Outside the Ukrainian Institute on London’s Holland Park Avenue stands a bronze statue of St. Volodymyr, Ukraine’s 10th century grand prince of Kiev. At his feet are jam jars and vases of flowers. On the white stucco parapet beneath the Ukrainian flag, there are photographs of some of those who died during the country’s Euromaidan uprising, which triggered Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea.
A man called Andrei, wearing a black polo neck and chic jacket, is reading the names of the dead beneath the photographs. He is a 38-year-old investment banker of Russian Ukrainian origin who has lived in London for 14 years, with his half-Russian, half-Ukrainian wife and their children.
“My Russian Ukrainian friends are all against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but my Russian friends are a bit jubilant,” he said. “I see what happened in Ukraine as a people’s uprising, pure and simple, and now we need a government that is utterly untainted. But Putin can’t afford to have a strong Ukraine.”
Andrei lives just off prosperous Kensington High Street in West London. He is the personification of “Russky London,” a phrase used by Russians and citizens of other post-Soviet countries to describe their invasion of the U.K.’s capital over the past two decades.
It is estimated that several hundred thousand Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Lithuanians, Estonians and others from the former Soviet empire live in London, though exact figures are hard to acquire. The 2001 census registered over 10,000 Ukrainian-born citizens now living in the U.K., but immigration has increased dramatically since then.
And despite the sanctions announced by the United States and European Union—so far limited to members of Putin’s inner circle—there are no signs of this trend abating. Indeed, it is likely that more Russians will head for London as the crisis worsens.
After Putin moved soldiers into Crimea, the Russian stock exchange fell 3.5 percent, and in Moscow there were queues around the block at the ATMs of the blacklisted banks, as Visa and Mastercard suspended operations.
“Many wealthy Russians must be shaking in their boots at the moment, wondering what the Americans and Europeans are planning to do,” said PR guru Lord Bell, the go-to man in London for many Russian billionaires. “And I imagine the people in London who run the restaurants and clubs they go to are just as nervous.”
Yet despite the threat of sanctions, capital is pouring out of Russia and into London. Not every rich Russian is the last billionaire left standing after some blood-soaked battle over aluminum; many are just successful businessmen who happened to make huge amounts of money at an extraordinary time. And London, an attractive option for them and their money when times were good, is even more so now that things are looking rockier in Russia.
“Everything points to London: It’s got a safe banking system, legal system, clean title of property, all the things that are uncertain back home,” said David Forbes, head of private office at the Savills estate agency. Forbes deals with what he calls “ultra-high-net-worth individuals,” and he has noticed a “large increase in the numbers of Russians and Ukrainians looking for London property to buy in the last few weeks.”
Owen Matthews, author of Stalin’s Children and Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America, has also observed this trend. “A rich French friend has just lost three houses she was looking at in Knightsbridge and Mayfair in the last 10 days, snapped up by buyers from the former Soviet Union,” he said.
And it’s not just investing in property that attracts Russians to Britain. It’s long been known that the privileged corridors of the British public school system hold an allure for those brought up in the bogus egalitarianism of the Soviet Union. Wellington College, one of Britain’s most innovative and fashionable public schools, has some 10 Russian pupils, according to its headmaster, Dr. Anthony Seldon, and it may well be getting more.
Peter Reznikov, the Rostov-on-Don-born head of Russian at Eton, has been running his own educational advisory service for a few years, focusing on how to get your child into a British boarding school. He said he has seen an increase in demand in the past few years. “I have a few new clients from Ukraine, who decided to send their kids to board in the U.K. since the crisis began.”
“The admissions director of Abingdon School,” Matthews said, “told me that she’s had such a surge of interest from rich Russians applying that she’s had to extend her long-planned trip to Moscow to fit them all in.”
Last Sunday, the atmosphere was somber at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Mother of God and All Saints in London’s Knightsbridge district.
“About three weeks ago, the priests were saying prayers for peace in Ukraine,” said Anastasia Denisova, 28, a Ph.D. student at Westminster University and a volunteer steward at the cathedral. “But they aren’t mentioning politics now.”
Perhaps the congregation could not be sure which side God might stand on, given that Ukrainians also worship at this church.
The cathedral’s annex and cloisters are packed. The main church, a freshly sandblasted Victorian basilica, sold to the Russian Orthodox Church by the Anglicans in 1978, is being renovated, presumably thanks to the generosity of its opulent émigré congregation. Through the candlelight, chanting and incense, these people—a 200-strong mix of children, their svelte mothers in Prada puffer jackets, determined-looking dads and the odd, nostalgic, flowery-headscarf-clad babushka—bow their heads in prayer.
