Russia's future ruling elite
I found this article about a year ago. Recent events (elections in December and March) once again made us think about the future of a once great country, which means about the future of our children and grandchildren. Who and how will determine their fate in the foreseeable future? And then I remembered this article, which I cite in full.
Friday, three in the morning, the shore of a narrow canal in Moscow behind the “House on the Embankment” - a huge apartment building built under Stalin for the nomenclature of the Communist Party, the house where the purges began. Black Hummer with chauffeurs, BMW with tinted windows and at least one Lamborghini ride slowly along the canal, past guards in black suits and headphones on their heads to get to the entrance to Paradise, a nightclub popular among wealthy Moscow teenagers.
Inside the kingdom of unrestrained hedonism. This is Moscow-style hedonism: blatantly chic, shameless, vulgarly bright, boastful. Long-legged models, painted in body art style, pose nude above the waist, next to a Formula 1 race car displayed only for tonight, and a few dozen Faberge eggs are sold (for 2 thousand pounds for piece). Flawlessly composed dancers, whose bodies are covered only with a film of baby oil and tiny bikinis, spin on a stand above the dance floor, where there is no room for people to push. On the upper tiers - private club rooms. The cheapest — a cramped six-seater cabin — costs £ 10 per night for 1200. A VIP-class office - a kitsch-style room with a private room and a shower - can be rented for 5500 pounds. This price includes drinks. Today all the rooms are occupied. In one of them, Andrew, the son of a wealthy businessman, celebrates his 17 anniversary with friends; his driver and bodyguard are waiting in the Mercedes on the street and watching DVDs to kill time.
Shrouded in mist of smoke, among bright laser beams and flashing lights, Andrei and his classmates smoke hookah and drink vodka and mojito with a volley. One of his girlfriends is a girl in a transparent top, openwork tights and diamond earrings, who, at most, look at 18 for years, drink champagne and take strawberries from a giant fruit dish. “Life is beautiful,” Andrei yells, trying to shout down loud music, while a lot of very young women and middle-aged men are dancing downstairs. - Just look! It is a paradise"? Where could be better than in Moscow? We have all. This is the best place in the world for fun. Of course, if you have money. But money is not a problem. ”
As if by request, a Russian pop song begins to sound, where it is said that life is good. The crowd falls into such frenzy that the guards are forced to withdraw two young girls. But even more shrill symbol of Moscow, where golden youth live, I find out a little later, at the bar counter. On a white T-shirt of an attractive young blonde who drinks a cocktail, a warning is embroidered around the bust: “No yacht. No plane. No money. No chance ”(“ No yacht, no plane, no money - no chance ”).
Moscow is experiencing an economic boom. According to the Russian edition of the magazine Forbes, there are now 110 dollar billionaires in Russia, and they live in Moscow more than in any other city in the world. If we talk about personal fortunes, then only in America there are more magnates than in Russia. Take into account more than 100 thousand multimillionaires, and you realize how much wealth has been accumulated in Russia - and all in all for 16 with a little years after the collapse of the communist regime. Perhaps, there is no country where such private capital would be brought together in such a short period.
Oligarchs - hungry young people of the Soviet era, the first to enter the insidious world of the post-communist business and creating multi-billion (in dollar terms) empires, settled down long ago. Most have children, and since in this country people get married - and often divorced - before, their offspring, as a rule, no longer walk under the table. Take, for example, Roman Abramovich, the owner of the Chelsea football club, which ranks third among the richest people in Russia. His fortune is estimated at 12 over billion pounds. At 41-year-old Abramovich has five children, and the eldest daughter is already in her teens.
Twenty years after Abramovich first went into business, and he started with rubber duckling, a new social phenomenon emerged in Russia that had not happened since the days of tsarism: the first generation that was born or brought up in wealthy families is growing up.
These children are surrounded by much greater luxury, and are also in much more greenhouse and weird conditions than the scions of wealthy families in other countries. The reason is not only that such fabulous wealth in private hands is something new for Russia since the Bolsheviks destroyed the local aristocracy in 1917, but also because, at least at the moment, money is in Russia mean little, until they boast shamelessly.
The credo of the communist ideology is long gone, so that rough and quick enrichment has become a new ideology, a new value system, a new religion. Capitalism, despised and condemned as the root of all evil for 70 years, is now perceived in Russia with the fervor of neophytes. But this cardinal change now arouses some doubts about the well-being of the Russian “golden youth”. Surrounded by privileges, fantastically rich, with great connections - are these rich kids the future ruling elite of Russia? And if so, how will they differ from their parents, who were born under the Soviet regime?
