CHAPTER ONE

BAPTIZED INTO GREATNESS

Irina Abramovich was heavily pregnant when she journeyed more than 700 miles south from her home in northern Russia to stay with her mother in Saratov on the banks of the River Volga. Saratov was her home town and she would often try to persuade her husband Arkady that they would be happier there, but he liked living in Syktyvkar, the capital of the Komi region, despite the bitterly cold winters. Still, at least she could see out her pregnancy somewhere slightly warmer and have her mother on hand as she gave birth for the first time. Saratov has produced such a long list of writers, thinkers, singers and conductors over the years that Russians say those born in the city are born under a lucky star. Irina gave birth there on 24 October 1966, but it soon began to look as if her son Roman Arkadievich Abramovich was influenced not by a lucky star but by a menacing cloud. When Irina found herself pregnant for a second time less than a year after having her first baby, she opted for a back street abortion rather than having a second mouth to feed during a period when times were particularly hard. Tragically, blood poison­ing set in as a result and, the day before her son's first birthday, she died. She was just 28.

Naturally, her death came as 'a terrible shock' to Arkady, says his best friend, Vyacheslav Shulgin. The two, who were both lewish, had met in the early Sixties through their work at the sovnarkhoz (the national economic council) in Syktyvkar. Prior to Arkady's marriage, along with another colleague called Filchik the pair would socialize together, chase women and dream of the day they would achieve their ambition of moving to Israel. 'Arkady was a handsome man,' recalls Shulgin, 'and he was the most boisterous and most sociable member of our team.'

Following his wife's death, Arkady threw himself into his work and, although he was a devoted father, his work com­mitments were such that the infant Roman, known to every- one as Romka, went to live with his paternal grandmother, Tatyana. By now Arkady was head of the supplies division of a large construction enterprise but he was frustrated by the restrictions of office life and is remembered as an ener­getic man who got involved in many aspects of the business that were not strictly his responsibility.

So it was no surprise when, one Saturday in May 1969, he volunteered to supervise some construction work. Shulgin vividly recalls what happened that day: 'When they were moving the crane into position, the arm broke off and crushed Arkady's legs. My best friend died a few days later. The doctors told me that this was a highly unusual case. Particles of bone marrow had clogged his arteries. We buried Arkady next to his wife.'

BAPTIZED INTO GREATNESS

And so, the unfortunate Roman Abramovich was left an orphan at the age of two and a half. One East European novelist writes of orphans being 'baptized into greatness', his logic being that they grow up weighed down by none of the restrictive expectations of parents that constrain the rest of us. His relatives could only hope that this would turn out to be true. Rather than being left with his grandmother in Syktyvkar or being consigned to a grim future in a state orphanage, the young Roman was adopted by Arkady's brother Leib and his wife Ludmilla, a former beauty queen. The couple already had two daughters, Natasha and Ida (respectively 13 and 10 years older than their cousin) but neither Leib nor his brother Abram had any sons and Roman's position as the family's sole male heir offered him a certain status. Leib, and later Abram, who took the boy under his wing when he moved to Moscow, went on to show a truly touching level of devotion to their adopted son and provided him with a lifestyle that would have been the envy of Arkady and Irina, had they lived.

Abramovich's new home was apartment No. 4 in a four- storey building at 22 Oktyabrskaya Street in the town of Ukhta, 700 miles northeast of Moscow. The block was built in 1968 and Leib and his family had moved in in the same year. Before the young nephew's arrival, conditions were already cramped - Soviet housing regulations allowed for just nine square metres per person - but he was treated like a returning prodigal son. Leib and Ludmilla gave up their small bedroom to him and slept on the sofa in the living room instead.

