor Ozwald Boateng is married to six-foot-plus Russian model Gyunel. Natalia Vodianova, the supermodel and wife of the British aristocrat and billionaire property heir Justin Portman, commutes between Britain and New York with their two young children.
In another British/Russian liaison, fashionistas have also been intrigued by the relationship between another supermodel, Naomi Campbell, and the Russian billionaire Vladimir Doronin, a property magnate with a towering ego who has been called Moscow’s version of Donald Trump.
Doronin was educated in St Petersburg, the home city of Russia’s former and current presidents, Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev. A close friend of the present Mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, and his wife Yelena Baturina (at the last count, Russia’s only female dollar billionaire), Doronin is another plutocrat who likes to ensure that he keeps in with the political in-crowd. He made his first money as a raw cotton distributor in the former Soviet republics of Tajikstan and Uzbekistan and in 1993 set up Capital Group, a Moscow-based property company specializing in ‘luxury design property projects’, among them grandiose 100-apartment high-risers, Yacht City (a development on the Moscow River), and elite housing at Barvikha Hills, which is close to the Kremlin.
Despite her reputation for a dark side and a propensity for uncontrollable rages - throwing a telephone across a hotel room, beating her assistant with her Blackberry - Naomi Campbell has been sweetness and tenderness in her relationship with Doronin. When the tycoon invited her for a rowdy all-night dinner party on his yacht Lady in Blue off St Tropez, her friends were amazed by her serenity.
Like Berezovsky, many of London’s rich Russian community became preoccupied with status. As Russian journalist Nicholas Ageyev put it in 2006, ‘It is interesting how many fervent capitalists were born behind the Iron Curtain.’11 Through a mix of corporate hospitality, hosting lavish social gatherings, and making generous charitable donations, wealthy Russians have steadily bought their way into the upper echelons of London society. Leonid Blavatnik is on the Council of the Serpentine Gallery and is a benefactor of the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House. In 2006, Russia’s London-based business elite threw an expensive gala at the Royal Opera House attended by guests from the British establishment and the arts. They paid £1,000 a head to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Moscow-born ballet icon Maya Plisetskaya.
A connection with the Royal Family is another major aspiration. This appears to have been achieved by Russian billionaire Sergei Pugachev, who has enjoyed close ties with former President Putin. Pugachev made his money through shipyards and property deals and became friendly with Viscount Linley, the son of Lord Snowdon and the late Princess Margaret and the Queen’s nephew. In September 2007 the two men spent a long weekend on a bear-hunting expedition in southern Siberia, where Pugachev is a senator and has mining interests. In return, Linley invited the oligarch for a pheasant shoot in Windsor Great Park that December. Shortly afterwards, talks got underway about Pugachev buying a large stake in Linley’s luxury furniture and interiors business, which has refurbished suites at Claridge’s.
Some Russians organized their own charity events. In 2006 former KGB spy turned banker Alexander Lebedev paid at least £1.3 million to host a lavish party at Althorp, in Northamptonshire, the ancestral seat of the Spencers and childhood home of Diana, Princess of Wales. It was the most extravagant ex-pat party of the year, a fundraising event to launch the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation to fight leukaemia. The guest list included not only the former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (the foundation was established in his wife’s name after she died of the disease in 1999) but also Hollywood heartthrob Orlando Bloom, supermodel Elle Macpherson, Lady Gabriella Windsor, the daughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, author Sir Salman Rushdie, and model Jemma Kidd. Indeed, Britons at the event nearly outnumbered the Russians.
This was the first time that Althorp had been opened to a private party on this scale, and it is testimony to the influence wielded by Lebedev in the British establishment. Connections were key. It was arranged by Geordie Greig, then editor of Tatler, who later took a swipe at the Russian super-rich for leapfrogging the British upper classes in the intensified competition for the best schools and homes.
