One week on, the full story is only just emerging of how Alexander Lebedev, the mysterious Russian billionaire and former KGB agent, spent more than £1m throwing a private party with Gorbachev at the Northamptonshire estate where Diana, Princess of Wales grew up and is now buried.
“It was amazing,” said Geordie Greig, editor of Tatler magazine, who helped to organise the “Russian midsummer fantasy” last Saturday. “It was fabulous,” gushed another of those who attended. It was, said another, “almost surreal”.
The evening began with guests — including Orlando Bloom, Elle Macpherson, Salman Rushdie and Tamara Mellon — wending their way through the parkland of the 8,500-acre estate. People in 18th-century dress sat in the trees “like a sort of scene from a Watteau painting”, said one guest.
Strange figures with wolves straining on leashes roamed the grounds. A camel played nomad on the lawns. As champagne and oysters were served in front of the house, a troop of Cossacks charged from the woods and whirled gracefully into an “equestrian ballet”.
The Christ Church cathedral school boys’ choir sang from a balcony. As dinner approached, children appeared dressed as fairies; they played out a mime that drew the 400 guests into a giant marquee.
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Jellied borscht with smoked sturgeon and “golden Oscietra caviar” were followed by free-range guinea fowl, all set off by a fine riesling and Crozes-Hermitage.
The musical entertainment was equally striking. Andrei Gavrilov, the international pianist and former winner of the Tchaikovsky prize, was followed by the hip-hop band the Black Eyed Peas. Bono, the U2 singer, chipped in by video link from Dublin.
The purpose of this extravaganza was — apart from general fun and games — to launch the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation, a charity dedicated to helping children suffering from cancer, named after Gorbachev’s wife who died from leukaemia.
Another of the guests was Robert Harris, author of Fatherland and Archangel. “It was quite a party,” he said. “Even the tables were revolving. Gorbachev didn’t dance but he seemed to enjoy the attentions of many people.”
After dinner the serious business of raising money began. Up for auction were lots including a personal tour of the Hermitage in St Petersburg, with the museum director as guide; a piece of diamond-encrusted jewellery donated by Christina Aguilera; a work of art by Tracey Emin, who was among the guests; a flight in a MiG-25 Foxbat, the fastest jet fighter in the world; and dinner with Gorbachev at Lebedev’s dacha outside Moscow.
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By the end of the evening the event had raised £1m for the charity — and the party, organised by planners Urban Caprice, had cost even more. The charity, however, would get all the money raised because Lebedev was picking up the tab for the entire bash.
It left many guests and outside observers bemused and intrigued by their unassuming, bespectacled 46-year-old Russian host. Who is that guy, they asked? An oligarch on the make or a new philanthropist? And what, while spending £1.3m to raise £1m, is he really up to?
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BY the gulag standards of Soviet Russia, Lebedev had it easy as a boy, growing up in a family that was part of the scientific elite. The son of a professor of engineering, he elevated his connections further when he married Natalia Sokolova, the scientist daughter of Vladimir Sokolov, an eminent biologist.
“Everyone on my mother’s side is a biologist,” said Evgeny Lebedev, the billionaire’s 26-year-old son, a reformed party animal who is based in London.
“My mother’s a microbiologist and my grandfather was the head of the department of biology in the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
“When I was a child, he took me on all his research expeditions. We mostly went to Soviet bloc countries, but it was amazing to go to places like Bolivia and Vietnam.”
()The Lebedev family had both an appreciation of the outside world and a close-up view of the Kremlin: they lived just round the corner. “I used to pop out to walk the dog in Red Square,” said Evgeny.
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Perhaps it was that proximity to power that led his father to forsake academia for the murkier world of intelligence. After training as an economist and becoming an expert on foreign debt, Lebedev joined the KGB’s Foreign Intelligence Academy. Four years later he was posted to the Russian embassy in London, working ostensibly as economics attaché and covertly as a spy.
