Rublyovka tells a story of one of the most important highways in Russia.

1. Rublyovka. Where power and money are at home
Proposal
Published by
edizioni e/o, Rome
Europa Kiado, Budapest
Tänapäev, Tallinn
Agora, Warsaw
Sluntse Publishers, Sofia
Rublyovka tells a story of one of the most important highways in Russia
and the people who live there – the Russian top politicians and multi-
millionaires. It gives insights into their everyday lives and customs and
explains why they almost make a special species of Homo post-
Sovieticus. Along with vodka, matryoshka dolls and AK-47s, Rublyovka
has become a symbol of the new Russia and its new myths. Living at
Rublyovka spells success for some, and for others is an example of bad
taste.
Rublyovskoe Highway has been a place for the privileged ever since it
was the ‘Tsars’ road’ in the 16th century: for the entire
Romanov dynasty, from Alexei Mikhailovich (the father of Peter the
Great) to the last of the Romanovs. This picturesque area, rich in game,
was always the favorite place for the royal falcon hunting, and Peter the
Great and Catherine the Great made pilgrimages to the Savino-
Storozhevsky Monastery by this road. Here, near the sovereigns, the
Russian nobility also made their homes, particularly the Princes Yusupov,
Shuvalov and Golitsyn. The times changed, but the nobility continued to
live at Rublyovka.
This is where the dachas of Lenin and Stalin were located, as well as the
summer residences of all the subsequent general secretaries, from
Khrushchev to Gorbachev. Their sidekicks also settled here (Anastas
Mikoyan, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Nikolai Yezhov) – side-by-side with
famous scientists, artists and writers (Mstislav Rostropovich, Andrei
Sakharov, Dmitry Shostakovich), and foreign diplomats. And they all
lived on a small stretch of highway that is only 35 kilometers long.
During the Soviet period, General Secretary Brezhnev may have gone for
a walk and encountered Solzhenitsyn, who was being hunted by the KGB
and hiding out at Rostropovich’s dacha. Now President Putin, should
he wish to venture beyond the wall of his residence and take a walk in

2. the park, could well bump into the wife of Khodorkovsky, the mutinous
oligarch that he has left to rot in jail.
In the mid-1990s, Rublyovka, which borders on the pristine and well-
forested bank of the Moscow River was swiftly privatized by stars of
show-business, the demi monde, officials and industrial magnates, and
turned into a kind of a ‘millionaires’ ghetto’, or a Russian
Beverley Hills, where it is outrageous not to be good-looking. Here you
can find the most expensive market in the world, and the most
expensive sports club, as well as the most exclusive boutiques and the
highest fences, with an army of thousands of security guards.
Multi-story super-elite structures keep popping up around Rublyovka –
this is where the new elite buy apartments for their parents, employees
and guests. Alongside the ‘new Russians’ – and increasingly,
social climbers from the state apparatus, reluctant to put their new
wealth on show – there still live the classic Soviet intelligentsia, people
who quite seriously believe that there is nothing more interesting in the
world than reading books. Ironically, they also count as millionaires,
because real estate prices here – depending on how far the land is
from Putin’s and Medvedev’s residences – fluctuate between
$40,000 and $200,000 per 100 square meters, and increase by 30-50%
every year. A vacant piece of land can fetch record prices – a
phenomenon comparable only to central Manhattan.
Valery Panushkin’s book is an attempt to look in the window and see
how the rich live. It is an attempt to understand how these people have
organized their lives, who have practically unlimited funds, and what the
new Russian elite is like. People whose religion is the Big Game and Big
Money. A game where the rules are not set, but imposed by the strong
and the brazen. Like a young player of computer games sleeps four
hours a day, and plays on the Internet the rest of the time, afraid to lag
behind his rivals, the inhabitants of Rublyovka plan all their activities
according to the progress of the Game. And you shouldn’t live on
Rublyovka to enjoy comfort, love your children and raise them, realize
yourself in work, sex and sport, wear new clothes, eat delicious food…
No! You must win the competition of life!