“We need to ask ourselves whether we are turning our own children into some spineless, vulnerable creatures living in a fantasy world, which has nothing to do with reality, with Russia behind the fences of our estates,” said the wife of a multimillionaire businessman , a mother of two children, a rare voice of dissent among the rich. By the way, this woman is a successful entrepreneur herself.
“I have almost no doubt that many children from rich families will either end up in drug treatment clinics by the 25 years, or fall into psychological dependence on psychoanalysts,” she says. “I am doing everything in my power to prevent this from happening to my children; ultimately, the fault lies with the parents. If you give a child everything you can imagine, how will he learn to fight for something, how will he develop ambition and energy in himself? ”
For the fast-growing Russian nouveau riche stratum, sending children to study in English boarding schools becomes just as necessary as owning a villa in Sardinia and a yacht sailing in the Caribbean. But for most, the road to Eaton, Harrow and Winchester starts at the Moscow School of Economics (MES). MES, founded just 15 years ago, is the elite of the elite high schools in Russia. Perhaps this is not the best school, but it is far ahead of all the others in popularity among the Moscow ruling elite. To send a child there is a sign gesture. Getting a child there is like becoming a member of a special club. In the end, the children of Abramovich and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, who is now serving a long prison term in Siberia, studied there. The children of Peter Aven, one of the first Russian oligarch bankers, also studied here - now they are in England.
For admission to school you need to pay 25 thousand pounds, but according to rumors, sometimes parents give and more - just to arrange a child. Tuition averages about 7 thousand pounds per year - this is pennies for any self-respecting rich Russian and only a small fraction of the cost of training a Russian child in the UK. The main thing here, parents of MES students say, is communication, since it’s almost impossible to get a child to this school without a recommendation from the right person.
September 1 in Russia begins the school year. This day, known as the Day of Knowledge, occupies an important place in the calendar of the country: parents, teachers and children come together to celebrate education.
As in Soviet times, children put on their most elegant clothes and bring flowers to teachers. Girls with colored ribbons in their hair are holding balloons. Teachers give heartfelt speeches to parents who are armed with cameras and video cameras. The culmination of the holiday is the moment when a child is chosen who will give the first school bell of the year.
In any Russian school 1 September is a special day, but at MESH it’s a real spectacle. At the entrance to the school for several hundred meters stretched street traffic jam, which, so to speak, pulls millions of dollars. Porsche Cayenne, Maserati and BMW limousines drive up, followed by SUVs with bodyguards. They deliver priceless toddlers. The healthy men-guards — some armed with machine guns, while others only with umbrellas to protect the owners from the rain — jump out of the cars and open the doors so that schoolchildren and schoolgirls — including seven-year-old kids — can solemnly enter the school gates. Some children carry gifts, others hardly drag huge compositions of flowers.
All dressed neat and elegant. For girls, the more bows, the better.
When a car with a driver, tinted windows and a blue flasher - the privilege of government employees - drives off from school, a slight panic reigns: the little girl remembers that she forgot her balls in the car. Her father gives the order to the bodyguard, who after a few seconds again resorts to the school with balloons. On the side of the bodyguard is a holster with a pistol. The last kids go to school. Bodyguards and chauffeurs are jostling at the gate, setting themselves up for a long wait.
“Somehow, at the festival, the teachers built new students on the stage and asked them to introduce themselves to everyone in the microphone,” Alina Pavlova recalls. Her 9-year-old kid is studying at MES and is now spending a week in the Maldives.
“Then they asked the children to tell how they spent their summer holidays. One said that he was in Sardinia, the other - that in Saint-Tropez, the third - in the Caribbean. Of course, they sailed on private yachts. I have to say that from the mouth of seven-year-olds, it sounded a bit strange. ”
In order to learn more about MES, I talked to Masha, the 13-year-old daughter of a government employee who, like most high-ranking Russian officials, also has a thriving company in parallel. Masha is not at all like a typical spoiled child from a rich family: she is shy, polite, speaks softly, but it quickly becomes clear that, despite her young age, privileges and fabulous luxury have long since become second nature to her.
She informs me that the next morning, when her spring break begins, she will be taken to the airport by car with a chauffeur. She goes to a big yacht in the Bahamas with a school friend and her parents. “Will you fly first class?” I ask naively. “No, on a private plane,” she replies as calmly as my daughter would have said about the day she spent at the playground nearby.
Masha's girlfriend, the daughter of a Russian industrialist, somehow threw a tantrum because she did not like the private jet that her parents had leased to go on a vacation. I was told that this stage was now overgrown with the help of a child psychologist.
Masha has been studying at MES since the age of seven. She explains that the most common dream among her school friends is to marry a multimillionaire. This is a significant change from Soviet times, when girls officially sought to become doctors or engineers, but secretly dreamed of becoming actresses who were then associated with a beautiful life.