The event was built around extravagant Russian themes, including Cossack horsemen and grey wolves from the steppe roaming the estate’s lawns with their attentive handlers. Two years later the charity party - a white-tie gala dinner - was repeated at a new venue, Hampton Court Palace. This time it was attended by some 400 guests, including Lady Thatcher and Naomi Campbell. Each paid £1,000 to attend and enjoy a concert by Sir Elton John, who missed his annual jaunt at the Cannes Film Festival. After dinner, guests bid for a catalogue of prizes, topped by an all-night party at Annabel’s nightclub for 160 guests.
The most notable absentees were the oligarchs. Lebedev’s 27-year-old son Evgeny, who organized the party along with the well-connected Geordie Greig, admitted that he failed to persuade a single one to attend. ‘Wealthy Russian people seem to be quite interested in their own causes and not very helpful to others,’ he acknowledged. ‘That seems to be a problem with Russian society as a whole, not just philanthropy. People at best don’t help each other; at worst they make it worse for each other. They compete with each other.’12
An extravagant and eccentric dresser, Evgeny Lebedev was educated at Holland Park School, Mill Hill School, then the LSE, and also studied art history. In 2006 Tatler listed Lebedev as the third most eligible bachelor in Britain. Later that year, at a George Michael concert at Earl’s Court, he sat alongside Kate Moss and Bob Geldof in the VIP enclosure. Charismatic and an energetic late-night socialite, the young Lebedev owns and operates a Japanese restaurant, Sake No Hana, in St James’s Street, just a few doors down from White’s, the epitome of British establishment private clubs.
His father, Alexander Lebedev, had been born into a Moscow academic family, studied economics, and gained a PhD on Russia’s foreign debt. He joined the KGB in the early 1980s and was dispatched to London in 1988 as an intelligence officer, operating out of a flat on Kensington High Street on a monthly salary of £700. Working under the cover of an economics attaché, he was tasked with obtaining intelligence on capital flows but also on whether or not Britain was planning to activate its nuclear strike force.
When he left the KGB in 1992, Lebedev held the rank of lieutenant colonel and returned to Moscow with savings worth just £400. But as well as having a doctorate in economics, he had carefully studied the City’s and Western commercial practices. Nicknamed the ‘Spy who came in from the gold’, Lebedev initially made money as a consultant to foreign firms. He then used the fees to buy up the ailing National Reserve Bank, bought shares in Russian utilities, and by 1997, his assets hit £680 million. His recovery was based on astute investments in the energy giant Gazprom and Aeroflot.
By 2008, Lebedev had acquired an estimated fortune of £2 billion and still headed the bank, whose executives include former KGB colleagues. None of this made him disloyal to his former employer. In his bank’s headquarters in Moscow there is a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the brutal founder of the Soviet secret police, which was toppled and removed from its previous location when the Soviet system collapsed. It is likely to be a private joke because he was a vociferous critic of Putin’s policy of promoting former KGB officers into power and influence. ‘People in the security services are not always that educated,’ he told the Spectator. ‘They will do anything for a million dollars.’
Lebedev also owns Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last independent newspaper, jointly with Mikhail Gorbachev. This was the paper for which crusading anti-Putin journalist Anna Politkovskaya worked before her assassination in October 2006. A former deputy in the State Duma for the pro-Putin United Russia Party since 2004, he is unusual in that he is equally critical of what he regards as the selfishness and extravagance of the oligarchs and the authoritarianism of the Kremlin.
In London Lebedev acquired a taste for the high-society life. ‘I like it when there’s substance to it,’ he told the Spectator. ‘When you’re sitting at a dinner with Tom Wolfe on one side and Tom Stoppard on the other, then obviously it’s enjoyable.’ But he also has a rebellious streak. By 2008, aged forty-seven, he looked more like a rock star with his designer-chic rimless glasses, casual outfits, and short, fashionably cut grey hair. In his campaign to persuade the Russian government to restrict betting, he appeared on television wearing a T-shirt reading, ‘Who the fuck needs gambling?’.