The spy was something of a maverick and unwilling to toe the line entirely. While in Britain he sent young Evgeny to a Church of England school in Kensington.
“It was forbidden at the time,” said Evgeny. “I had to be sneaked out the back by my parents.”
How did a relatively modest spy make the leap to billionaire player in only a few years? Lebedev once said that it was mostly down to luck. Doubtless he was fortunate at the embassy in London to met Andrei Kostin, who later became head of Vnesheconombank, one of Russia’s largest state banks.
It was probably fortunate, too, that when Lebedev returned to Moscow he became close to Alexander Mamut, a secretive banker who was cosy with Boris Yeltsin, whose election as Russian president in 1991 within the old Soviet Union marked the death knell of communism.
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As the Soviet Union collapsed, Lebedev read the runes smartly. When the communist die-hards kidnapped Gorbachev in 1991 to try to halt his reforms and besieged the White House, the Russian parliament, Lebedev and his wife joined Yeltsin in defying the attempted coup, according to their son.
“They went to the White House to the barricades,” said Evgeny. “They were part of the defence.”
Such loyalties paid off after Gorbachev resigned and Yeltsin took over in the Kremlin. By 1995 Lebedev was chairman of the National Reserve Bank (NRB) which, in little over a year, became one of Russia’s top 10 banks, mainly as a result of its close connection to Gazprom, the giant state gas company.
“It doesn’t matter how smart you are,” said one businessman who knows Lebedev. “In Russia, to become as successful as Lebedev has, one must have serious connections, either in politics or in intelligence or both.”
There were some hiccups, of course.
In 1997 Lebedev’s Moscow home and dacha were raided by police who were investigating tax evasion. Other threats were rather more nerve-racking.
“Living in Russia in the 1990s with my father doing business was very intense,” said Evgeny. “Russia of the 1990s was like the wild west. It is much more calm now and people don’t get shot right, left and centre.”
Was that ever a fear for his father? “There were incidents that made us think, certainly.”
ACCORDING to Forbes magazine, Lebedev is the 194th richest person in the world and worth about $3.5 billion. He now owns 31% of Aeroflot, the Russian airline. But unlike Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea football club, he is not splashing out on trophies.
“He’s different from other oligarchs,” said a friend, who visited Lebedev and Gorbachev in Moscow while preparing for the party.
“He’s not buying yachts and football clubs.” (Mind you, he did once pay for Rod Stewart to stage a concert in Moscow and also tried to buy a statue of Felix Derzhinsky, founder of the KGB, to sit in the entrance of his bank.) At a private dinner in The Ivy restaurant in London the night before the Althorp party, Lebedev played host to Lady Thatcher as well as to Gorbachev. But he left the former political giants to their reminiscences and then spent the evening chatting to Sarah Ferguson, apparently swapping entrepreneurial tales.
Others note that Lebedev is “not scared of trying to get things to happen” and has some political ambitions. The billionaire has increasingly criticised corruption in Russia and has challenged his fellow oligarchs for failing to do enough for ordinary citizens.
“If a person buys airplanes, yachts and football clubs abroad, who is going to like this?” Lebedev said recently.
In partnership with Gorbachev he has recently bought a stake in Novaya Gazeta, one of the last Russian newspapers that still dares to criticise the Kremlin.
His son, however, plays down the idea that buying into the newspaper might lead to a clash with President Vladimir Putin.
“He’s not trying to change the newspaper,” Evgeny said. “It’s not an aggressive opposition.”
Lebedev himself is far too canny to risk a clash. Late last year he toyed with the idea of running for mayor of Moscow again (he had made an abortive attempt in 2003). However, he was summoned for what he later described as “a little conversation” by Putin’s men and was told to forget about it.
He did, and instead turned his attention to a reality television show called Chance, a version of The Apprentice in which the contestants are given $100,000 to start up businesses. Lebedev, joke friends, may yet become Russia's answer to Sir Alan Sugar or Donald Trump.