Moscow’s Gilded Ghetto

The billboard appears at mile 3 of the post- Soviet boulevard of big-ticket dreams that is the Rublyovka Highway. “Any house,” the sign by a prestigious homebuilder proclaims. “Helicopter as a bonus.”

Only in the millionaire’s suburb of Rublyovka are houses so pricey that a helicopter is thrown in like a carpet upgrade.

How elite is Rublyovka? So tony that real estate prices have streaked skyward even on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the “Rublyovka adjacent” avenue in northwest Moscow -- presumably because those who drive along it, as almost anyone who is anyone in Russia does, are probably on their way to Rublyovka.

The Rublyovka Highway shuts down twice each day as President Vladimir V. Putin is chauffeured between work and his Rublyovka estate in his black Mercedes 600 Pullman, prompting an elite traffic jam that locals love to fume about to acquaintances consigned to lesser bottlenecks.

Russians throughout history have lived large, from the gilded palaces and Faberge eggs of the czars to the epic miseries of the Second World War. Today’s prosperity is no exception. Fourteen years after the arrival of capitalism, Forbes magazine’s annual survey of the wealthy last year found Moscow with more billionaires than any other city on Earth. (A new survey scheduled to be published today shows the city dipping slightly below New York, thanks to the Yukos Oil prosecution’s disastrous effect on the company’s stock.)

The days of the profligate “new Russians” of the 1990s, famous for their maroon sport coats, gold chains, crew cuts and bad taste, are largely over. In their place is a tightknit aristocracy, more discreet in its appetites and with fortunes hard to imagine even on an international scale.

The net worth of the nation’s 36 richest men and women, according to Forbes’ calculations, is more than $110 billion, equal to 24% of the nation’s gross domestic product.

In some cases, the new “new Russians” are the same businessmen who got rich in the shady privatizations of the 1990s. Now, most have reached their late 30s and 40s, and they’ve moved their businesses toward legitimate operations. They own oil companies and huge metal mining operations, cellphone companies and real estate development firms.

And after more than a decade of traveling between Paris, London, New York and Moscow, they have begun to expect at home -- in districts such as Rublyovka and a growing number of other high-end Moscow neighborhoods -- the kind of amenities they have long enjoyed abroad.

Rublyovka, once the exclusive retreat of Stalin, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders, has even become the subject of a bestselling new novel, “Casual,” a Russian version of “Desperate Housewives.” The book is the talk of Moscow because it is the first to portray the privileged lifestyle behind Rublyovka’s towering, closely guarded walls.

Lots in the community are being snatched at the equivalent of $5 million apiece, and miles of forest are falling under the bulldozers to make way for $10-million homes, some with elaborate turrets, Russian Empire facade styling, private chapels and, in one case, a motorboat grotto. But the trail of Russia’s millionaires doesn’t end there.

Crocus City, on the north side of Moscow, bills itself as the largest luxury mall in the world -- and that’s before construction begins on an expansion that will double the size of the shopping center and include 15 high-rise office buildings, a yacht mooring terminal, helipad, 1,000-room hotel, 216,000-square-foot casino and 16-screen movie theater.

Shoppers at this “city within a city” spend an average of $560 on clothes and shoes during each visit.

(Lest Crocus City be dismissed as an enclave only for the wealthy, says co-owner Emin Agalarov, “We’ve got a JLo store which positions itself as an everything-here-is-around-$100 outlet. So anyone could theoretically come and buy something here.”)

Meanwhile, Gucci, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada and Armani are ensconced less than 10 miles away, in a cobblestone nook off fashionable Tverskaya Street downtown. They are within walking distance of an array of high-end clubs and restaurants distinguished mainly by the scowling bodyguards standing beside cars with tinted windows outside and the jewel-and-mink-draped beauties inside -- often until 5 or 6 in the morning.

Cafe Galleria, this year’s hot spot, requires a weeklong wait for reservations to dine in its sleek, yellow-and-black-columned halls. Even then, it won’t admit those who might “spoil the atmosphere,” as owner Arkady Novikov puts it.

California rolls -- in a city suddenly mad for sushi, not a single fashionable restaurant can afford to be without it -- go for $17 each. A hunk of creamy burrata cheese with cherry tomatoes costs $24.

“Practically every restaurant in Moscow has to have this cheese now. Russians can’t live without it,” Novikov says of the coveted mozzarella, which must be flown in fresh from Italy.

Novikov owns a network of eateries that have at one time or another been at the center of Moscow’s social beehive, including the tiny but tony Vogue Cafe downtown and the popular Czar’s Hunt and Veranda u Dachi restaurants in Rublyovka. He operates 15 acres of greenhouses outside the city to keep his clients in arugula and wild strawberries throughout the Russian winter.

“People are becoming more sophisticated,” he says. “The attitude of people with money had changed toward many things, first of all toward the money itself. Now the money is no longer falling on your head from the sky, like before, and the culture of the people has changed for the better.

“We learned a lot of things from the West, including how to dress, how to behave and how to eat.”

Ksenia Sobchak, Russia’s 23-year-old answer to Paris Hilton, grew up in far from underprivileged circumstances -- her father was mayor of St. Petersburg -- but insists she’s no spoiled debutante.

“Me myself, I never considered myself to be rich, though I get a real big salary. So how did I get this image of this golden rich girl?” wonders Sobchak, who hosts a reality television show and lives with her millionaire fiance in an apartment on Tverskaya Street.

Then she answers her own question: “I really am a socialite. I don’t like to spend time at home in a cozy armchair. I really enjoy going to cinemas, visiting friends, going to restaurants. For me, Moscow is the best city in the world. If you want to have fun for 24 hours, you can have fun.”

