Billionaire’s lover who crashed to earth w ith a very big bump
She’s lost the private jet, the yacht, even the nanny! Here Alexandra Tolstoy lets rip at the oligarch ‘bully’ who’s left her high and dry
AT FIRST glance, Alexandra Tolstoy seems to have it all. A beautiful White Russian countess with long, thick, golden hair, she is the mother of three gorgeous children by her Russian oligarch ex-boyfriend; the chatelaine of a huge house in Chelsea and a £50million property on the Caribbean island of St Barts; as well as the owner of a walk-in wardrobe that you could get lost in.
Still impossibly glamorous at 43, her life story has had all the passion and turmoil of the novels of her distant cousin Leo Tolstoy. She has been a London banker, a TV presenter and an adventurer who travelled the Silk Road on horseback.
She has lived in poverty in a tiny Soviet-era apartment in Moscow with her ex-husband, an Uzbek horseman, and luxuriated in a Belle Epoque chateau on the Cote d’Azur as the long-time mistress of balding billionaire Russian tycoon Sergei Pugachev. He was known as ‘Putin’s banker’ before he fell out of favour with the Kremlin.
The years with Pugachev were a kaleidoscope of private jets, yachts and the best hotels. As well as a large country house near Moscow, Alexandra had a suite in Claridge’s permanently at her disposal. After a week in a villa at the Eden Rock in St Barts, Sergei bought the most expensive house on the island.
But last week this gilded world collapsed after London’s High Court ruled that the £90million offshore trusts set up by Pugachev to provide for their children could be seized by the Russian state, which claims he illegally siphoned the money from a failed Russian bank.
‘I cried for two days when I heard. I lost our house in St Barts. My children are losing their home,’ Alex1999, andra says today, looking round the cathedral-like kitchen that runs across the two Chelsea artists’ studios that Pugachev bought and knocked into one.
‘I was such a romantic. I’ve taken extraordinary risks in my life. I’ve always been reckless,’ she concedes. ‘Until now, it’s paid off. But I was young then and had more energy. And I didn’t have the children.’
We sit in a room full of scooters, 3ft-long toy cars, and a dolls’ house the size of garden shed. The children are next door: five-year-old Maria is working with her nanny, sevenyear-old Ivan is doing his homework at the kitchen table, and Alexis, eight, is practising the piano.
They face an uncertain future, says Alexandra, speaking for the first time since the legal judgment that has destroyed her life in London and, she says, her security.
Without income and isolated hundreds of miles away from Pugachev – who is now hiding from the Russian authorities in the South of France – she is considering moving to Moscow to find work.
She opens up, too, about her feelings for her former lover.
She describes him as a tyrannical and paranoid bully who, she claims, effectively kept her prisoner in his spectacular homes – claims that he denies.
‘I never had access to any money,’ she says. ‘There is nothing in my name. I’ve now got to earn a living to keep my children and the best prospect is in Russia. I don’t want to go, but I can earn a living there. I am scared Sergei could have the children kidnapped.
‘He’s a control-freak and a liar. And those two problems undermined our relationship. He was a tyrant who abandoned us. I was scared all the time.
‘When I look back I just remember him bullying me. I don’t want to live in fear like that. And I don’t want my daughter to grow up thinking that is normal. He claimed all I ever wanted was his money. But he only had to make me and our children secure. That’s all I wanted.’
During our interview, Alexandra paid off the children’s part-time Russian nanny, who wept as she pocketed the cash and headed for the airport.
Countess Alexandra Tolstoy was just 25 when she first came to the public’s attention after joining a 5,000-mile horseback trek along the entire route of the Silk Road in just as the former USSR was opening up.
One of her local guides was the Uzbek showjumper Shamil Galimzyanov. They fell in love in a tent on the Asian steppes and – to the amazement of her friends and family – were married at London’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral in 2003.
Despite her exotic name and family history, Alexandra is a Home Counties English rose, educated at Downe House, a school where the Duchess of Cambridge studied briefly. Slim and with huge blue eyes, she looked set for an utterly conventional, if privileged, life.
Yet the path she has taken since reading Russian at Edinburgh University has been anything but predictable. Her unlikely marriage to Shamil soon hit trouble. ‘He was drinking,’ she explains. ‘I was earning all the money. And then he’d lose all the money I’d earned.’
She had started a TV career, presenting Alexandra Tolstoy’s Horse People for BBC2, when Pugachev zoomed into her life in his private jet in 2008 and whisked her away to a life of yachts, chateaux in the South of France and St Barts.