The times change, and so do the rules of the Game, and the relics of the
Rublyovka residents. Back in the time of gangster capitalism, it was
fashionable to build houses that looked like the Butyrka prison – with
thick walls and tiny barred windows (my home is my castle). They were
replaced by gaudy houses with pretensions to a resemblance to the
Winter Palace in Petersburg, with classical and medieval elements, and a
hall that was supposedly like something from the Renaissance. Then the
fashion came along for Finnish houses and Swiss mountain chalets. At
the moment, the trend is to dismantle and transport entire rooms from
Europe, or even an entire chateau – authentic parquetted, staircases
and fireplaces. On the land of some estates on Rublyovka, a prison, a
palace, a Finnish house, a chalet and a chateau stand next to each other
– four of the houses are empty, and the owner lives in the fifth,

3. because it is fashionable at the moment. It was not for the purposes of
comfort that one resident of Rublyovka built an Orthodox church, with
the relics of Prince Vladimir held in a golden reliquary above the gates,
with a certificate of authenticity from an archeological institute (it’s
not hard to guess that it cost the owner a fortune). And during dinner,
models strut across the podium inside the church, wearing revealing
dresses from the latest collection of Roberto Cavalli. And the owner asks
whether the guests would like the models to take their dresses off. But
everyone understands that with a chalet or a chateau, Rublyovka
won’t become Gstaad. Russian mud is even more noticeable under
the wheels of Rolls Royces or Jaguars.
The same applies to food. The fashion for Uzbek cuisine was replaced
with sushi, and now advanced residents of Rublyovka only eat farm
products of “home― cooking. The poor waiters, who are made to
change their uniforms yet again according to the ethnic cuisine.
In the famous Barvikha (the fiefdom of Yeltsin), there is a conglomerate
of boutiques with the clumsy name Barvikha Luxury Village. In a normal
village, where you can’t walk to the next house without gumboots,
no one would think of selling Manolo Blahnik shoes with stiletto heels.
But it is the holiest of holies of fashion in the glamorous world of
Rublyovka, which also has its prophets – famous European tailors or
journalists who write about fashion read lectures here on the topic
“how to dress―. Ordinary parishioners from Barvikha Luxury
Village send their wives to these lectures. This parish has its own saints
and followers, and they make vows, just as Orthodox monks make vows
of silence. For example, the editor of “Interview― magazine Alyona
Doletskaya never wears stockings. She must have made a vow. People
respect this. There are also pilgrimages. To Milan to go shopping, to
Paris, New York, to Saville Row in London for men’s suits, to Naples
for the famous local tailors, who don’t hold the needle
perpendicularly, but parallel to the index finger.
More serious people, on the other hand, try to show their disdain for
clothes. Legend has it that Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once invited to a
reception by the Queen of the United Kingdom. He bought a dinner
jacket, visited Her Royal Highness, and wen he came back to his hotel
from the palace, he immediately threw it in the garbage, because he
prefers to wear jeans and a sweater. The hotel maid, when she found a
brand new dinner jacket in the garbage, sent it to be dry cleaned,
packaged it and had it delivered to Khodorkovsky in Moscow. He threw it
away again, and this time his own maid took it out of the garbage, had it
dry-cleaned and hung it in the cupboard.
One of the attributes of the game is a car. Black is the color of power. A
black Mercedes of the latest model means that you belong to the powers
that be. A large black cross-country vehicle has something military about
it. The cortege of the president consists of black cross-country vehicles.
But a person at Rublyovka who is not involved in the military or the
government should have a car of any color but black. But it must be a

4. new car, unless you are Alexander Mamut, who drives a vintage Bentley,
because Mamut is a philanthropist, who supports and revives culture.