This summer, Sobchak is preparing for the “it” marriage of the season, to Russian American businessman Alexander Shustorovich, a Harvard graduate who helped broker a $2-billion business deal when he was 30. Sobchak is planning a “simple” and “nice” wedding, at a resort near St. Petersburg, for 300 people.

Today’s wealthy Russians, she says, are sensitive to the issues that have sent thousands of pensioners into the streets to protest the partial loss of their benefits. There are 25 million Russians who live on less than $87 a month, and the average monthly wage is less than $240. Many of the well-to-do, Sobchak says, remember what it’s like to have nothing.

“I was a Pioneer,” she recalls, referring to the old Communist youth camps. “I remember the songs about Lenin. I remember those huge lines. I remember buying kilos of green bananas and putting them under the bed to ripen, because you didn’t know when you’d be able to get bananas again.”

Russia’s wealthiest classes, says Eduard Dorozhkin, editor of Rublyovka’s local newspaper, Na Rublyovkye, “know they made mistakes in the past, and their mistake was to show how rich they are. It’s impolite to look rich in a country with so many poor people.”

At the same time, many say, the memory of penury is what inspires an abundance of wealthy Russians to spend with abandon.

“If Americans have $1 million, they’re not going to spend $200,000 on a car. The Russians, they will,” says Alla Verber, vice president of Mercury Ltd., which operates luxury shopping centers in downtown Moscow. “The Russians think, ‘You only live once, and God knows what’s going to happen in five years.’ ”

These days, though, most ostentation is anonymous -- a phenomenon attributable as much to nervousness about government tax crackdowns and the ever-present possibility of mafia violence as to a lingering sense from the Soviet years that being splendidly rich is anything but politically correct.

The city’s many Humvees and their even-more-fortified Russian equivalent, the $144,000 Kombat, have tinted windows. Neighbors often have no idea who lives in the gated palace at the end of their street. The magazine Arkhidom, Russia’s equivalent of Architectural Digest, features glossy pages of ornately decorated mansions and multimillion-dollar penthouse apartments but not a word about who owns them.

Oksana Robski’s “Casual,” which sold 50,000 copies in the first 10 days after publication, provided ordinary Muscovites with another peek at life in Rublyovka, which even in the Soviet era was the storied enclave of Politburo members, nuclear scientists and presidents. Today, former Presidents Boris N. Yeltsin and Mikhail S. Gorbachev have homes there; so does Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn.

The world Robski portrays, however, is mostly about Rublyovka wives: the thin, carefully coiffed, Dior-clad women who were lucky enough to snag a business mogul, then spend much of the rest of their lives plotting to keep from being dumped for a younger woman.

“The book was perfect. I loved it,” says Roman Kondratov, a stylist at the Place in the Sun salon in Zhukovka, one of several elite neighborhoods that make up the Rublyovka district.

“These women in the book, they exist,” he says. “Let’s see. The typical Zhukovka woman: First, she gets up at 2 p.m. Then gym, spa, hair. They come in here and some of them look like Christmas trees, jewels everywhere. And the things they talk about, they’re mind-boggling for me.

“Where they’re going on vacation. What they’re going to buy. Mostly, they think about clothes. What they’re wearing, what their friends are wearing, where they’re going to buy the clothes they want, where they’re going to fly to buy them. The kind of money they talk about spending is almost incomprehensible to me. And plastic surgery, endless talk about plastic surgery. Most of them go to the States, to the guy who did all Michael Jackson’s work.”

Over green tea at the elegant Prichal restaurant near her Rublyovka home, Robski says, “It’s my world. I need to write about what I know.”

And the author’s age? “Let’s say 28.”

“It was important for me to portray this world not as it is reflected in tabloids and magazines. It’s interesting to show that these people not only go to hairdressers and get manicures, but they live there,” says Robski, wearing a powder blue sweater set and an 11-karat diamond teardrop pendant. “They live their lives and lose their loved ones and die of incurable diseases. They fall in love and get betrayed. I think it’s stupid to say that only those people who possess nothing have feelings inside.”

Robski knew whereof she wrote when her heroine’s husband was killed in a contract hit. Her second husband died the same way.

Her next book will deal with Rublyovka as well, but it will take readers far into the world beyond it. Robski plans to write about the female bodyguard agency she once ran, providing stylish armed protectors to wealthy businessmen throughout Russia.

Indeed, for a growing number of wealthy Russians, even Rublyovka is too confining -- especially now, when tawdry new dachas are lined up on the roadside and Putin’s traffic jams are simply impossible.

Portrait artist Nikas Safronov, who for a $70,000 fee has painted many of the leading women of Rublyovka society (“The shape of the nose, their eyes, look as if they have emerged from the same lab,” he confides. “Special, exquisite, elite and expensive.”), recently bought a castle in the Scottish Highlands.

Oil oligarch Roman Abramovich, who is believed to be Russia’s richest man with a net worth of $13.3 billion, spends more and more time in Britain, where he recently bought the Chelsea soccer team along with a $9.5-million flat in the Knightsbridge area of London and a 450-acre estate in Sussex.

Not everyone is sad to see them go.

“In the past, I used to pick mushrooms and berries on the forest floor over there. Now you can’t even set foot there,” says Tamara Vorontsova, 74, whose cottage lies on a street that is now little more than a driveway leading to a compound of mansions behind locked gates.

“You can’t get down to the river anymore, because everything is closed off with fences. But I have to say, the area has improved.”

Are they good neighbors? Vorontsova seems puzzled by the question.

“What can you say? They’re rich. But we know nothing about them,” she says. “They come in their cars, and they go in their cars. They live behind fences, and they are surrounded by guards.”