Lebedev’s stunt against gambling has been part of a wider campaign against the Russian mafia, including tougher laws against drug trafficking. He also called for a ban on wealthy bureaucrats and businessmen in Moscow from putting sirens on their cars and using the ambulance lanes - a practice that has caused delays for ordinary people being taken to hospital. Within a few weeks he was the subject of an assassination attempt in Moscow, when two bullets missed his head by inches.
In line with their social aspirations, most wealthy Russians take their personal appearance very seriously and since 2000 Britain’s luxury retailers have learnt fast how to separate Russia’s frenetic shoppers - a mixture of visitors and residents - from their cash.
One by one London’s luxury department stores and Old Bond Street boutiques started to hire Russian-speaking staff. In 2005 Harrods’ personal shopping department - Harrods by Appointment - employed its first Russian speaker: the oligarchs’ wives are especially addicted to the ‘personal shopping’ service. On one occasion a Harrods personal shopper was even asked to furnish a private jet.
By the mid-1990s, Harvey Nichols employed six Russianspeaking assistants on its shop floors to cope with the influx of new, high-spending consumers. As the shop’s marketing manager put it in 2005, ‘The Russians are to this decade what the Japanese were to the 1990s and the Arabs were to the 1980s. They come to shop and they pay in cash. They have money and want to spend it. There are women who come in with pages from Russian Vogue and when they shop for the latest handbag, they buy seven.’13
Such is the demand from Russian shoppers that Elena Ragozhina of New Style magazine started publishing Exclusive London, a bi-annual tourist guide to London’s most exclusive shops and boutiques: one article in 2006 she called - tongue only partly in cheek - ‘How to Spend a Million Pounds in One Hour’.
For the men, shopping means cars. In 2007 Russians spearheaded rising sales of the £285,000 Rolls-Royce Phantom, the seventh-most-expensive car in the UK. Rodney Turner, director of London’s Rolls-Royce H. R. Owen dealership, says that he first started to notice the Russians in a big way in 2005 and that by 2007 they accounted for about one-fifth of his clients. They are one of the nationalities known within the trade as the ‘big hitters’. ‘Russians mostly don’t stop at one car,’ according to Turner. ‘They will often buy a Phantom and the new Drophead Coupé [first introduced in 2007 and selling for £400,000] for the wife or for fun. Sometimes they will ship one or more cars to the South of France as well as keep one or two in England.’
Sometimes the Russians would come themselves with an interpreter and security. But more typically the cars would be bought by an agent. It was not uncommon for the agent to turn up with what Turner describes as a ‘shopping list’. In the two years up to early 2008 he dealt with nearly thirty Russian customers, each of whom bought six or seven cars in one go, typically including a Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Ferrari, Lamborghini, and, on one occasion, a Bugatti Veyron, the world’s most expensive limited edition car and very difficult to get. ‘What they are really saying is: I have the money I want the best.’ Those buying were mostly families who had bought a very expensive house and had hired an expensive, top-notch designer responsible for the complete package. ‘Their job would be to design and manage the refurbishment of the house, select the furniture, décor, flooring, make sure the staff are in place and the cars are in the garage,’ said Turner. ‘The designer will be given a deadline and everything will need to be in place right down to the flowers and the garden before the family arrives. It would often be the designer who came in with the “vehicle shopping list” and who was commissioned to oversee the purchase and delivery of the fleet.’
As with buying property, the Russians’ innate impatience meant that they were rarely willing to wait. In early 2008 the waiting list for a Phantom Drophead Coupé was at least two years. This led to a ‘grey market’ in which customers would jump the queue by paying another client about to take delivery a premium of up £75,000. Wealthy Russians were quite happy to pay a commission to secure first option on a sports car. In some Moscow restaurants they had become used to paying a premium of as much as £1,000 just to secure a reservation.
Renowned for their heavy vodka drinking, the Russians also quickly acquired a taste for fine wine. One dealer admitted that some of his clients were spending enough to support a small wine merchant single-handedly. As one butler to a Russian explained, ‘Wine is one way they express themselves. Those with mansions sometimes buy up whole collections of wine, putting in cellars in the process. They want to drink what is perceived to be the very best - Cristal, Krug, Château Petrus, or Margaux - and then it has to be the premier years of each one. That’s the year they want; they won’t buy either side of it. If it’s 1982 it has to be that year, nothing else.’