Of course, in MES, not every child boasts papa's wealth, and many behave like ordinary children. But, as Masha explained, each class has its own clique of children “on the ponts”. “If you want to be accepted into their circle, you must follow strict rules,” says Masha. - The first prerequisite is expensive clothes from top designers. At school, it is perfectly normal when an 13-year-old girl walks with a handbag from Gucci or Prada, wears high-heeled shoes and dazzles. You can not do without a watch, instructed by precious stones. Most children have credit cards and at least a couple of 100 euro notes in their wallet. And, of course, everyone has a mobile phone, preferably an iPhone. Almost everyone has a personal governess, bodyguards and an armored car. ”
Two years ago, to celebrate his son's 14 anniversary, a certain Ukrainian tycoon sent his personal plane to Moscow, put the whole MES class where his son was studying, and brought everyone to Kiev for the weekend. Children lived in suites in the most expensive five-star hotel in the city and rode along the Dnieper on a private yacht. The boy's father could not join them: at that time he was in prison.
Trying to throw dust into one another’s eyes, demonstrating wealth as extravagantly as possible, parents sometimes spend tens of thousands of pounds on celebrating children's birthdays - for example, they hire a whole circus troupe. Usually, these families live on the Rublevo-Uspenskoye Highway, a winding road that runs from Moscow to the west between birch and pine trees. This area, known as Rublevka, is the Moscow equivalent of Beverly Hills. Here are the fenced estates of oligarchs, ministers, Kremlin officials. Forest areas along the highway are located behind metal fences 5-6 meters high, which are equipped with surveillance cameras and are patrolled around the clock by private security guards.
Where open fields once stretched, among which in some places were seen dilapidated dachas, now rises Barvikha Luxury Village, an elite shopping complex just a few minutes from Putin's dacha. There are Lamborghini and Ferrari showrooms. The Bentley showroom is said to sell one car a day. The complex has boutiques Gucci, Prada and Armani, as well as Dolce & Gabbana with a VIP fitting room trimmed with mink fur. There is an expensive restaurant nearby, from where 15-year-old Arianna, a girl from Rublyovka, at one time ordered sushi for herself every day, as she did not like the food in the canteen.
Even closer to the city, where Moscow begins, I once saw two kids slowly driving along the sidewalk in their pedal cars, the Ferrari and the Porsche, and two bodyguards in dark suits and a nanny quickly walked behind them.
According to Professor Boris Arkhipov, a child psychology specialist, this luxurious lifestyle makes Russian rich children vulnerable to a number of psychological problems. For about 10 years, Arkhipov worked as a consultant in MES and other elite high schools, watching the children of some of the richest Russian oligarchs.
“The problem is that in many cases parents are uncultured people, they only know the culture of money,” explains Arkhipov. - Children learn from their parents. If a father foul-heartedly scolds his subordinates, why not treat them in the same way with a nanny and a bodyguard? Many children have problems with discipline. They do not recognize the authority of adults. They live in a gilded cage, with a servant, but often not getting enough love from their parents, who are too busy — they run their business empires, then they have fun. These children have different ideas about real life. ”
“But the main and most common problem is that they have little energy. Why make efforts and strive for something when you were born in a shirt and everything is served to you on a gold platter? ”Notes Arkhipov.
Other sociologists call the little inhabitants of Rublevka "children because of the fence." They caution that the luxurious hothouse conditions of their life mean that it will be difficult for them to adapt to the real world with its problems, since, at best, they have little contact with children from other social strata.
Arkhipov said that at school, children often play in the classroom on a mobile phone or on a pocket game console, and when teachers confiscate these devices, they complain to their powerful parents. As an example of psychological manipulations resorted to by some children on the experience of Arkhipov, he recalled the incident in MES, when a teenage school girl threw herself on the neck of a teacher, who gave her a bad grade, and a friend filmed this moment on his mobile phone. According to Arkhipov, a complaint was filed on the basis of a compromising picture, and the teachers were dismissed.
“Once the mother of a girl who came to study at MES demanded to inform her of the names of all the boys in her daughter’s class, because, as she put it, she wanted to ensure that her daughter would find a rich husband from an early age,” said Arhipov. - The biggest problems are often experienced by children from less wealthy families. They are rich, but do not belong to the category of oligarchs. They find it harder to fit in on Wednesday, to keep up with children whose parents have private jets. ”
I don’t know how great the pressure of a group of peers is, but it’s hard to doubt that in Rublevka and in its vicinity parents are very proud to teach their children to expensive things from childhood. Recently, at a dinner in a wealthy Russian family, I saw the little daughter of a man in the top ten Russian billionaires fed with a spoon of black caviar - which, however, is much cheaper here than in London.
