UK Press Features
The new Moscow molls
Evening Standard – March 14, 2007
As Roman Abramovich’s wife gets her marching orders and girlfriend Daria steps into her Prada shoes, we reveal the smart new breed of Russian women making their mark in London.
Divorce, Russian style, is nasty, brutish and short. No one knows that better than Roman Abramovich’s about-to-be-ex wife Irina, the latest victim of the Russian elite’s hard-headed approach to personal relationships. The penniless trader she married in 1991, while she was a trolley dolly for Aeroflot, has morphed into the world’s 11th richest man, owner of oilfields, Chelsea Football Club and enough luxury yachts to launch a medium-size invasion of Europe. Even though he was famous for years as smart Moscow’s most family-minded moralist — a man who didn’t approve of the quick-change approach to wives favoured by most new Russian billionaires, and insisted his own coterie of business colleagues kept their noses clean — he’s finally succumbed to temptation. He’s trading in the blonde mother of five for a younger, classier model.
Abramovich’s new squeeze, 16 years younger than him and Irina, is brunette Darya Zhukova, a leading light of the new Russia’s gilded youth. This bubbly 25-year-old moved to America at the age of four with her mother. An ex-student at the University of California in Santa Barbara, she returned to Moscow after graduation to enjoy the hedonistic party-and-clubbing lifestyle of Russia’s richest families, and settled in London in 2005, in the penthouse flat next door to her millionaire metals-dealer father Alexander Zhukov’s home in Kensington. Her friendship with Abramovich is believed to have begun after she and her father were invited to a New Year’s party hosted by the billionaire, but she hasn’t made the relationship her whole life. Although she says she’s “very serious about studying, so I don’t care much about parties any more – I prefer to be at home”, she’s friends with Lord Freddie Windsor and Camilla Fayed and a fixture on the London party circuit. She’s also studying homeopathy and dabbles in clothes design.
“She’s very lively, but she’s very natural,” said one friend. “She’s got style. She’s not at all vulgar or brassy in the way that some Moscow girls are. But she is also a very serious person and interesting for a man to talk to. She is devoted to her studies and determined to be a doctor of homeopathy. She’s the kind of girl who men remember for a very long time after first meeting her. She is extremely attractive and very sexy.”
Perhaps just as importantly, Dasha Zhukova doesn’t even remember the hardscrabble days “before money came,” as New Russians vaguely describe the time in the early Nineties when they made their fabulous wealth by buying up Russia’s mineral resources at rock-bottom prices. Dasha Zhukova exudes to-the-manor-born insouciance with every toss of her model-girl chestnut locks. Although Abramovich’s legendary fortune would be part of his charm for many women, Zhukova is one of the few rich enough for it to make little difference to her feelings. And her youthful innocence of a time when wealth beyond most people’s wildest dreams wasn’t a certainty may be a relief to a generation of men who now want to forget they ever had to climb to reach the top.
Darya Zhukova is the epitome of the new New Russia – a second post-Soviet generation of money far more savvy and sophisticated than the first. This new wave of very young Russian lovelies gracing the glossies in the West’s most glamorous capitals is far more like the super-rich anywhere else than their awkward footballers-wives predecessors.
The second-generation Russian rich have shed all traces of nouveau vulgarity. They’re likely to tell you that they read great literature and enjoy classical music. The gold-and-chandeliers-with-everything home decoration style that used to be mockingly known as Tsarist Rococo has given way to a pared-down Zen aesthetic. The two holiday rituals of the year – January, when the entire Russian elite goes skiing for a fortnight at Courchevel, and August, when it descends on the Cote d’Azur to mess about on boats at St-Tropez (or Sardinia) – are, at least in theory, organised around wholesome sport. And most rich wives are reinventing themselves as biznis-leidis: boutique owners, interior designers or philanthropists running charities.
