COLUMNISTS 
I wouldn’t dream of asking most of my Lunch with the FT guests what they are thinking of spending their money on in the near future. It is a private matter. The question is vulgar. Off limits. But something about the company of a billionaire oligarch, and particularly this very charming one, brings out my venal side. And so it is that two-thirds of the way through a very pleasant lunch with Evgeny Lebedev, I change abruptly the subject of our conversation and come right out with it: he has the newspaper, he has the fashion house, he has the hotels and the theatres. What next? Does he fancy buying a football club?
His response is laconic and instantaneous: “I can definitely state that I have no intention of buying a football club.” And then a soft smile plays on his lips. “You know, when I met Prince Charles, one of his people whispered something in his ear, and he turned to me and asked: ‘Have you been interested in football all your life?’” The smile turns to a chuckle. “I think he confused me with the other Russian.”
We will talk more of the other Russian later. Right now this particular Russian, the 29-year-old son of KGB-agent-turned-newspaper-proprietor Alexander Lebedev, is making waves of his own in London society. We are lunching at his West End Japanese restaurant, Sake No Hana, where he is freshly arrived from a morning meeting at the Evening Standard, the paper owned by his father, of which he is the senior executive director.
It was, he says, a “bittersweet” morning, the last day of London Lite, the free newspaper set up by Associated Newspapers three years ago in rivalry with Rupert Murdoch’s thelondonpaper. Both have now closed following the decision by the Standard’s new owners to distribute it as a free newspaper.
“We had, what is it called, a knock-out?” He means a banging-out, but his term has a certain resonance. “It was sad to lose all those journalists,” he says with evident sincerity (36 jobs were affected though Associated hopes to absorb them within its other titles). Otherwise, he is pleased with the results that the new, free Standard has produced in its first month. “Our circulation has gone from 250,000 and falling, to 600,000. The cost of getting each copy to a reader has gone from 30p to 4p. We used to pay newsagents for taking the paper, now they take it for free.
“People were worried about [the paper] losing quality, but they realise that it hasn’t.” Most neutral observers have indeed been pleasantly surprised by the paper’s new incarnation. “It was a difficult decision, but the right one,” stresses Lebedev. “Perhaps it is the future for all newspapers.”
Whenever I hear the term “future of newspapers”, I turn to the nearest drink. Luckily I have ordered a guava bellini. Lebedev is sticking to green tea; it had been his intention to make the restaurant a much more “pure” Japanese experience – no alcohol apart from champagne, no coffee – but he wasn’t sure London was ready for it. “The English tend to be conservative. You can push them, but not too far.” Taking shoes off might have been a problem too. “Ladies like their high heels, the men may have holes in their socks.”
Lebedev would as likely be housing a ferret in his trousers as wearing socks with holes in them. He is dapper and fashion-conscious and today for lunch wears a deep green jacket, pale grey sweater, and a small collar and thin tie combo that reminds those of us born before 1980 of early Joe Jackson videos. His neatly trimmed beard is black and of a startling density.
We have a brief discussion about mercury levels – his are high, an occupational hazard of what has been labelled his sushi lifestyle – but we decide to throw caution to the seas and order a selection of sushi and sashimi delicacies.
Unlike many oligarchs, if the oxymoron may be excused, Lebedev has spent a considerable part of his upbringing in London. While his father worked for the KGB he was being educated at a Church of England primary school, and then at schools in Holland Park and Mill Hill, after which he studied for a degree at the London School of Economics, and took a history of art course at Christie’s. He visited Russia intermittently, but decided to make London his home. I ask if he felt more English than Russian. “I don’t want to sound pompous, but I feel in a very privileged position. I feel I belong in both places. It’s a wonderful thing.
“I feel very affiliated with Russia, what I see as its soul. Even with its landscape, that vastness that you can’t grasp. Our history is violent and bloody: revolutions, war, turmoil. Even Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, they saw themselves as reformers but, on the other hand, they were brutal. Catherine used to write to Rousseau and Voltaire but then she had people’s noses chopped off.
“I do have a melancholic side to my character, which is Russian. But what I feel no connection with at all is Moscow. It is a place that has become completely driven by money and power. There is no part of it that has not been destroyed to make way for architecture of diabolical design.