The apartment block is little changed today from how it was when Abramovich moved there. An uncarpeted concrete staircase leads up to his childhood home, and from the first floor up, someone has made an attempt to brighten th up by stencilling a border of camomUe flowers along "h* stairway wall - but there are few opportunities to admir •' as most of the light bulbs don't work. The family has Ion gone, Leib and Ludmilla having moved to the Kaluga district near Moscow in the Eighties. But their upstairs neighbours Ivan and Ludmilla Lagoda, both lecturers in economics at the local Ukhta State Technical University, are members of the generation that missed out on the opportunities offered by perestroika and they still occupy the same flat they moved into thirty-five years ago with their son Sergei. They have fond memories of the child who moved in downstairs all those years ago. It took them some time to establish that Roman was Leib's orphaned nephew, they admit, despite the fact that he had arrived overnight as a fully-formed four year old. 'We were not so close that I could ask,' says Ludmilla. 'It was their personal business.'

It was not until Abramovich started school two years later that the families began to have more to do with each other. In line with Soviet bureaucratic uniformity, Abramovich's first school was called simply School No. 2. Etched in concrete above the main door is the phrase, 'You must study, study, study' - Lenin's exhortation to Young Communist League members in 1918 when they asked him how they could best contribute to the strengthening of the communist state. As Ludmilla Lagoda recalls:

Roman came here to play with Sergei, and Sergei and Dmitri from apartment No. 1 downstairs went to Leib's to play with Roman. They played hockey together. Leib and Ludmilla were quite strict carers. If Roman came to

visit us, Ludmilla would call half an hour later to make sure he was behaving himself. They were a cultured family. When they were having meals, Ludmilla always put a table­cloth on the table and laid out the cutlery in a proper way. They had good manners. What was very special about him was that he would always stop and say hello, while other children would rush by.

Abramovich's childhood friend Dmitri Sakovich was three years older than him and it is revealing that neither of them appeared to notice the age gap. While Abramovich went on to become a billionaire, fate has been less kind to the boy he knew as Dima. These days, Sakovich comes across as a shy man with a rather beaten look. His own career as a builder-cum-decorator has clearly not taken off and he and his wife, who is Jewish, are planning to take advantage of a scheme sponsored by Germany to enable Jewish emigration to northern Westphalia. He remembers his childhood friend as someone with a strong sense of curiosity who was con­stantly asking questions. When Sakovich was given a toy Russian castle as a present, for example, Abramovich took a great interest in how it was put together and had soon mas­tered how to do it. 'He was quick on the uptake and tried to do things well and quickly,' Sakovich says. 'He seemed to like efficiency. You felt energy in him.' A sign of impatience? 'Perhaps.' He also observed a feature of his young friend that was to stay with Abramovich throughout his life and is repeatedly commented upon: 'He was a cheerful, sociable boy, always smiling. The best thing about Romka was his constantly smiling face, which he still has today. When he is on TV, he is always smiling.' ooi Aoramovlcn nau Uisupuue, guuu llinnngfs and res for his ciders instilled in him from an early age but, to expl_aj what childhood influences allowed a Jewish orphan to escape his past and make his fortune in a land where anti-Semitism was widespread, perhaps some account should be taken of the unusual character of the town of Ukhta and the lessons passed on by Uncle Leib.

On the face of it, Ukhta is an archetypal grim north Russian town. With its undistinguished architecture, birch trees and blanket of snow it could be any one of a number of settle­ments built under Stalin to exploit the natural resources of the surrounding region. The temperature in winter is below freezing and the the locals are well used to -25° Celsius. The relentless cold and gloom have a tendency to sap the morale of the inhabitants and many turn to strong drink to raise their spirits. Those who cannot afford vodka often resort to a mixture of shaving balm, well known to be 30 degrees proof, and beer - apparently it makes 'a very pleasant cocktail'. But one aspect of Ukhta distinguishes it from many other similar outposts: it emerged from the Gulag.