In another case, I was struck by the developed sense of fashion in the eight-year-old daughter of friends living in the estate on Rublevka: she politely asked her mother to revile her black handbag from Prada to go to the Kremlin premiere. I also saw this girl in solemn circumstances with a Chanel pearl necklace around her neck. And recently I came across photographs of a children's swing decorated with plates of gold.
Abramovich’s children are probably used to relaxing on his 377-foot-long Pelorus yacht - and according to some reports, he will soon add to his flotilla The larger yacht is another 550-foot Eclipse. It is believed that Eclipse cost 200 million pounds. According to rumors, there are two helipads on its deck. The ship will soon pass sea trials at sea. It will become the largest private yacht in the world.
Abramovich and his family are not only swimming, but flying with chic. The largest billionaire among private jets is a specially redesigned Boeing-737, originally designed for 360 passengers. The contrast between the childhood of the tycoon’s offspring and his own is extremely high: after all, Abramovich was orphaned in early childhood and grew up in the house of his uncle in the inhospitable republic of Komi, known only for its natural resources and Soviet-era camps.
The same can be said about Mikhail Fridman, who now occupies the seventh largest state (10,4 billion pounds) in Russia, is the father of two daughters. In his student years, Friedman could barely get himself some clothes, and, as he recalls, riding a chic was a video recorder, smuggled into the USSR by the high-ranking father of his classmate.
The first business of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the area of business was a messy cafe for students at Moscow University, and Oleg Deripaska, who grew up with his grandmother and grandfather (his mother gave him up for education at an early age), remained dead after their death: their home was confiscated by the state. And this is not an exception: many Russian millionaires tell colorful stories about your way from rags to riches. Of course, the children of the Soviet nomenklatura were in a privileged position, they lived in spacious apartments and cottages far from the communal apartments of the proletariat, ate products that their parents bought in stores specifically designed for the party elite, and studied in the best schools. But to find something similar to the chic excesses of today's “golden youth”, you need to mentally return to the days of tsarism.
If the majority of 110 Russian billionaires and their less wealthy multimillionaire counterparts have a common trait, then this is probably icy determination. Unlike their children, who inherited wealth, these people made a fortune in the merciless and deadly times of the early stage of “business” development in Russia, when they got rid of their rivals, hiring killers, and only the smartest, most cunning and possessing the best connections made their way up.
Since fortunes made themselves at record speed, often through dubious transactions concluded in conditions of lawlessness, Russian tycoons can be blamed for anything other than lack of energy or a visionary gift. But it is precisely these two features that now may be difficult to find for their children, nurtured in ruble cocoons.
They ski in Courchevel and bathe, jumping into the water from yachts in Sardinia and Saint-Tropez. They never went down to the Moscow metro. If they want to have a party, they rent a whole mansion for the weekend. And, by the way, some young girls from Olga's circle of friends believe that sniffing cocaine is the best way to keep a slim figure.
“The children of rich people, with whom I am friends, are all completely good people,” says Olga. - They are kind, generous, open. But they have a lot of problems, they periodically suffer from bouts of depression and severe apathy. The reason is simple. They have everything, but they have not achieved anything themselves. And they are smart enough to understand what it means. They have no purpose in life, and that is enough to make everyone unhappy. I call them "kids-vegetables."
Leaving Paradise, leaving behind a number of luxury cars heading for the club, I say to myself that, as in many other respects, in Russia after the fundamental social, political and economic changes of the last 20 years, at least one a generation so that the situation returns to normal, so that everything falls into place and extremes disappear.
According to my friends, some intelligent billionaire parents have already expressed serious concern about raising their children and are tightening the rules for them. Other wealthy parents with whom I know have not turned their children into spoiled scum, although they raise them in luxury.
Having reached the end of the channel, I reflect on the fact that it is impossible to imagine a less inappropriate background for the hedonism of “Paradise” than “House on the Embankment”. Once it was the most prestigious place of residence for representatives of the Stalinist elite and their families, and later the very place from which they began to disappear and go to Siberia, when the ruler feverishly exacerbated paranoia; in this building, generals and party leaders, who knew that their time had come, went to bed without taking off their shoes, ready for the secret police to take them away tonight.
After 70 years, while the children of Moscow rich people have fun to the fullest until the morning, it is obvious that some of them will one day become the head of the Russian business and political system, while others are almost certainly doomed to stay in luxurious drug treatment clinics. However, one way or another, it is extremely unlikely that they will share the fate of many of their once privileged ancestors who lived in the neighboring house. So something is changing.