“The big problem with Russian culture is that it doesn’t move forward. Lots of institutions are run by dinosaurs, people who have been there 30 to 40 years. The director of the Pushkin Museum has been there since Stalin was alive. If you are the director of a museum, you only leave in a body bag. I don’t blame them for not wanting to leave but the young generation suffers.”
So London was some kind of hip haven for him?
“It is the cultural centre of the world. The last year has been extraordinary for theatre – attendances are up despite the economic troubles; it shows people will spend on true quality.” Lebedev, who on Monday will host the Evening Standard Theatre Awards, is currently in a relationship with the actor Joely Richardson, although he stresses that his interest in theatre predated their liaison.
Who would have thought, he asks, that people would queue from 6.30 in the morning to get tickets for Waiting for Godot? “It is amazing. I liked it so much I am going to take it to the Moscow Art Theatre next year.” Lebedev has a stake in the theatre made famous by its founder Constantin Stanislavski, and wants to “provoke some dialogues” between British and Russian practitioners on its stage. “There is such a strong connection. We come from the same roots but went in different directions.”
This is not the only act of cultural entrepreneurship Lebedev wants to talk about. He is proud of the two Russian movies he produced last year – Yuri’s Day and Paper Soldier, which won the Silver Lion at Venice – and tells me that he has plans to bring a couple of young Russian artists whom he admires to stay at Palazzo Terranova, his luxury hotel in Umbria, so that they can develop their art without interference from commercial pressures.
Bringing Russia to western Europe, in other words, is at least as important to him as taking English culture back to Moscow. He gets exercised by the popular image of Russia in this country. “Why is it that the only thing that is showcased in the west is this image of murky, dubious businessmen, of whom nobody knows anything, or aggressive, ruthless politicians?” I ask, a little tentatively, if he has ever watched Spooks, the BBC spy series that has a succession of sinister Russian oligarchs plotting to overthrow the British state. Thankfully, he hasn’t.
He warms to his theme. “I asked [the director] Richard Eyre the other day if there were any people in today’s Russian arts scene that he would like to meet, and he went silent. He couldn’t think of anyone. And why is it that the only things we see here are either obvious – the Bolshoi, the Kirov – or very lowbrow? The previous mayor [of London] put on a couple of festivals in Trafalgar Square, and it was all potatoes, and folk dancing, and vodka, and fur hats, and dancing bears. That is not what Russia is about.”
But Russia is surely beginning to make cultural links with western Europe – what about The Garage, the contemporary art space in Moscow created by Dasha Zhukova, Roman Abramovich’s glamorous girlfriend? “I call them the wives and girlfriends,” he says, not a little dismissively, of Zhukova and her art-loving cohorts, before hastily adding: “They are fulfilling a great service. Before them, there was nothing.
“People in Moscow should have access to Jeff Koons and Antony Gormley,” he continues. “But once again, it is a case of looking out. Our tragedy is that we overlook completely what is happening inside the country.”
Lebedev is, in any case, a little disillusioned with the buzzy contemporary art scene in London. “Going to Frieze [art fair] this year was very ... ” He pauses for a long time. “It just made me very sad. There wasn’t a single piece of work that stuck with me.” What a contrast, he says, to the previous week, when he visited Florence and spent some quality time with Michelangelo’s late Pietà. “I was alone, and found myself just looking at it for about 40 minutes.
“I was reading Oscar Wilde’s essay ‘The Soul of Man [Under Socialism]’ and he talks about precisely what is happening today: artists creating what everyone wants to see, not what comes from inside. At that point, they cease to be artists.”
It is impossible not to sense in Lebedev someone poised between the restless energy of 21st-century urban culture and the eternal verities of his mother country. His projects seem to want to create a synergy between those almost opposite ways of seeing; his frustrations come from finding fault in both approaches as they currently stand.
Most descriptions of Lebedev paint him as a playboy, on the grounds that he is young, rich, single and was once reportedly seen canoodling with the Spice Girl Geri Halliwell at a party. When I ask about his interest in fashion – he owns Wintle, a bespoke men’s wear line and another forthcoming project is the launch of Dazed and Confused magazine in Russia “to show the [country’s] beauty and the ugliness” – he is keen to draw a line between himself and an earlier, possibly more reckless, version.
“As a teenager, I had a lot of dreams,” he says with a pronounced sense of sagacity. “Most teenage dreams are not realised. And it is not always good when they are.”
