‘It was absolutely the love story of my life’
Countess Alexandra Tolstoy tells Rosa Silverman where it all went wrong with the man they called ‘the Kremlin’s banker’
Compared to most, Countess Alexandra Tolstoy’s coronavirus lockdown period is looking pretty rosy, truth be told. Holed up at her parents’ home in rural Oxfordshire, the writer and her three children appear to be enjoying an Enid Blyton-esque existence in the great outdoors, without fear of infection.
As Tolstoy wrote on Instagram recently: “Days of feeding chickens, playing kick the can, reading Alice in Wonderland, making biscuits and sleeping on the grass are definitely SILVER LININGS.”
The 46 year-old countess – daughter of the author Count Nikolai Tolstoy and distant relative of the War and Peace novelist Leo Tolstoy – is asthmatic and believes it likely that if she caught the virus, she’d require hospital treatment. As a single mother to Maria, Ivan and Aliosha, aged eight to 11, she needs her parents on hand, just in case.
But if Tolstoy’s pandemic experience seems pretty peaceful so far, it’s fair to say all is not as picture-perfect as it seems.
Yes, the London home from which she has escaped to the country is a multimillion-pound Chelsea town house – two former artists’ studios knocked together – to which she will return once the lockdown has ended. But the house is on the market, and when it sells, she will be evicted and the money kept by the Russian government.
Tolstoy’s estranged partner, and father of her children, is Sergei Pugachev – a billionaire oligarch once known as “the Kremlin’s banker” and close friends with the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. It would be some understatement to say he is now firmly out of favour.
Pugachev’s wealth was generated from an empire that included St Petersburg shipyards, Red Square properties, and one of the world’s largest coal mines.
But after his bank, Mezhprom, collapsed in 2010, Russia’s state deposit agency, the DIA, accused him of siphoning off millions of dollars from a state bail-out and pursued him through the High Court in London, succeeding in securing a worldwide freeze on his assets in 2014.
Fearing for his life, Pugachev fled the UK for France, where he has citizenship, while Tolstoy remained in Britain with the children – in financial freefall.
If not quite “riches to rags”, it’s a novel-worthy tale in its own right, that is told tonight in a new BBC documentary, The Countess and the Russian Billionaire.
Filmed over five years, it offers an intimate peek inside the couple’s former life of unimaginable luxury – and charts the hair-raising fall from grace that followed, along with the collapse of their relationship.
“It’s so weird; when you look back you think, ‘Oh my God, how did that actually happen to me?’ ” Tolstoy says of the excesses of her old life when we speak over the phone.
She was 34 when she met Pugachev, 10 years her senior, while teaching English in Moscow in 2008. “It was absolutely the love story of my life,” says the countess, who had made a previous unlikely match, by marrying a penniless Uzbek horseman called Shamil Galimzyanov in 2003.
Meeting Pugachev was the “catalyst” for the end of that marriage: “He was absolutely magnetic, I can’t explain – a force of nature,” she says. “He was charming, funny and selfdeprecating. He felt, to me, like a very family-oriented person. He was clever, sophisticated and fun, and I felt like I could talk to him about anything. I felt, ‘this is my person, this is my rock’.”
For a while, she enjoyed a fairytale existence of private jets, multiple luxurious homes (a French chateau, a 200-acre estate in Herefordshire and a $40 million – £32 million – villa in St Barts) and enormous wealth. Near the start of the documentary, entary, in footage filmed several years rs ago, she shows us her handbag dbag collection. Confessing sing to a weakness for Chanel, nel, she explains that the bags ags have been “filed” by her r “amazing housekeeper.”
Now, the bags are re long gone – and she e says her relationship hip with Pugachev began gan to unravel even before the cameras s arrived, after a row over the last-minute cancellation of her long-planned 40th birthday party y in the South of France. e.
She had realised d by this point he wasn’t going to marry her, and following the th row, had something of a “nervous “nerv breakdown” and flew back to Eng England to her parents’ house. “I w was so frightened. I had three th children under four, I had nowhere nowh to go, no money.” mone
Yet even though she knew h her relationship with Pu Pugachev was “doomed”, “doom it rumbled back ba on: “I was like an automaton. I never thought I could get out of it.” In 2016, however, h Pugachev a was found guilty of contempt of court by a High Court judge for breaching a number of court orders related to the litigation battle being waged against him through the British justice system by the DIA.
A warrant was issued for his arrest, but he had already fled the country – saying later, in an interview, that he’d been receiving death threats from Russia since 2011 (a claim that has been denied).
Tolstoy only found out where he’d gone, 10 days later, when she “woke up to banging on the door. It was [a lawyer representing] the Russian government and they said they had a court order to raid our house. [Then] I discovered he was in France.”
She initially took the family to join Pugachev in his Côte d’azur chateau, but claims that he locked himself in with the children and hid her passport. Fearful that she was being manipulated, she managed to return home, where Pugachev cut her off financially, she claims. Pregnant with their fourth child when he left, she
‘I woke up to a banging on the door – it was the Russian government’
subsequently suffered a miscarriage.
“I do wonder if I should have got out sooner but it was very difficult,” she reflects. Pugachev occasionally still sends her emails, but she doesn’t know if she will ever see him again. “He can’t come to the UK. It’s very complicated.”
Going it alone doesn’t seem to have been easy, either. “I do get very scared in many different ways: financially, because we don’t really have any security at all; I have three children who depend on me emotionally, financially, psychologically. We know we’re going to be evicted, we just don’t know when.”
For years, she suffered terrible anxiety, insomnia and panic attacks, but the documentary shows the return of the independent and adventurous spirit that has carried her through life, so far: “When I’m pushed into a corner, I feel that’s when I really perform, and I’ve drawn on huge reserves of energy I never knew I had.”
She is now selling off the contents of her designer wardrobe. “But I feel I made the right decision, because we’re free,” she says.
“My life hasn’t been at all universal, but the theme is universal: that in times of crisis we do have a source of strength none of us could imagine we have. We can all be resourceful in ways we would never expect.”
The Countess and the Russian Billionaire is on BBC Two tonight at 9pm