Take Galia Orlovskaya, the rich, pretty co-owner of a boutique with jeweler Stephen Webster, who made wedding rings for Madonna. Or designer Ozwald Boateng’s model wife, Guinel. Or Katia Gomiashvili, who’s been featured in Tatler for her design label, Emperor Moth (Kate Moss is its poster girl). This 26-year-old daughter of a famous actor had her status as part of the crème de la Moscow crème confirmed by her friendship with Suleiman Kerimov, a handsome, married billionaire playboy with a taste for fast cars and the south of France, who’s listed by Forbes as one of Russia’s 100 richest men.
So many of the newest wave of wealthy Russians have made a second or third home in London, whose oligarch-friendly tax laws they appreciate, that you no longer need to hang out in Belgravia or go clubbing at Chinawhites to see them. Even if they just flick past most Londoners in their carelessly expensive clothes, their insatiable desire for discreet opulence means they have become an influence on life in the British capital. Whether they’re students or bankers, designers or party girls, they’re the ones in the roped-off sections of the smartest shops, being shown the goods no one else could dream of affording. They’re the ones whose love of lateral conversions in Mayfair and Chelsea is helping push house prices to their current heights of irrational exuberance. They’re ambitious enough for their children to have colonized every private school and music academy, irritating less well-off parents as they suspect little Johnny’s place in senior school has gone to little Oleg just because Oleg’s parents paid for a new school library, and moan as little Oleg’s big bodyguards muscle them off the pavement.
This mix of savoir-vivre and plain old push is a far cry from the behavior of the first wealthy wives, whose husbands bought up Russia’s natural resources in the Nineties. Those young women, suddenly finding themselves married to massive amounts of money, were visibly at a loss as to what to do with it. They didn’t work, because they suddenly didn’t have to. But their money didn’t free them to have fun. It just cut them off from their poorer sisters, and threw them into each other’s company for endless advice sessions in bars gleaming with marble, or on diamond-encrusted mobiles. You’d see clusters of them in posh saunas, getting thinner and more orange by the day and sounding ever more bewildered as they mulled over cosmetic surgery and designers and whether Thailand was a more chic holiday destination than Bali. They wore footballer’s-wives outfits, all plunge and micro and glitter and mink – the kind of clothes that carried price tags with so many noughts on that you couldn’t believe the suitcasefuls of dollars they represented, but which no one but a Russian would ever buy. Their men also went in for crass over-spending. They favoured raspberry-coloured jackets and blingy jewellery, yelled coarsely into the latest mobile, drank too many Dom Perignon-vodka-Amaretti cocktails, drove Mercedes-600s and kept a Jeepload of muscle-men on hand at all times. They were all so insecure that it was easy to feel sorry for them.
It’s hard to feel sorry for today’s more glamorous crop of international jetsetters. But it’s not just envy that makes some British observers feel uneasy about their new neighbours. However cosmopolitan the new super-Russian set is, its members still behave differently from their Western counterparts in one key respect. For a start, they treat affairs of the heart with a businesslike chill that our American-style sentimentality about celebrity relationships doesn’t prepare us for. Marital break-ups have always been taken unemotionally in Russia. Everyone I know has a child from a previous marriage; a wedding doesn’t necessarily mean till death do us part. If a friend announces she’s getting divorced, there’s no point in saying you’re sorry; gushing Western sympathy will only earn you curious looks. When Dasha Zhukova’s ex, tennis player Marat Safin, told Tvoi Den newspaperg, after news of her relationship with Abramovich became public, “I couldn’t care less about her! We’ve broken up, and now we can do whatever we want,” he was only displaying a very traditional phlegmatism. But Westerners who want their celebrities to display their feelings for the cameras will be shocked by this Russian combination of glamour and heartlessness.
Polished though they are, the newest Russians aren’t quite a Western-style aristocracy yet. As Londoners have learned since our oligarch-friendly tax laws encouraged the wealthiest people in Moscow to move here, their hard-headed belief that everything has a price, and can be bought if the price is high enough, can still take precedence over the impeccable manners that established elites pride themselves on.
Irina Abramovich knows better than most, but the rest of us are finding out fast. The newest Russians may not be rough diamonds any more, but many of them are still at least as hard as the Siberian diamonds in their safes.
ENDS
Vanora Bennett is the Orwell prize-winning author of The Taste of Dreams: An Obsession with Russia and Caviar (Headline).