I ask if he collects major art works, and he is once more down on his compatriots. “No, I collect a little bit, but it has become a status thing. A lot of Russians, they buy boats and aeroplanes to prove their status, and then they realise they can be a tiny bit more sophisticated by buying expensive art: you can buy a Freud, or a Bacon. But most people see through that.”
Some people might see this as a thinly veiled reference to the other Russian: Abramovich reportedly bought a very expensive Freud and a very expensive Bacon for Zhukova last May. I ask Lebedev if he had been quoted correctly when criticising Abramovich for his lack of openness.
“It’s what I said at the beginning of our conversation – what we tend to import are these murky, shady individuals that no one knows anything about because they keep themselves to themselves, for whatever reason: insecurities, or they have something to hide. It creates an image of us as a closed, impenetrable society – God knows, we had that in the Soviet Union days, everyone thought there were bears in the street, and it’s still that way.”
There was a lot of paranoia around, I say.
He nods. “I mean come on, who needs bodyguards in London? If you have 50 bodyguards around you, you attract attention. It is another status thing.” For some reason my mind wanders to the fate of poor Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned after a sushi lunch in Piccadilly in 2006. Too many episodes of Spooks perhaps.
Lebedev finally rallies with a burst of optimism. “I feel Russia is ready for a change. But for change to happen, you need to struggle. A lot of people are afraid to struggle. That’s why I so greatly respect and admire my father. He has the courage to say things, and to fight for them. He is always told to keep his mouth shut, but he wants to champion democracy and freedom. He wants to do something.”
Read Peter Aspden’s culture column this week: Band-aid for seasonal spirit
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Sake No Hana
23 St James’s Street
London SW1
Green tea £3.00
Guava bellini £9.50
Salmon roe nigiri x 4 £16.00
Salmon sashimi x 2 £10.00
Faty tuna sashimi x 2 £19.00
Eel sashimi x 2 £10.00
Sea urchin sashimi x 3 £36.00
Mixed sorbet £5.00
Hazelnut mousse £7.50
Sesame aubergine £6.00
Sesame spinach £6.50
King crab and cucumber sunomono £8.00
Sautéed mushroom £8.50
Dragon roll £15.00
Voss still water x 2 £9.00
Genmaicha x 2 £6.00
Total (including service) £196.13
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John Lloyd on the rise of the Lebedevs
There are oligarchs and oligarchs. Alexander Lebedev, proprietor of the Evening Standard, banker, humanitarian, liberal and former KGB agent, is a top-drawer oligarch. Not for him the devastated childhood of oil prince Roman Abramovich, orphaned at three; or the work on building sites that aluminium king Oleg Deripaska claims he had to do to pay for his studies. Lebedev has passed through a series of elites – not without exertion – to reach his present one: the battered but still potent band of British newspaper proprietors.
His father was a professor, mother a Moscow school teacher – part of the capital’s intelligentsia. He attended two of the great churns of Soviet diplomatic and security cream – the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and the Institute of the Economics of the World Socialist System. In the latter, his thesis was on globalisation and the problem of debt: from there, he passed into the first chief directorate of the KGB.
The initials still prompt a shudder of revulsion: but by the early to mid-1980s, when Lebedev joined, the sword and shield of the party had got over its era of mass murder, and was concerned by the decline of the Russian economy and society. Hence its support for reforms and for young radicals such as Mikhail Gorbachev. Loyalty to Gorbachev has been one of Lebedev’s most enduring and attractive traits.
His post in London in the late 1990s, under the cover of economic attaché, allowed him to study globalisation close up: the cover was, in considerable part, his actual job. Returning to Russia as the Soviet Union collapsed, he went into banking. A friendship with Viktor Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin’s most enduring prime minister, helped him build up the moribund National Reserve Bank to the core of his holdings in Aeroflot, Gazprom and others. At the same time, he supported the deposed Gorbachev and has continued to finance his other endeavours.
As a newspaper baron, he has earned real merit in being the largest sponsor of Novaya Gazeta, the most outspoken paper in Russia. SInce becoming the owner of the London paper he used to scan for intelligence as an agent, he has made it free, forcing the closure of two freesheet rivals. He’s the source of rumours about other takeovers – The Independent is often cited – but has so far been discreet, a handy elite trait.
John Lloyd is a former FT Moscow bureau chief.
Read his television column this week: The indiscreet charms of the BBC