Wine writer Tim Atkin remembered watching four cigar-smoking Eastern Europeans order a 1996 Château Petrus at the Michelin-starred Hakkasan in London one night in June 2007. Two of the men proceeded to dilute the wine - which cost £1,560 a bottle - with Diet Coke. Petrus certainly has status value for Eastern Europeans.
Restaurant managers would rub their hands with glee when a Russian party made a booking. Top restaurants favoured by Russians have included Le Gavroche and Cipriani in Mayfair. And around the corner, the boutiques and jewellers became particularly grateful for the arrival of the ‘rouble revolution’. Moreover, while the economic downturn in 2008 started to affect mainstream retailers, it initially had a limited impact on some top-end retailing. In January 2008 Stuart Rose, the beleaguered chief executive of Marks & Spencer, commenting on the tough Christmas suffered by the store, added somewhat acidly, ‘But London can’t get enough diamonds.’ Again it was the Russians who led the way.
Bond Street jewellers first spotted the Russians in the 1990s. In the second half of 1993 Tiffany and Co. saw an influx of Russian customers. According to the shop’s manager, ‘We’ve had people looking at stones worth tens of thousands. They’re mainly interested in diamonds. It’s odd seeing them wearing poor quality jewellery and coming into Tiffany’s to buy a gem the size of a pigeon’s egg.’14 Diamond-encrusted watches were in particular demand. Cartier said at the time that Russian customers ‘Sometimes employed bartering tactics. They obviously have a lot of money to spend but they try to get cash discounts. They like to know they’re getting a bargain.’15
Like a celebrity or a royal princess, the Russians expect special treatment. ‘There was one occasion when a Russian walked into a top Bond Street jewellers, asked for the manager, and said he wanted the store to open next Sunday because he was bringing a client who wanted to buy diamonds worth £1.5 million,’ recalled Alexander Nekrassov. ‘The jewellers never opened on Sunday but made an exception on this occasion. The Russian duly arrived and promptly handed over the promised payment.’ A decade on, the Russians had become even better customers for top jewellery retailers.
In 2007 Elena Ragozhina started hosting regular parties for subscribers of her magazines at London’s most exclusive fashion and jewellery boutiques such as Tiffany and Co. and the newly opened Old Bond Street showrooms of the Lev Leviev diamond empire. According to the store, prices ranged from an ‘entry-level’ diamond ring at £25,000 to a £4.2 million diamond necklace. Born in Uzbekistan and raised in Israel from the age of fifteen, Leviev became a billionaire courtesy of the controversial world of diamond trading. By 2007, the 51-year-old was rich enough to spend £35 million on one of the most expensive new houses in Britain, a Hampstead mansion that boasts a Versailles-style stone staircase, indoor pool and spa, and a carved replica of a chimneypiece at Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire.
Even by the summer of 2008, there were only minimal signs of a slowdown in the diamond trade. In June, as the credit crunch was starting to be felt and property and share prices plunged, Chopard launched London’s most expensive cocktail at the Westbury Hotel in Mayfair. At £225 per glass, the Chopardissimo - a vodka martini with Beluga caviar - was served up to 100 of the company’s best customers.
There are few areas of London’s highly developed consumerist culture that have not been touched by the Russians. Chauffeur firms thrived. Michelin-starred chefs found themselves in great demand. Companies established to cater for the rouble invasion were inundated with requests from luxury goods industries in their attempt to target Russian spenders. Aliona Muchinskaya said that whenever her company gained publicity for organizing a big Russian event in London, she would be ‘flooded with e-mails, letters, and calls from agents representing celebrity singers, famous chefs offering to cook in private houses, private chauffeur companies, agents selling properties from Dubai to the Seychelles, even companies selling private islands. On several occasions we have been contacted by titled Britons offering their homes to clients for events.’