How much time must pass before the scions of the Russian super-rich choke on their own excesses?
Mark Franchetti, "The Times"
Mark Franchetti, "The Times"
Friday, three in the morning, the shore of a narrow canal in Moscow behind the “House on the Embankment” - a huge apartment building built under Stalin for the nomenclature of the Communist Party, the house where the purges began. Black Hummer with chauffeurs, BMW with tinted windows and at least one Lamborghini ride slowly along the canal, past guards in black suits and headphones on their heads to get to the entrance to Paradise, a nightclub popular among wealthy Moscow teenagers.
Inside the kingdom of unrestrained hedonism. This is Moscow-style hedonism: blatantly chic, shameless, vulgarly bright, boastful. Long-legged models, painted in body art style, pose nude above the waist, next to a Formula 1 race car displayed only for tonight, and a few dozen Faberge eggs are sold (for 2 thousand pounds for piece). Flawlessly composed dancers, whose bodies are covered only with a film of baby oil and tiny bikinis, spin on a stand above the dance floor, where there is no room for people to push. On the upper tiers - private club rooms. The cheapest — a cramped six-seater cabin — costs £ 10 per night for 1200. A VIP-class office - a kitsch-style room with a private room and a shower - can be rented for 5500 pounds. This price includes drinks. Today all the rooms are occupied. In one of them, Andrew, the son of a wealthy businessman, celebrates his 17 anniversary with friends; his driver and bodyguard are waiting in the Mercedes on the street and watching DVDs to kill time.
Shrouded in mist of smoke, among bright laser beams and flashing lights, Andrei and his classmates smoke hookah and drink vodka and mojito with a volley. One of his girlfriends is a girl in a transparent top, openwork tights and diamond earrings, who, at most, look at 18 for years, drink champagne and take strawberries from a giant fruit dish. “Life is beautiful,” Andrei yells, trying to shout down loud music, while a lot of very young women and middle-aged men are dancing downstairs. - Just look! It is a paradise"? Where could be better than in Moscow? We have all. This is the best place in the world for fun. Of course, if you have money. But money is not a problem. ”
As if by request, a Russian pop song begins to sound, where it is said that life is good. The crowd falls into such frenzy that the guards are forced to withdraw two young girls. But even more shrill symbol of Moscow, where golden youth live, I find out a little later, at the bar counter. On a white T-shirt of an attractive young blonde who drinks a cocktail, a warning is embroidered around the bust: “No yacht. No plane. No money. No chance ”(“ No yacht, no plane, no money - no chance ”).
Moscow is experiencing an economic boom. According to the Russian edition of the magazine Forbes, there are now 110 dollar billionaires in Russia, and they live in Moscow more than in any other city in the world. If we talk about personal fortunes, then only in America there are more magnates than in Russia. Take into account more than 100 thousand multimillionaires, and you realize how much wealth has been accumulated in Russia - and all in all for 16 with a little years after the collapse of the communist regime. Perhaps, there is no country where such private capital would be brought together in such a short period.
Oligarchs - hungry young people of the Soviet era, the first to enter the insidious world of the post-communist business and creating multi-billion (in dollar terms) empires, settled down long ago. Most have children, and since in this country people get married - and often divorced - before, their offspring, as a rule, no longer walk under the table. Take, for example, Roman Abramovich, the owner of the Chelsea football club, which ranks third among the richest people in Russia. His fortune is estimated at 12 over billion pounds. At 41-year-old Abramovich has five children, and the eldest daughter is already in her teens.
Twenty years after Abramovich first went into business, and he started with rubber duckling, a new social phenomenon emerged in Russia that had not happened since the days of tsarism: the first generation that was born or brought up in wealthy families is growing up.
These children are surrounded by much greater luxury, and are also in much more greenhouse and weird conditions than the scions of wealthy families in other countries. The reason is not only that such fabulous wealth in private hands is something new for Russia since the Bolsheviks destroyed the local aristocracy in 1917, but also because, at least at the moment, money is in Russia mean little, until they boast shamelessly.
The credo of the communist ideology is long gone, so that rough and quick enrichment has become a new ideology, a new value system, a new religion. Capitalism, despised and condemned as the root of all evil for 70 years, is now perceived in Russia with the fervor of neophytes. But this cardinal change now arouses some doubts about the well-being of the Russian “golden youth”. Surrounded by privileges, fantastically rich, with great connections - are these rich kids the future ruling elite of Russia? And if so, how will they differ from their parents, who were born under the Soviet regime?