In the morning, the men of Rublyovka spend a long time at breakfast,
while the president’s cortege drives past. They start to move during
the day. And their wives wait for them. They wait all day. They even wait
for the husband they dislike, as there is nothing else left for them. They
may kill a few ours at the Aldo Coppola hair salon, and talk to their
friends, see how they are dressed, and spend another hour to break up
the weekday with the only “correct― masseuse, whose services
cost around ten time more than any other massage, and to invite her to
your house is proof of success. And they may also receive a few
invitations to children’s parties, where they go with their child and
nanny, for without a nanny, who is always from the Philippines, the
average client of Aldo Coppola cannot even change her children’s
diapers. In summer she goes to Sardinia, in between seasons she goes
shopping in Paris or Milan, and for New Year she goes to Courchevel to
prance about in her new diamonds. Sometimes, late in the evening, her
husband will send her a note in a special envelope from the Barvikha
hotel: “I’ll be home late, don’t wait up for me.― As if he
can’t ring her on his mobile phone. Perhaps he can, but it is not
sufficiently humiliating as a separate envelope, in which money may also
be placed along with the note. 30,000 rubles. This money is her real
price.
The Rublyovka lifestyle (they use the English word here), if it is
promoted and mass-produced, may become just as much a reliquary as
a house, car or a Kremlin entrance pass – it can give a person power.
Rustam Tariko, a vodka manufacturer, seller of expensive beverages and
banker, bought a villa on the Emerald Coast of Sardinia, hired a plane
and brought in society journalists and his former girl friends to take a
holiday – to lie on the sea shore, drink Krug rosé wine and eat
lobster. They also took part in a boat race, in which, strangely enough,
the winner was not the former boat racing champion Guido Capellini,
who Tariko invited, but Tariko himself and the Italian Gazetta dello sport
devoted an entire page to this event. Journalists handed the newspaper
to each other and prepared to write about Rustam Tariko in their own
newspaper, who is practically a local here in the Mediterranean.
Everyone pretended that they didn’t notice “advertorial―
written at the top of the page in large letters. And this fantastically
expensive celebration was not held for the sake of Rustam’s
naturalization in Italy, but for the sake of the Rublyovka Game. It is
almost impossible to become a local in Europe or America. But on
Rublyovka, people can believe you are European if you have a house,
football club, hotel restaurant or win boat races there.
Europeans are surprised: why do these rich new Russians behave so
noticeably in Europe? Why, for example, do Rublyovka residents buy
Ferraris and have an accident on the English Promenade in Nice? The
answer is simple: so that their European life is noticed on Rublyovka.

5. The majority of residents of this money ghetto follow the Rublyovka laws
meticulously, but there are also those who establish these rules – the
trendsetters, the legislators of fashion. The oligarch Roman Abramovich,
for example, may order a restaurant for himself alone, to eat a
vegetable salad without dressing, surrounded by an army of waiters.
There are also those who come up with projects, and become people
projects. When the French police, allegedly on the personal orders of
Nicolas Sarkozy, arrested the billionaire Prokhorov for 4 days at
Courcheval, with two buses of women of easy virtue who were brought
from Russia, and was charged with being a pimp, the oligarch said that
all the girls were his fiancées, and they were all so beautiful that he
could not choose one, and decided to take them all to the ski resort.
Nicolas Sarkozy, who knows nothing about Rublyovka project thinking,
did not realize that he was involuntarily initiating a new project. Two
years later, the French ambassador in Moscow, Jean de Gliniasti, gave
an award to Prokhorov, and said that this new cavalier of the order of
the Honored Legion had a genuine passion for art, and showed real
interest in new technologies. Of course he had a genuine passion for art,
if Prokhorov spent a huge amount of money on organizing French
exhibitions in Moscow, and Moscow exhibitions in Paris! Of course he was
interested in new technologies, if the oligarch invited a French company
to develop the new hi-tech Yo-Mobile.
