The English rose who fears Putin wants to kill her family
She wed a Cossack horseman —then dumped him for a billionaire dubbed the Kremlin’s banker. Now Alexandra Tolstoy’s fairy tale has turned to terror
SITTING in an airy West london drawing room decorated with exquisite good taste, Alexandra Tolstoy is busy telling me about her next house: a £12 million pile in Battersea that used to belong to the Forbes media family.
Meanwhile, her three blond children are having breakfast next door with one of the three nannies who ensure they grow up trilingual, speaking English, French and Russian.
It’s vital they have a good grasp of French, because london is just for term-time, while holidays are spent in a Belle Epoque chateau overlooking Nice in the south of France, where they have a Bond- style aluminium yacht, which boasts a grand piano in its Art-Deco interior.
This elegant blonde from Oxfordshire would seem as far from the breadline — or indeed any human misery — as it’s possible to be. yet Alexandra claims otherwise. The reason for giving this interview, she says, is to let the world know that she believes herself and her family to be in grave danger.
Every day, she says, she lives in fear for their lives after Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly appropriated $10 billion (£5.9 million) of her Russian oligarch lover’s fortune.
A boarding- school beauty — and distant relative of the great Russian author leo Tolstoy — who caused a sensation by briefly marrying a penniless Cossack horseman, Alexandra last hit the headlines in September when she was caught up in an unseemly court battle in Russia with said ex-husband.
In the end, a Russian judge rejected his bid to overturn a post-nuptial agreement that gave Alexandra ownership of the £250,000 one-bedroom Moscow flat where he still lives.
It’s a battle that might seem somewhat petty, considering the opulence surrounding her. Why on earth would a billionaire’s partner care about such small change?
Several reasons, as it turns out. One is the chill wind blowing her way from Russia after her lover, the bearded oligarch, Sergei Pugachev — once known as the Kremlin’s banker — spectacularly fell out with his once close friend, Vladimir Putin.
Another is that, apart from a cottage in Oxfordshire and a sporadic income from work — she is currently acting as ambassador for a Polish fashion label, Boho — the flat is all that she has in her own right.
Despite her famous name and enviable connections, there seems to be little family money — indeed her father was once made bankrupt.
Alexandra met her Uzbek ex-husband Shamil Galimzyanov during a wild, nomadic decade during which she went on extreme expeditions to China, Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan, traversing thousands of miles on horseback.
She spent months living under canvas, surviving on yogurt with wild rhubarb and rice with onions. She wrote books and became a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
For her last television series, in 2009, Horse People With Alexandra Tolstoy, she moved in with remote horsey communities across the world.
I wonder if sometimes she hankers after those days galloping across the plains of Russia and sleeping under the stars, rather than living in the bullet-proof gilded cage she now finds herself in.
For look closer at her current apparent idyll and Alexandra’s concern over her safety, and that of her angelic- looking children, is evident everywhere.
ABURly young Russian security man opens the door. Another taciturn Russian man makes the coffee. Alexandra is adamant that I don’t disclose even the vaguest hint of the area in which she lives in london.
She never discusses travel arrangements on the phone in case someone is listening in. And although she describes herself as a Russian emigre and her partner was once Putin’s greatest ally, neither of them has dared to set foot in Moscow for three years — so fearful are they that they will be imprisoned or killed.
Tolstoy is nothing if not adventurous, but it seems that this latest adventure might be a little nailbiting, even for her.
Not for her the Fulham or Wiltshire life of her contemporaries at Downe House — the Berkshire school the Duchess of Cambridge once briefly attended — or the more straightforward recreational activities of most of her Edinburgh University friends.
During her gap year before university, Alexandra cemented her longstanding passion for Russia, which resulted in her swapping her philosophy course for Russian.
Her father Count Nikolai’s branch of the Tolstoy family arrived in Britain in the Twenties, and it’s hard to resist the idea that Alexandra — part English rose, part exotic emigre — read a little too much leo Tolstoy at a young age, and let those stories of love and adventure go to her head.
She and her ex-husband lived in her Moscow flat, where she gave English lessons — most notably to Pugachev, 51, the industrial oligarch who is now her partner and the father of her three children.
The deeply religious Pugachev was the man who ignited Putin’s career in St Petersburg by introducing him to the daughter of former Russian President Boris yeltsin.
PUGACHEV was once known as the ‘ Kremlin’s cashier’ because of his closeness to Putin and the fact that his bank, Mejprom-bank looked after the money of Putin’s inner circle. But, like some Tudor courtier, he fell out of favour in 2010 and was eventually forced to flee the country.
‘Sergei left Russia in the beginning of 2011,’ Alexandra explains. ‘He had resigned as a senator because they had started expropriating his assets, initially a building in Red Square which he was turning into a hotel. He’d spent millions on it, but one day it was taken over by the federal security guard service, who safeguard the president.’
Who are ‘ they’, exactly, I ask. ‘Different people, but unless it’s done with the approval of Putin, it doesn’t happen — and if he doesn’t want it to happen, it won’t.’
Having quit as a senator, Pugachev lost immunity against prosecution in Putin’s courts. Things turned more sour when he sold a coal mine in Russia. The money he was due never materialised.
‘It’s not so simple as to steal something — that would be too obvious. They destroyed the mine by revoking its licence and, before that, cancelling the finance of the new railway nearby. It was an expropriation plan — the buyer had no intention of paying.
‘The same thing happened with his shipping yards, which were taken for less than they were worth. Putin himself gave a speech there, basically denigrating Sergei, which in Russia is code for getting rid of him. It’s like the show trials under Stalin.
‘They turn on him and accuse him of things to justify what’s happened.’