“People are really worried about what is happening,” said 38 year-old Maria, pushing her child’s buggy through the cloisters of the cathedral.
“No they’re not,” said her husband, Alex, a hard-eyed 50-year-old property developer who has lived in London for 20 years. “Nothing will change. And it’s better not to use our surname. Maria’s Ukrainian. I’m Russian. You see how we are all mixed.”
The first Russians began to appear in London in the very early 1990s, when the Soviet Union crumbled and the supermarket race for its raw materials and assets began.
Svetlana Adjoubei, who moved to London in 1990, is the founder of Accademica Rossica, a London Russian cultural organization that runs film and book festivals and other events throughout the year from a tiny office in Soho. Her husband was not a businessman but a scientist, brought over to work for the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. Coincidentally, he is also the grandson of the late Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the man who created Putin’s casus belli by giving Crimea, Russia’s favorite tourist resort and only Western warm-water port, to Ukraine in 1954.
Adjoubei was in the perfect position to see other—and rather different—Russians trickle in and then flood her adopted city. “We Russians have always had a thing about England ever since the 19th century,” she said. “Good old England. Country of equality, good schools, good houses, good literature, good law. London is now known as Russia’s Third City, after Moscow and St. Petersburg.”
A relict of the old Soviet intelligentsia, she educated her daughter at the fiercely competitive St. Paul’s, Britain’s most prestigious girls’ day school. “Although intelligentsia is an insult now,” Adjoubei added sadly. “It means someone who is incapable of earning money. Ochen kulturniy [very cultured] used to be a compliment, but now it’s ochen bogatiy [very rich].”
Whether or not she is right, it’s clear that not since the Arab invasion of the early ’70s, fueled by an oil price rise, has Britain seen such an extraordinary influx of absurdly rich foreigners.
When they first appeared, blinking in their leather overcoats and minks, the whispering began. Stunned estate agents told of huge cash deals; gleeful school bursars swapped stories of parents paying fees with suitcases full of cash. Tony Blair’s old alma mater, Fettes College, one of Scotland’s top public schools, became known as Fettski, for the large number of Russian pupils it enrolled; restaurateurs talked about thousands of pounds spent on wine and enormous cash tips. It soon became apparent that these sparkling visitors were not on holiday; they were here to stay.
The first Russians who emerged out of Heathrow with Swiss bank accounts and Louis Vuitton holdalls of cash back in the early ’90s were just groping in the dark. One Russian woman—charming, cultivated, very rich and keen to remain anonymous—told me she and her husband had first moved to London to protect their children from potential kidnapping and to keep their money safe.
Her husband commuted weekly by plane to work in Russia, while she stayed in London with the children. But her early London life was a series of social mishaps, including buying a house by mistake—large, but in the nether reaches of a northern suburb. She realized how far it was from her husband’s Mayfair office only when he rang her on his first day and said, “Where did you buy the house? It’s taken me two hours to get here.”
“I had no idea where Mayfair was,” she said. “It took me six months to sell it.” After a couple of more moves, she now she lives contentedly in London’s Holland Park. Invitations began to trickle in.
“We went to stay in a castle,” she said. “I was so excited. I came down for dinner in couture and diamonds to find my hostess was just, well, wearing a nice skirt. I took my earrings and rings off and hid them in my bag! Then one of the guests came up to my husband and said, ‘We think all you Russians are mafia and all your wives are hookers.’ My husband replied, ‘Well, we think Englishmen are all gay and their wives are ugly!’ I was so embarrassed, but he said to me, ‘They called you a whore. We’re leaving tomorrow.’ Our bedroom was so uncomfortable anyway.”
Families like this one were encouraged to make the move not just because of the turbulent times back home but also by the extraordinarily favorable tax regime for non-domiciled U.K. residents, brought in by Tony Blair’s Labour government.
“Your socialist Gordon Brown has turned your country into Monaco,” Boris Berezovsky, one of the original oligarchs, said over dinner once. Rich Russians began to call London “the Laundry.” The City of London’s position as a global financial center, plus the sky-rocketing property market that was, until recently, capital gains tax-free for foreigners, made London the perfect place to clean their money.
More and more Russians came: those still in Putin’s favor, like the Uzbek oligarch Alisher Usmanov (who co-owns the Arsenal football club), commuting between houses in London and Moscow; and those who have fallen out, like Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Evening Standard and Independent newspapers. Son of Alexander Lebedev, the former KGB officer-turned-oligarch and Putin critic, Evgeny is now a stalwart of the London social scene.
So is Katia Elizarova, the blond model seen on Fox TV’s reality show Meet the Russians. Elizarova, who paid for her degree at the University of London entirely with the proceeds from her modeling career, is now invited to houses like Blenheim Palace and 5 Hertford Street, one of the most exclusive clubs in London.