In recent years, many houses on Rublyovka have been bought by new
and chance people. The owner of some company affiliated to Gazprom,
or a minor oil-worker from Siberia, a police officer who has taken a lot of
bribes – now that the Game is coming to an end, they can all buy a
house on Rublyovka. And live quietly. They can even make attempts to
understand the rules – to send their wives to courses of wearing
fashionable dresses, enroll in sommelier courses themselves, to gain an
understanding of wines. But the more they dream of living by rules, the
further they get from the cherished goal. For paradoxically enough, the
rules exist so that they can be broken. For example, if there’s a
traffic jam on Rublyovka, then a “wise guy― (a category of people
who can break the rules) will drive up to the traffic cop and offer him
15,000 rubles to drive in the opposing lane, and for him to tell his
colleagues not to stop his car further down the highway. The cop takes
the money. But if there’s a traffic jam the next day, then the
“wise guy― will drive up to the traffic cop and wind down the
window, and ask in a deliberately loud voice: “Inspector, how much
does a monthly subscription cost to drive in the opposing lane?― An
ideal “wise guy― not only tries to break conventional rules, but
also the laws of physics, and of physiology. If his wife gets pregnant,
and the doctor at the ultrasound test says that a girl will be born, then
the “wise guy― will ask what it costs for the baby to be a boy. And
if a “wise guy― is told that his friend has been killed, he will
demand that the doctor brings him back to life. And he will not explain
his friend’s death by a bullet to the heart, but that “the doctor is

6. completely full of himself and doesn’t even take money
anymore.― This is a real case told by doctor N.
But the residents of Rublyovka know that horizontal rules should be
broken every minute, but vertical subordination should never be
violated. Those who have broken vertical rules are exiled or in jail. Such
as the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who broke the Rule of the
mirror, when at a meeting on combatting corruption with the president,
he tried to combat corruption by using the words “we’re all
guilty―. How can “we all― be guilty? The president too? The
lawyer of the company Hermitage Capital Sergey Magnitsky died in
prison, when he tried to uncover corruption schemes of partners who
were in power. This was not a battle of equals, but a low attack on the
highest things, not with an empty-headed opposition bark, but with legal
proof in the hands.
The poet Dmitry Bykov, together with the performing artist Yefremov,
hold concerts two kilometers from Putin’s residence, where they
declaim poems slandering the government. But they warned that this is
a project, and in a year’s time they will close it down. And they did
close it down, and after making plenty of money from the Rublyovka
audiences and dividends in the form of an image, which after the project
was closed down saw them receive a wave of invitations to appear on
the radio and television, and hold concerts all over the country. Or the
opposition politician Alexei Navalny works on the anti-corruption project
Rospil on the Internet, openly raises money, publishes documents
compromising high-ranking officials and oligarchs, and labels the party
of power as being crooks and thieves. He does so with plenty of
evidence, and if this were not a project (and a project does not involve
development), investigations would have begun a long time ago, by the
parliament and the prosecutor’s office. But the punk group Pussy
Riot sings in the Church of Christ the Savior “Mother of God, Drive
out Putin―, and the girls get arrested, for a long time. And activists of
the opposition rally on the 6th of May are also arrested simply for
scuffling with the police, and also for a long time.
In the 2000s, you could pay for the Great Game with the price of
freedom. The players decided that it was better to transfer the function
of destruction to the state, and that it was more convenient for the state
to put people in jail than to kill them. Before you were put in jail, you
had to pay money, not to the prosecutor himself, but to his
intermediary. After this it would be too late: in Russian courts just 0.7%
of sentences are not guilty! To keep your money, and avoid bankruptcy,
jail and emigration, you must become a tool in the Great Rublyovka
Game, to go into state service, because no one asks anything of a tool.
The only difficult is to go into state service while holding on to your
money and continuing to play the Game. There is a whole technology for
this.
By the end of the 2000s, any significant immunity was no longer the
privilege of deputies, but of state officials. The drawback of state service

7. is that officials’ salaries are very small, and it is forbidden to have
business or earnings on the side. So you have to present your boss with
a terrible piece of compromising information against yourself. The
deputy Mitrofanov, for example, was elected to all the convocations of
parliament, and ran from one party to another, behaved eccentrically,
participated in all the talk shows in the world – but his career
wasn’t happening. But as soon as Mitrofanov was caught giving a
bribe of 2.5 million rubles, he immediately received the media
committee. This is because he was seriously compromised, and so
Mitrofanov’s loyalty to the government is now guaranteed by the
criminal case that is hanging over him. So his career will soar, the State
will protect Mitrofanov from rivals in the Great Game, as they are certain
that Mitrofanov himself is defenseless before the state, for at just one
click of the fingers, not even by the general prosecutor, but by an
ordinary investigator, he will go to jail.