In those days he was enormously rich, but Alexandra insists she wasn’t looking for that. The couple’s passionate affair seemed like the perfect marriage of Old Russia and New. The Countess of the Ancien Regime and one of the fortunate few who clawed their way out of the rubble of the Soviet Union to vast wealth.
‘People warned me,’ Alexandra concedes. ‘But I was truly in love. I felt that this was my person. He was so charming and attractive. I just felt so right. We entered into a world that was just our world.’
When I interviewed the couple seven years ago for Tatler magazine in Pugachev’s Belle Epoque chateau above Nice, they were very obviously in love – holding hands, staring into each other’s eyes, a row of
I might have to move to Russia just to earn a living
discreet diamonds twinkling at Alexandra’s throat. They had arrived on a private jet from St Barts via Paris, where Pugachev had just bought Hediard, the French equivalent of Fortnum & Mason. A retinue of a dozen staff, including a private doctor, was in constant attendance: ‘Sergei is a paranoid hypochondriac,’ says Alexandra.
Their eldest child, Alexis, was waited on by an army of soft-footed servants. The chateau was full of extraordinary artwork – a Titian was propped up against a wall. Pugachev had bought the once-derelict chateau in the early 1990s and restored it. ‘He did have exquisite taste,’ sighs Alexandra. ‘Everything in the chateau was beautiful.’
Back then, Pugachev was still known as Putin’s banker. But in late 2010 his relationship with the Russian leader soured after Pugachev’s private bank, Mezhprombank, went into liquidation with debts of £1.65 billion.
Putin accused him of embezzle- ment. Pugachev, by now a French citizen, accused the Russian state of unlawfully seizing his assets and fled to London.
The Russian government sued him in London’s High Court for £1.5billion it says he had looted from the bank.
Instead of claiming the lawsuit was politically inspired, Sergei ran away to his French chateau and was declared to be in contempt of court, with a two-year prison sentence left hanging over his head should he return to this country. ‘Sergei ran away from us on my father’s 80th birthday. He didn’t come to the party,’ she says.
Alexandra had just told Pugachev she was pregnant with their fourth child, yet she heard nothing more for three weeks until one of his Latvian bodyguards turned up at their Chelsea house and began removing Pugachev’s possessions.
A few days later, lawyers for the Russian government arrived with a warrant to search the house. ‘They took my phone and my computer. In court my WhatsApp messages were discussed. I burst into tears.’
She lost the baby shortly after the raid.
What infuriates Alexandra is that Pugachev did not even attempt to fight the case. ‘He should have stayed in the UK and done what another Russian oligarch, Andrey Borodin, did: got good lawyers and defended himself.
‘But instead he just panicked and fled. Who flees, leaving their children and their mother? And not warning them?’
But by then, says Alexandra, Pugachev’s behaviour had already become increasingly volatile and controlling. The Belle Epoque chateau in the South of France became a prison for Alexandra during her visits there.
‘Sergei used to tell me I was mad. He would change the locks on the house. He would cut me off financially. He never gave me a credit card or a bank account. I just had a tiny allowance.
‘He makes you completely dependent on him financially, then cuts it off. He turns around and accuses you of being only interested in the money.
‘He did it to everyone, from people who worked for him to his eldest son from his first marriage. He promised my parents he’d marry me, but he didn’t.
‘We used to have housekeepers, a driver, more nannies, but that went. Sergei didn’t want me to have any money, but a judge insisted we had an income from the trust.’
She believes Pugachev is attempting to force her to live with him in France, something she is refusing to do. ‘I don’t feel safe with him in France. My parents are adamant I do not take the children to France.
‘I don’t know what we are going to live on. The last instalment from the trust came on October 1. I don’t know if we’re going to get any more on November 1. We’ll be left high and dry. It overwhelms me and at night I cry and cry, but in the day I pull it together for the children.
‘I think the shock makes me swing in and out of reality, rather like people behave after a death which can take time to truly sink in.’
She is not entirely destitute: there’s a small income from her step-grandfather, the novelist Patrick O’Brian, who left her the royalties from his successful Jack Aubrey books – Master And Commander was made into a film with Russell Crowe in 2003.
But it is an extraordinary slide in fortune, nonetheless.
Her next prospective move – back to Moscow – seems an odd choice for a woman who has been virtually bankrupted by the Russian state and is fearful of an ex-oligarch lover. She claims that a Russian TV company wants to make a documentary about her fashion blog, and might even employ her as the presenter of a chat show.
And then, of course, there is the Tolstoy name. ‘It still opens doors in Russia,’ she concedes.
Last night Mr Pugachev denied abandoning his family, claiming Ms Tolstoy had effectively barred access to his children. He still hoped, he said, she would bring the family to live with him in France.
What kind of man flees, leaving their kids behind?