Other Russian immigrants have become involved in British politics, like Alexander Temerko, the Ukrainian-born Russian politician-turned-businessman and former deputy head of the now defunct oil giant Yukos. When Putin imprisoned Temerko’s colleague Mikhail Khodorkovsky for fraud after Khodorkovsky criticized the regime, Temerko fled to London. He is now a major donor to the Conservative Party and is also deputy head of the British engineering and energy business OGN and a member of the Leaders’ Group, the Tory Party’s donor club.
But the upper ranks of British society remain largely closed to Russians, partly because of language barriers and partly because they are highly impenetrable. Still, this barrier seems to be melting away to some extent for their children, who are integrating more naturally, having been educated in Britain’s top public schools. “People always ask me, ‘How British is your school?’ ” said the founder of one prominent London prep school. “I say, ‘Very.’ ” But anecdotal evidence suggests that most smart London schools have a healthy proportion of Slavic pupils.
Since the early 1990s, an industry has grown up to advise the Russians and London’s other rich foreign immigrants on how to move to London and spend their money when they get there. Quintessentially, the concierge company founded by Ben Elliot, the nephew of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, has a dedicated Russia Desk.
“We help them find private-members clubs,” said 28-year-old Veronica Voronina, founder of another concierge service, The Anonymous, which has a large Russian clientele. Voronina knows her market well; she’s a Russky Londoner herself. Her mother was a doctor, invited over to the U.K. by the National Medical Association in the early 1990s, while her father, a politician and businessman, stayed in Moscow.
“We do everything if you move to London, she said. “If you don’t have a business, we find you the right sort of one to invest in to help with your hobbies and your interests. We help get your kids into the right schools.”
The Anonymous, founded four years ago, also has branches in Dubai, New York and Porto Montenegro, a favorite hot spot of the super-rich, including Nat Rothschild. “It’s like a new Monaco for Russians,” said Voronina.
One Hyde Park, the Knightsbridge glass apartment block opposite the Harrods store, is Russky London’s most prestigious address. As well as the usual gyms, pools and underground car parks, each flat has a built-in iPad, with which you can order room service from the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park Hotel, brought to you by a staffer through an underground tunnel connecting the two buildings. Most of One Hyde Park’s astonishingly expensive apartments have gone to Russians and Ukrainians, with the odd Nigerian, according to Savills, which managed the sales.
“The most expensive penthouse in One Hyde Park went for 140 million pounds, for 37,000 square feet,” said Forbes. It was sold to a Ukrainian billionaire, and it is estimated he will spend another 50 million pounds on doing it up.
“The English always used to be catered to. They used to go around with their noses in the air. But now they are catering to others,” said Alona Cherkassy, a 38-year-old Russian engaged to a Briton. She moved to London over a year ago to work for a PR company from New York, where she already had U.S. citizenship. Cherkassy is just one of the tens of thousands of Russians or Russian-speaking professionals who have either moved to London or set up businesses there. British banks, PR firms and art galleries are now keen to employ Russian speakers to lure in more Russian money and customers. “Fifteen years ago I wouldn’t have come here,” said Cherkassy. “London is now what New York used to be.”
The fact that Moscow’s most prominent restaurateur, Arkady Novikov, has launched three new venues in London in a year may support this theory.
Until recently, expat Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Russians often socialized together. There were few tensions between the various national groups, but that is starting to change. “We’ve had people unfriending us on Facebook,” said Sonya and Anya, the Bloom twins, a pair of identical Ukrainian pop stars who arrived in London a few months ago.
“Putin is the Russian bear who has put his paw on Crimea,” said Elizarova, a Russian whose grandmother was Ukrainian. “People here are mostly terrified about what will happen to their families back home.”
And that includes the oligarchs. Alexander Lebedev recently said that he’d seen several “ashen-faced” Russian billionaires. For the Russians used to holidaying on the Riviera, the prospect of increased sanctions, or travel bans, is grim. Russia may think it is holding Europe ransom with its gas exports, but Putin may have seriously miscalculated. According to analysts from The Economist Intelligence Unit, only between 1 and 2 percent of Britain’s trade is with Russia. Nor is it dependent on Russian gas, having many other possible supplies, said UK Trade & Investment, a government department.
Russky London, for the most part, is still holding its head up high, unembarrassed by Putin’s behavior. “What people are worried about is their money. They’re not at all worried about what others think,” said the Russian woman who wished to remain anonymous. “They’re just worried they won’t be able to travel freely again. If it returns to the Cold War, we won’t be able to go to the South of France.”
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