The sustained spending frenzy that overtook London from the mid-noughties is not, however, just down to the billionaire oligarchs and their wives, daughters, and mistresses. In fact, it is no surprise to learn that the oligarchs have mostly preferred to keep themselves out of the limelight. Rather, the frenzy was led by the next socio-economic group down in the wealth stakes - those who were merely multi-millionaires. These comprised a much larger group of former KGB officials, businessmen hired by the oligarchs, and a newer generation of Russian entrepreneurs who started to make money out of the consumer boom that emerged in Russia from the millennium. This group may not be billionaires but they are equally addicted to a turbocharged lifestyle and luxury living, something that Tom Ford, creative director of Gucci until 2004, has described as being ‘in the hard drive of Russian people’.
In the 1990s the new moneyed Russians became known for their designer clothes, dark, sharp suits, jewellery, and heavy partying. They were not, however, the idle rich. Many were tireless, energetic, frenetic deal-makers - always hustling, trading gossip, and boasting about their profligacy. They seemed only too happy to conform to their emerging stereotype - vulgar, spendthrift, and indiscriminate buyers of the flashiest clothes, brands, and diamonds. ‘It’s the head-to-toe, total-look designer dressing,’ one fashion observer said. ‘Think chilled vodka, caviar, extravagance, cash, and bling. They acquired so much money so quickly; it went to their heads. They are like teenagers on heat.’
The more contemporary Russian super-rich have mostly displayed greater discretion during their spending binges. Wary of too many questions being asked about the origins of their wealth and obsessed with security, apart from their wives, the husbands have mandated their butlers, secretaries, PAS, and other third parties to choose the properties, negotiate with contractors, and do their spending for them. Even the wives started to show discretion. They may have continued to live high-octane social lives while donning Bulgari jewellery, but they did so more discreetly, thus preserving a new desire for public anonymity.
The days of conspicuous, vulgar displays of extravagance were less in evidence as the end of the first decade of the new millennium approached. ‘They are more discriminating consumers nowadays,’ said one member of the set. ‘You won’t see Russian women buying left, right, and centre the way they did during the nineties.’ Their new style was described by one as ‘discreet opulence’, with the use of personal shoppers or benefiting from roped-off sections in the smartest shops. According to Marina Starkova, a director of Red Square, ‘Their style is not as flashy as it used to be, all Versace and gold chains’. Aliona Muchinskaya claims that by the mid-noughties, conspicuous excess was fading. ‘In Moscow you expect friends to ask how much a new bag or jacket cost, but in London the trend is towards British understatement,’ she said.
Russian women, rarely worried about the price tag, have had a huge impact on the London fashion scene. In 2005 the designer Julien Macdonald claimed that most of his sales had been to Russians. ‘Russians are every designer’s dream,’ he said. ‘They are the saviour of almost every glamorous fashion brand in the world. Without them, a lot of us would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.’16 It is a process fuelled by the emergence of new Russian models such as Natalia Vodianova. In 2005 Vanity Fair featured a number of Russian models on its cover, heralding ‘the new supermodels from behind the Iron Curtain’. In the same year Russian Vogue devoted an entire issue to the Russian influence, much of it shot around Red Square.
One woman who has emerged as a force in the international fashion world is Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend, Daria Zhukova. Her label, Kova & T, launched in Harvey Nichols in December 2007, sells in more than seventy stores around the world. It is a deliberately ‘casual luxury’ and consciously unglitzy brand - which includes plain jeans, vest tops, T-shirts, miniskirts, leather shorts and jersey dresses, and, most famously, latex leggings. The label is designed to counter what one fashion expert describes as the ‘post-Soviet flashiness’ that Russians seemed to embrace in the 1990s.