“We need to ask ourselves whether we are turning our own children into some spineless, vulnerable creatures living in a fantasy world, which has nothing to do with reality, with Russia behind the fences of our estates,” said the wife of a multimillionaire businessman , a mother of two children, a rare voice of dissent among the rich. By the way, this woman is a successful entrepreneur herself.
“I have almost no doubt that many children from rich families will either end up in drug treatment clinics by the 25 years, or fall into psychological dependence on psychoanalysts,” she says. “I am doing everything in my power to prevent this from happening to my children; ultimately, the fault lies with the parents. If you give a child everything you can imagine, how will he learn to fight for something, how will he develop ambition and energy in himself? ”
For the fast-growing Russian nouveau riche stratum, sending children to study in English boarding schools becomes just as necessary as owning a villa in Sardinia and a yacht sailing in the Caribbean. But for most, the road to Eaton, Harrow and Winchester starts at the Moscow School of Economics (MES). MES, founded just 15 years ago, is the elite of the elite high schools in Russia. Perhaps this is not the best school, but it is far ahead of all the others in popularity among the Moscow ruling elite. To send a child there is a sign gesture. Getting a child there is like becoming a member of a special club. In the end, the children of Abramovich and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, who is now serving a long prison term in Siberia, studied there. The children of Peter Aven, one of the first Russian oligarch bankers, also studied here - now they are in England.
For admission to school you need to pay 25 thousand pounds, but according to rumors, sometimes parents give and more - just to arrange a child. Tuition averages about 7 thousand pounds per year - this is pennies for any self-respecting rich Russian and only a small fraction of the cost of training a Russian child in the UK. The main thing here, parents of MES students say, is communication, since it’s almost impossible to get a child to this school without a recommendation from the right person.
September 1 in Russia begins the school year. This day, known as the Day of Knowledge, occupies an important place in the calendar of the country: parents, teachers and children come together to celebrate education.
As in Soviet times, children put on their most elegant clothes and bring flowers to teachers. Girls with colored ribbons in their hair are holding balloons. Teachers give heartfelt speeches to parents who are armed with cameras and video cameras. The culmination of the holiday is the moment when a child is chosen who will give the first school bell of the year.
In any Russian school 1 September is a special day, but at MESH it’s a real spectacle. At the entrance to the school for several hundred meters stretched street traffic jam, which, so to speak, pulls millions of dollars. Porsche Cayenne, Maserati and BMW limousines drive up, followed by SUVs with bodyguards. They deliver priceless toddlers. The healthy men-guards — some armed with machine guns, while others only with umbrellas to protect the owners from the rain — jump out of the cars and open the doors so that schoolchildren and schoolgirls — including seven-year-old kids — can solemnly enter the school gates. Some children carry gifts, others hardly drag huge compositions of flowers.
All dressed neat and elegant. For girls, the more bows, the better.
When a car with a driver, tinted windows and a blue flasher - the privilege of government employees - drives off from school, a slight panic reigns: the little girl remembers that she forgot her balls in the car. Her father gives the order to the bodyguard, who after a few seconds again resorts to the school with balloons. On the side of the bodyguard is a holster with a pistol. The last kids go to school. Bodyguards and chauffeurs are jostling at the gate, setting themselves up for a long wait.
“Somehow, at the festival, the teachers built new students on the stage and asked them to introduce themselves to everyone in the microphone,” Alina Pavlova recalls. Her 9-year-old kid is studying at MES and is now spending a week in the Maldives.
“Then they asked the children to tell how they spent their summer holidays. One said that he was in Sardinia, the other - that in Saint-Tropez, the third - in the Caribbean. Of course, they sailed on private yachts. I have to say that from the mouth of seven-year-olds, it sounded a bit strange. ”
In order to learn more about MES, I talked to Masha, the 13-year-old daughter of a government employee who, like most high-ranking Russian officials, also has a thriving company in parallel. Masha is not at all like a typical spoiled child from a rich family: she is shy, polite, speaks softly, but it quickly becomes clear that, despite her young age, privileges and fabulous luxury have long since become second nature to her.
She informs me that the next morning, when her spring break begins, she will be taken to the airport by car with a chauffeur. She goes to a big yacht in the Bahamas with a school friend and her parents. “Will you fly first class?” I ask naively. “No, on a private plane,” she replies as calmly as my daughter would have said about the day she spent at the playground nearby.
Masha's girlfriend, the daughter of a Russian industrialist, somehow threw a tantrum because she did not like the private jet that her parents had leased to go on a vacation. I was told that this stage was now overgrown with the help of a child psychologist.
Masha has been studying at MES since the age of seven. She explains that the most common dream among her school friends is to marry a multimillionaire. This is a significant change from Soviet times, when girls officially sought to become doctors or engineers, but secretly dreamed of becoming actresses who were then associated with a beautiful life.