Europeans are bewildered: why does the official Golikova spend money
at the casino in Monaco which is clearly incompatible with her salary?
Why does the official Kostin arrive at a port in Greece with not one, but
two luxury yachts? Why do they need expensive hotels? Why the
diamonds on the fingers of their wives and lovers? The answer is simple:
so that the jail sentence is written on the forehead of every official, and
so only the boss can protect the official from a criminal conviction.
Those who have survived and not gone to jail are about to embark on
the final stage of the game, which the oligarch Roman Abramovich has
already begun – to legalize his money in the West, and purify the
money in the eyes of the entire world. For this purpose, he must pay
money once more, and this is very hard for a Rublyovka player, a
disciple of the religion of money: money may get angry if their disciple
places the law higher than money.
And what can the people expect at the end of the Game who have
managed to observe all the commandments of Rublyovka, to survive and
hold on to their money? Happiness? According to the renowned political
analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, these people expect immortality: “Every
religion aspires to immortality, and not to happiness―.
The territory of Rublyovka resembles a cucumber with strange zigzags,
because the boundaries carefully avoid the villages which have
cemeteries. One gets the feeling that death does not exist at Rublyovka.
(The future also does not seem to exist, because there are virtually no
schools at Rublyovka. The children of Rublyovka usually study abroad.)
Rublyovka residents take care of their health in the expectation that an
immortality potion will be invented, or at least a recipe for prolonging
life.
The most important player at Rublyovka, Vladimir Putin, has two
hobbies: saving endangered animals and the children’s hematological
center, where children suffering from leukemia are treated. Saving
endangered animals in Vladimir Putin’s performance looks rather

8. comical. He shoots a sleeping dart at a tiger brought to him specially,
which has already been pumped full of drugs before Putin’s arriv al.
Or he flies a motorized hang-glider and teaches the endangered great
white crane to fly, but during the preparations for Putin’s visit, one of
the cranes falls into the propeller of the hang-glider, and another one is
crippled. But Putin is quite serious about the children’s hematological
center. This is because the hematological center involves bone marrow
transplants. And bone marrow means stem cells. And stem cells mean
immortality.
At any rate, if in the near future the potion of immortality is not found,
many Rublyovka players may turn to religion – a more traditional way
of becoming immortal. You must waste a lot of time, efforts, and
sometimes even money to determine how you feel about surrogate
motherhood, pension reform, armament spending, same-sex marriages,
juvenile justice, charitable work or the Olympics in Sochi. But as soon as
a Rublyovka player chooses a belief (atheism is also a belief), virtually all
the phenomena in the world are instantly sorted into good and bad of
their own accord. “Belief― at Rublyovka is a cheap intellectual tool
for swiftly sorting through the news. The Rublyovka player only really
believes in money.
The owner of the Vimpelkom company Dmitry Zimin is the first person in
the Great Game, it seems, who has reached the end of the Game
because of his intellect and age, to the furthest level, where the only
goal is to get rid of money. Not to leave the money to his son – this
money will kill anyone who hasn’t earned it themselves, but to invest
90% of his fortune in charity. Other billionaires are also considering this
method of solving the problem, such as Potanin or Prokhorov. But how
can one make sure that the foundations in which this money is invested
don’t kill anyone, but serve the public good? In other words, so that
eternal life is acquired if not by those who possess the money, then at
least by the money itself. Zimin has reached this last maze, from which
there is no exit to any higher level. The most he can achieve is to leave
the Game. To move to England or Normandy, to live the life of a very
well-off person, but not a magician, not a sorcerer of money.
And finally to see the cherished words: GAME OVER
Source:
http://www.dursthoff.de/book.php?m=3&aid=59&PHPSESSID=89ae1e73dacbdafabfb4f42c06ab8093&b
id=145