Zhukova’s London circle included Lord Lloyd-Webber, Lord Freddie Windsor, Camilla Fayed, and Polina Deripaska. Typical of the new breed of young and successful Russians - a mix of entrepreneurs, designers, and models that make up the Russian jet set - she also became something of a celebrity draw herself. London became full of young, glamorous, and expensively dressed Russians. They could sometimes be spotted in London’s stylish restaurants and tearooms or being chauffeured around their favourite shops in Old Bond Street and Sloane Street. This is a group that insists on looking immaculate and glamorous at all times. Their favourite designers tend to be Prada, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, Lanvin, and Chloé, and they holiday in St Barts at Christmas, Courchevel in January, and St Tropez in August. They strive for the most fashionable and know they will need to pay a premium. ‘We get overcharged three times just for the accent,’ said Katya, the stunning wife of Ruslan Fomichev, the former aide to Berezovsky.17
These then are the offspring of Russia’s billionaires and multi-millionaires. They are the first generation to have come of age in the post-communist era and many have been raised in mansions with servants and chauffeurs. They want for nothing. Oozing with self-confidence and armed with limitless credit cards, many have been educated in British public schools and universities and so have the advantage over their parents of knowing the country and speaking good English.
Along with Evgeny Lebedev, a regular at events like Elton John’s White Tie and Tiara Ball and Donatella Versace shows, another member of the Russian glitterati set has been Alsou Safina. She moved to London with her family when she was twelve, and was educated at Queen’s College, a private school in Harley Street. While her father has returned to Russia, she has been granted British citizenship and lives in an apartment in St John’s Wood, overlooking Lord’s Cricket Ground. She is a successful international singer, came second in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2000, and is now married with a young daughter.
The young Russian set may have parents or grandparents brought up under communism, but they remember little or nothing of the Soviet Union, or of the privations of the past. Many have bought apartments in the new blocks being built in Kensington and Knightsbridge, paid for by their parents. Local estate agents say that expensive new luxury flats have sometimes been bought by clients often barely out of their teens. Some have servants and could be seen parking their top-of-the-range cars ostentatiously outside their apartments or near fashionable nightclubs. ‘Young men like nothing more than to change their cars almost every month - Ferrari today, BMW tomorrow, riding from one club to the next as if there was no tomorrow’ as one who knows them puts it.
British universities - increasingly dependent financially on foreign students - have attracted thousands of Russians. In 2006, 20,600 Russians were granted visas to study in the UK. One lecturer in business studies at King’s College London said that a number of the university’s students from the former Soviet Union ‘were distinguished by the wealth of their parents. Some of them have expensive apartments in nearby Kensington bought by their parents while some of the girls wear designer clothes even to classes’.
The Russian love affair with spending is confirmed by Ledbury Research Agency, a PR company that targets the wealthy. As they put it in 2007, ‘Russia is producing today’s most determinedly conspicuous consumers.’ The obsession stems from their fatalistic approach to life. ‘Russians like to spend. They have no concept of saving, just as they have no concept of tomorrow,’ said Marina Starkova. Evelina Khromchenko, editor of the Russian edition of L’Officiel, the leading French lifestyle magazine says, ‘You have to realise the idea of saving for a rainy day is frowned on. Russians believe that if you keep money for a rainy day, you’ll catch the rain. Instead they think you should just go out and buy a pair of Manolo Blahniks. Nobody allows a rainy day to happen to a girl in those kinds of shoes.’18
Valerie Manokhina, married to a relatively rich Russian, has a British passport and divides her time between London and Moscow. She remembers learning English at a London college in the mid-1990s. Because of the variety of nationalities in the class - Japanese, German, French, and Chinese - they were given a test in which they had to apply their respective characters to three circles. One circle represented the past, one the present, and one the future. They were then asked how much the circles, and what they represented, overlapped for them. ‘The Russians in the class were the only ones who didn’t connect all the circles,’ she recalls. ‘The past and present overlapped but the future circle always stayed apart. It is shocking but so true - we have nothing to do with the future, we don’t refer to it, don’t plan for it, don’t think about it. I live my life just for the moment. As long as I can enjoy the moment I don’t care what happens tomorrow. It is about being fatalistic, we live in the present, we use the present tense all the time.’