Of course, in MES, not every child boasts papa's wealth, and many behave like ordinary children. But, as Masha explained, each class has its own clique of children “on the ponts”. “If you want to be accepted into their circle, you must follow strict rules,” says Masha. - The first prerequisite is expensive clothes from top designers. At school, it is perfectly normal when an 13-year-old girl walks with a handbag from Gucci or Prada, wears high-heeled shoes and dazzles. You can not do without a watch, instructed by precious stones. Most children have credit cards and at least a couple of 100 euro notes in their wallet. And, of course, everyone has a mobile phone, preferably an iPhone. Almost everyone has a personal governess, bodyguards and an armored car. ”
Two years ago, to celebrate his son's 14 anniversary, a certain Ukrainian tycoon sent his personal plane to Moscow, put the whole MES class where his son was studying, and brought everyone to Kiev for the weekend. Children lived in suites in the most expensive five-star hotel in the city and rode along the Dnieper on a private yacht. The boy's father could not join them: at that time he was in prison.
Trying to throw dust into one another’s eyes, demonstrating wealth as extravagantly as possible, parents sometimes spend tens of thousands of pounds on celebrating children's birthdays - for example, they hire a whole circus troupe. Usually, these families live on the Rublevo-Uspenskoye Highway, a winding road that runs from Moscow to the west between birch and pine trees. This area, known as Rublevka, is the Moscow equivalent of Beverly Hills. Here are the fenced estates of oligarchs, ministers, Kremlin officials. Forest areas along the highway are located behind metal fences 5-6 meters high, which are equipped with surveillance cameras and are patrolled around the clock by private security guards.
Where open fields once stretched, among which in some places were seen dilapidated dachas, now rises Barvikha Luxury Village, an elite shopping complex just a few minutes from Putin's dacha. There are Lamborghini and Ferrari showrooms. The Bentley showroom is said to sell one car a day. The complex has boutiques Gucci, Prada and Armani, as well as Dolce & Gabbana with a VIP fitting room trimmed with mink fur. There is an expensive restaurant nearby, from where 15-year-old Arianna, a girl from Rublyovka, at one time ordered sushi for herself every day, as she did not like the food in the canteen.
Even closer to the city, where Moscow begins, I once saw two kids slowly driving along the sidewalk in their pedal cars, the Ferrari and the Porsche, and two bodyguards in dark suits and a nanny quickly walked behind them.
According to Professor Boris Arkhipov, a child psychology specialist, this luxurious lifestyle makes Russian rich children vulnerable to a number of psychological problems. For about 10 years, Arkhipov worked as a consultant in MES and other elite high schools, watching the children of some of the richest Russian oligarchs.
“The problem is that in many cases parents are uncultured people, they only know the culture of money,” explains Arkhipov. - Children learn from their parents. If a father foul-heartedly scolds his subordinates, why not treat them in the same way with a nanny and a bodyguard? Many children have problems with discipline. They do not recognize the authority of adults. They live in a gilded cage, with a servant, but often not getting enough love from their parents, who are too busy — they run their business empires, then they have fun. These children have different ideas about real life. ”
“But the main and most common problem is that they have little energy. Why make efforts and strive for something when you were born in a shirt and everything is served to you on a gold platter? ”Notes Arkhipov.
Other sociologists call the little inhabitants of Rublevka "children because of the fence." They caution that the luxurious hothouse conditions of their life mean that it will be difficult for them to adapt to the real world with its problems, since, at best, they have little contact with children from other social strata.
Arkhipov said that at school, children often play in the classroom on a mobile phone or on a pocket game console, and when teachers confiscate these devices, they complain to their powerful parents. As an example of psychological manipulations resorted to by some children on the experience of Arkhipov, he recalled the incident in MES, when a teenage school girl threw herself on the neck of a teacher, who gave her a bad grade, and a friend filmed this moment on his mobile phone. According to Arkhipov, a complaint was filed on the basis of a compromising picture, and the teachers were dismissed.
“Once the mother of a girl who came to study at MES demanded to inform her of the names of all the boys in her daughter’s class, because, as she put it, she wanted to ensure that her daughter would find a rich husband from an early age,” said Arhipov. - The biggest problems are often experienced by children from less wealthy families. They are rich, but do not belong to the category of oligarchs. They find it harder to fit in on Wednesday, to keep up with children whose parents have private jets. ”
I don’t know how great the pressure of a group of peers is, but it’s hard to doubt that in Rublevka and in its vicinity parents are very proud to teach their children to expensive things from childhood. Recently, at a dinner in a wealthy Russian family, I saw the little daughter of a man in the top ten Russian billionaires fed with a spoon of black caviar - which, however, is much cheaper here than in London.
