Londongrad: From Russia with Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs. Mark Hollingsworth

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СКАЧАТЬ journalist. Although this advantage was partially reduced in 2008 when, following a mounting media and public outcry, the government introduced a £30,000 annual levy on non-domi-ciled residents, it was an inconsequential sum for the superrich.

      The origins of the oligarchical influx lie in the privatization of Russia’s vast and valuable state assets in the 1990s, an explosive process that enriched the few, opened up a huge gulf between rich and poor, and enraged the Russian people. A World Bank report in 2004 showed that, in effect, thirty individuals controlled 40 per cent of the $225 billion output of the Russian economy in its most important sectors, notably in natural resources and automotives. The study concluded: ‘Ownership concentration in modern Russia is much higher than in any country in continental Europe and higher than any country for which data is available.’⁵

      Little of this unprecedented accumulation of wealth has been invested in Russia in business or charity. Rather, most of the money has been secreted abroad, with billions of dollars hidden in a labyrinth of offshore bank accounts in an array of tax havens, from Switzerland and Jersey to the British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar. Much has ended up being deposited in and managed by British banks. Stashed away, it has been almost impossible to trace. Despite attempts by Russian and British law enforcement agencies, little of it has been recovered and requisitioned back to Russia.

      Russia is where the money originated, but it has not been a comfortable place to spend it - too many people pointing fingers in Moscow restaurants, too much scrutiny by the tax police, and the constant fear of assassination. The Russian rich cannot go anywhere without bodyguards and bullet- and bomb-proof cars. Even wearing bespoke suits attracts attention. But in the UK or Europe they have been able to go mostly unrecognized and can relax, spending their gains without fear of censure or of being called to account. After buying their multi-million pound town houses and country estates, they have indulged their sybaritic lifestyles, cruising in St Barts, skiing in Gstaad, and shopping in Knightsbridge.

      For their wives it has been heaven. ‘London is a metropolis,’ said Olga Sirenko, who edits a website for Russian expatriates. ‘It is fashionable. It has all the boutiques and the culture. Moscow doesn’t have that kind of chic.’ Aliona Muchinskaya, who has lived in Britain since 1991 and runs her own PR company, says that Russians now dismiss Paris as being ‘too dowdy and villagey’. London, by contrast, is ‘bustling and busy with its restaurants and nightclubs. Russians can hire Rolls-Royces and private jets more easily here.’

      On arrival in London the first port of call for the affluent, socially aspiring Russian was to the estate agent, notably Savills, Knight Frank, or Aylesford. Deals were cut at high speed: no mortgages, just cash. In 2006 one-fifth of all houses sold for over £8 million went to Russians. For properties over £12 million, the figure was higher still. But Russians have been extremely selective in location, not merely restricting themselves to the golden postcodes - SW1, SW3, W1, and W8 - but only to certain streets and squares within them. Owning a British country property is also prestigious. Again, their choice of location has been very specific: St George’s Hill and Weybridge and Wentworth Park, both in Surrey.

      The next decision for the oligarch seeking to emulate the British aristocracy was which top boarding school to send their offspring to, for a British education is another motivating factor for moving to the UK. Public schools generally offer high academic standards and a secure, friendly environment. In Moscow, by contrast, kidnapping is a constant and real fear. While London’s elite estate agents set up offices in Moscow and St Petersburg to woo ultra-rich buyers, British public schools, colleges, and universities have also sent their senior teaching staff to Russia on recruitment drives.

      By 2008, it was no longer surprising to find Russian students at British schools and top universities, whether it was Abramovich’s teenage daughter at an independent all-girls’ school in London or foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s daughter at the London School of Economics. School numbers soared from 2000 and some Russian parents started to seek schools where there were no other Russians. The fees - up to £30,000 a year - may not have been a problem, but old habits died hard. A headmistress of one top girls’ public school told the story of a Russian whose daughter had failed the entrance exam and who offered her a suitcase full of cash. He promised to pay for anything - a new gym, classrooms, a swimming pool. ‘Things don’t work like that over here,’ said the bemused headmistress. At another top school a parent asked permission to land his helicopter on the cricket field when visiting his child.

      While most Russian children eventually return home, an English education is regarded as a commercial benefit. ‘I know that some oligarchs only hire students with a Western education,’ said Boris Yarishevsky, president of the Russian Society at the London School of Economics.⁶ This also extends to politicians. ‘I know people whose fathers occupy really high positions in the Russian government and I know they study in London,’ he added. ‘I don’t think that they would want me to give out their names, though.’⁷ It is quite possible that one day Russia - like many African and Middle Eastern states - will elect a President who has been educated at a British private school.

      The UK has long been a haven for Russian exiles and dissidents. Anti-tsarist radicals flocked to London in the early twentieth century and Revolutionary Congresses were held here every two years. At the 1907 Social Democratic Congress the New York Times reported that an arrest warrant had been issued for one notable attendant, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: ‘A Famous Rebel in London. Lenin Will Be Arrested if he Returns to Russia - Real Name Ulianoff ’ ran its headline. Lenin was not a permanent exile but visited the city six times between 1902 and 1911. At Seven Sisters Church in Holloway, north London, he met workers whom he described as ‘bursting with socialism’, while the area around Whitechapel and other parts of the East End swarmed with radicals. During one of his trips Lenin saw Hamlet at the Old Vic and visited Speaker’s Corner and the National Gallery. It was at the British Museum in 1902 that he first met Leon Trotsky, who had just escaped from Siberia.

      After the 1917 Revolution, relatively few affluent Russians fled to London - only 15,000 by 1919. Far more moved to the Slavic states, to Berlin, and to a lesser extent to France and China, particularly Shanghai. Those who did arrive in Britain were a mix of aristocrats and middle-class liberal intellectuals, notably the family of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin who arrived in 1919 and settled in the Surrey town of Surbiton. ‘I am an Anglophile, I love England,’ Berlin once reflected. ‘I have been very well treated in this country, but I remain a Russian Jew.’⁸ Other descendants of this first wave of Russian immigration include the actress Dame Helen Mirren (born Ileyna Vasilievna Mironov), winner of an Oscar for The Queen, and the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.

      During the Cold War there was always a sprinkling of new Russians coming to London. Some were dissidents fleeing the gulags; others were high-level KGB defectors who ended up rubbing shoulders in London with White Russians - mostly the offspring of those who had fled Russia after 1917. The latter lived mostly quiet lives, spoke good English, and were largely Anglicized. The 1991 Census recorded 27,011 residents living in the UK while claiming the former Soviet Union as their place of birth. Most of them would have been Russian.

      The collapse of the Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s had a dramatic impact on the pace of Russian arrivals, unleashing a new and unprecedented wave of migration from Russia and former Soviet and East European states. In 1991 the British Embassy in Moscow issued barely 100 visas - to a mixture of those working for Russian companies, students, and Russians who had married Britons - while only one Russian living in the UK was granted citizenship. Even by the mid-1990s, Londoners would have started to become aware of the occasional unrecognizable foreign accent in a shop or in the street - those Russians who did come congregated in a few favourite restaurants and nightclubs - but otherwise the early arrivals remained largely anonymous. Gradually that trickle turned СКАЧАТЬ