During the global financial crisis, Sergei’s bank, Mejprombank had gone bust owing £600 million. Russia claims to be recovering the money; Alexandra says they are stealing it by undervaluing his assets, and that the bank went bust because it was the only one refused a government loan.
Things reached crisis point last Christmas when an international arrest warrant — for fraud — was issued through Interpol. Pugachev was on the front page of every Russian newspaper.
‘Miraculously Sergei managed to quash it all, which hasn’t happened before. The warrant was completely illegal. But we don’t know when it’ll come up again, because they’re not going to let it go.’
The Russian press (not, it must be emphasised, a free one) claims the arrest warrant was only withdrawn for technical reasons — namely, that they got his address wrong.
Certainly, the law firm in charge of recovering Mejprombank money seem determined to pursue Pugachev’s personal assets.
Given that Pugachev was so close to Putin in his 20s and 30s, what on earth went wrong?
Alexandra says: ‘All the people close to Putin now really kowtow to him, and they are not politicians but money management people, which is why I think the Ukraine sanctions are such a good idea. He has more than
enough already but money is like a drug — there’s never enough.
‘Plus Sergei, you see, is very independent. And he knows a lot, which is quite compromising. It was also a big problem when he started investing in assets abroad — such as Hediard ( a French luxury food shop), France Soir (a nowdefunct newspaper), and David Linley (Viscount Linley’s luxury goods business —Pugachev has since sold his stake). And being with me didn’t help either. There is actually a law that a senator cannot marry a foreigner.
‘You cannot underestimate the ill-will in Russia towards the West.’
Foreign investments, and even a relationship with an Englishwoman, are seen as a betrayal in Putin’s realm. It really does sound like some ancient royal court, with bloody beheadings, intrigue and once-trusted favourites suddenly being cast out.
‘It is as childish and playgroundish as that,’ says Alexandra. But there is nothing childish about the climate of fear in which she now lives. London, she says, is the safest place on earth for oligarchs because of our extradition policy, whereby we will send back only those we are sure will receive a fair trial.
But as has been shown by the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with radioactive polonium in London in 2006, the gunning down of Russian businessman German Gorbuntsov in Canary Wharf in March 2012, and even, perhaps, the unexplained death of Pugachev’s friend Boris Berezovsky in Berkshire in March 2013, Russian vendettas can spill over on to the streets of Britain in deadly fashion.
This, rather than the money that has been taken from her lover, is Alexandra’s concern. She admits the family will not actually go bust themselves.
As she says: ‘Nobody needs ten billion anyway!’ She won’t put a figure on Pugachev’s current wealth, but he still has other investments, including an American business, which makes artificial blood.
These assets outside Russia are presumably safe?
‘I’m sure they will try to get hands on things outside Russia, but my main fear is that they’ll try to extradite him.’
Pugachev certainly seems to have woven a complicated financial web; time will tell if it saves his fortune. His private jet (worth $25 million four years ago) is registered not in his name, but to a trust company.
What is described by the Russian authorities as his ‘palace’ in Nice is owned by a company registered in the principality of Liechtenstein. And the house in Battersea, which Sergei and Alexandra are renovating, was bought by a company with no direct links to Pugachev, although its holding company also ran a firm which itself was running his bank.
To complicate matters for Alexandra’s own fragile peace of mind, she and Sergei are not even married. His wife — from whom he split more than ten years before he met Alexandra — will not agree to a divorce, and because of business interests and the fact that he cannot now go to Russia, it has become impossible to obtain one.
It bothers the couple intensely ‘because we are both Christians and believe in marriage, and it seems so hypocritical that we are bringing up our children to be Christian without being married’.
This, of course, can only make her feel more insecure about her position, with the family’s livelihood under siege, and it perhaps partly explains the other drama in her life — namely that she wanted to evict her ex-husband from her Moscow flat.
She has an emotional attachment to the flat, because it was bought with the legacy of her step-grandfather Patrick O’Brian, the author of the Master And Commander series. And to cap all of that, she feels she has given her ex, Shamil Galimzyanov, quite enough already.
‘I don’t really want to talk about it too much, as I think it’s really undignified,’ she says, ‘like washing your dirty linen in public, which is why I didn’t respond at the time.
‘I have been extremely generous financially, beyond anything I was required to do. I did a bit of a silly thing because when we got divorced the lawyers and the judge said: “You shouldn’t let him stay in the flat” — but I felt sorry for him and I wanted to help. But it was a mistake.
‘We signed a post-nup because I felt it was so much part of my family. All my siblings have bought a flat or part of a house with their legacy and I want it to come back to my children.’
LOOKING back on the marriage, she says she would ‘never say I regretted’ it. ‘We had an amazing time travelling; I really wish him all the best, he’s a really kind, good person . . . I know he’s happy now: he’s been with someone else for six years.’
Galimzyanov, meanwhile, is resigned to moving out of the flat, which is already for sale, and full of bitterness.
‘I don’t have anywhere to go,’ he said. ‘I am packing my things now and getting ready to move out. I feel angry and bitter at how I was treated because Alexandra and her father made a promise to me that I could stay in the flat after she left me — but, I see now, this was worthless.’
Meanwhile, Pugachev was put back on Russia’s wanted list after a decision in the Basmanny Court in Moscow on March 20. He is accused of stealing more than 28 billion roubles from Russia’s Central Bank — in other words, the amount, £600 million, that Mejprom-bank owed when it went under.
According to Alexandra, the fact he grew up in a ‘dog-eat-dog’ environment means he is as strong as possible in the circumstances.
But for all the glitz and glamour — her lunches with her friend Princess Charlene of Monaco, the yacht in the south of France — with the threat of reprisals from Russia ever-present, Alexandra Tolstoy may have a very high price to pay for her seemingly charmed life.