In another case, I was struck by the developed sense of fashion in the eight-year-old daughter of friends living in the estate on Rublevka: she politely asked her mother to revile her black handbag from Prada to go to the Kremlin premiere. I also saw this girl in solemn circumstances with a Chanel pearl necklace around her neck. And recently I came across photographs of a children's swing decorated with plates of gold.
Abramovich’s children are probably used to relaxing on his 377-foot-long Pelorus yacht - and according to some reports, he will soon add to his flotilla The larger yacht is another 550-foot Eclipse. It is believed that Eclipse cost 200 million pounds. According to rumors, there are two helipads on its deck. The ship will soon pass sea trials at sea. It will become the largest private yacht in the world.
Abramovich and his family are not only swimming, but flying with chic. The largest billionaire among private jets is a specially redesigned Boeing-737, originally designed for 360 passengers. The contrast between the childhood of the tycoon’s offspring and his own is extremely high: after all, Abramovich was orphaned in early childhood and grew up in the house of his uncle in the inhospitable republic of Komi, known only for its natural resources and Soviet-era camps.
The same can be said about Mikhail Fridman, who now occupies the seventh largest state (10,4 billion pounds) in Russia, is the father of two daughters. In his student years, Friedman could barely get himself some clothes, and, as he recalls, riding a chic was a video recorder, smuggled into the USSR by the high-ranking father of his classmate.
The first business of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the area of business was a messy cafe for students at Moscow University, and Oleg Deripaska, who grew up with his grandmother and grandfather (his mother gave him up for education at an early age), remained dead after their death: their home was confiscated by the state. And this is not an exception: many Russian millionaires tell colorful stories about your way from rags to riches. Of course, the children of the Soviet nomenklatura were in a privileged position, they lived in spacious apartments and cottages far from the communal apartments of the proletariat, ate products that their parents bought in stores specifically designed for the party elite, and studied in the best schools. But to find something similar to the chic excesses of today's “golden youth”, you need to mentally return to the days of tsarism.
If the majority of 110 Russian billionaires and their less wealthy multimillionaire counterparts have a common trait, then this is probably icy determination. Unlike their children, who inherited wealth, these people made a fortune in the merciless and deadly times of the early stage of “business” development in Russia, when they got rid of their rivals, hiring killers, and only the smartest, most cunning and possessing the best connections made their way up.
Since fortunes made themselves at record speed, often through dubious transactions concluded in conditions of lawlessness, Russian tycoons can be blamed for anything other than lack of energy or a visionary gift. But it is precisely these two features that now may be difficult to find for their children, nurtured in ruble cocoons.
They ski in Courchevel and bathe, jumping into the water from yachts in Sardinia and Saint-Tropez. They never went down to the Moscow metro. If they want to have a party, they rent a whole mansion for the weekend. And, by the way, some young girls from Olga's circle of friends believe that sniffing cocaine is the best way to keep a slim figure.
“The children of rich people, with whom I am friends, are all completely good people,” says Olga. - They are kind, generous, open. But they have a lot of problems, they periodically suffer from bouts of depression and severe apathy. The reason is simple. They have everything, but they have not achieved anything themselves. And they are smart enough to understand what it means. They have no purpose in life, and that is enough to make everyone unhappy. I call them "kids-vegetables."
Leaving Paradise, leaving behind a number of luxury cars heading for the club, I say to myself that, as in many other respects, in Russia after the fundamental social, political and economic changes of the last 20 years, at least one a generation so that the situation returns to normal, so that everything falls into place and extremes disappear.
According to my friends, some intelligent billionaire parents have already expressed serious concern about raising their children and are tightening the rules for them. Other wealthy parents with whom I know have not turned their children into spoiled scum, although they raise them in luxury.
Having reached the end of the channel, I reflect on the fact that it is impossible to imagine a less inappropriate background for the hedonism of “Paradise” than “House on the Embankment”. Once it was the most prestigious place of residence for representatives of the Stalinist elite and their families, and later the very place from which they began to disappear and go to Siberia, when the ruler feverishly exacerbated paranoia; in this building, generals and party leaders, who knew that their time had come, went to bed without taking off their shoes, ready for the secret police to take them away tonight.
After 70 years, while the children of Moscow rich people have fun to the fullest until the morning, it is obvious that some of them will one day become the head of the Russian business and political system, while others are almost certainly doomed to stay in luxurious drug treatment clinics. However, one way or another, it is extremely unlikely that they will share the fate of many of their once privileged ancestors who lived in the neighboring house. So something is changing.
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