The town that celebrated its sixtieth anniversary in 2003 was built and populated by political prisoners exiled after falling victim to one or other of Stalin's purges. The result is that it was formed by a cosmopolitan mix of dissidents, from ballet dancers to physicists. At one point it boasted a particularly good football team because Nikolay Starostin, a star player with Spartak Moscow who had fallen foul of the KGB, took over the coaching of Dinamo Ukhta. Significantly, from Abramovich's point of view, many of the dissidents were Jews. Unified by their shared victimhood, the people of Ukhta betrayed fewer of the anti-Semitic prejudices that marked communities elsewhere. The town was regarded at cultured and enlightened, a place where no one cared what ethnic group you belonged to and people felt 'very equal'. So while the young Abramovich was described as lewish on the register at School No. 2 and his adoptive parents would have carried the word lewish rather than Russian in their pasa- ports, the signs are that he escaped the sort of playground baiting that might have occurred in other parts of the country.

Through Uncle Leib, Abramovich was alao given a crash course in the laws of the market at a time when private enterprise was officially banned. At the time, Leib was head of the supplies department at UkhtaLes, Ukhta's state-owned timber business. According to Yevgeni Devahovsky, a head of department at the local university:

If his father was head of supplies at the Vocal logging company, it's the best school of economics he could have gone to. What is now called business was in those times called speculation. In Soviet times it was seen as wrong to buy at one price and sell at another but that is exactly what they would have been doing. The whole idea of running supplies departments was to get things on the cheap and sell at higher prices. You had to be gifted and skilled and brave to do it. Not everyone had those talents. Obviously Leib did. Even the people in Party times who were Party functionaries became very prominent businessmen because they had access to better supplies. They lived a double life, promoting the state ideology on the one hand and profiting from the black market on the other.

Thus Leib was 8 VIP by Ukhta standards, a man who h access to what Ludmilla Lagoda calls 'goodies' but which most people in the West would regard as necessities. During the Soviet era, many staple goods - from sausages to shoes - were in desperately short supply. This meant that the con­sumer had an excess of money and a shortage of product. As a result, many were prepared to buy a state-subsidized rail ticket to make the 1,400-mile round trip to Moscow to stock up on fairly cheap items such as sausages. Indeed, so common was this practice that it spawned a national joke:

What's long, green and smells of sausage?

A train.

Leib had privileged access to both food and clothing because the state channelled them through his department to be sold to the workers. He could officially receive ten sheepskins, for example, and the relevant paperwork would later show that these had been sold to staff, whereas they had in fact been sold on the black market at a substantial premium over the price set by the state. In this context, anyone who had access to such goods enjoyed status and power. Ludmilla Lagoda describes Leib and others in his position as 'the oligarchs of the time'. Fortunately for her and her husband, their influential neighbour perceived them as having something to trade too. One of Leib's daughters, Natasha, was a student of Ludmilla's and he was not above asking her 'to put in a good word' for her - clearly a hint that there would be some benefit to Ludmilla if she did so. In fact, Natasha was a very good student and Ludmilla did not need to inflate her marks. There was a pay-off, never­theless. In those days, cars were in such short supply that the only way the average citizen could obtain one was by adding their name to an extremely long waiting list. Leib used his connections to accelerate the Lagodas' application and before long they were the proud owner* of a Lada.

About the only thing even Leib waa unable to fix was a bigger apartment for himself and his expanded family. Hous­ing was in such short supply that regulations were then strictly enforced and, while the Lagodas had succeeded in wangling a three-roomed apartment by forging docancMii that showed Ludmilia's father was living with them, Leib found it impossible to obtain a bigger flat. But, in every other way, the young Roman had a privileged upbringing. Not only was he never short of a decent pair of shoes but, thanks to his uncle's job - which often involved bartering Russian timber for consumer goods from countries such as Bulgaria and Japan - he is also remembered as the first boy in the area to own a Western-style cassette player rather than the bulky reel-to-reel affairs that others had to put up with. Their relative prosperity caused resentment in some quarters, however, and the Abramovich flat was burgled on at least two occasions.

After four years with Leib and Ludmilla, Abramovich was on the move again, this time to Moscow where he was reunited with his grandmother, Tatyana. 'Roman disappeared in 1974,' Ludmilla Lagoda recalls, 'and Leib explained that he had decided to send him to Moscow because the capital offered more opportunities for a business career.' Leib was obviously a man who thought ahead.

Abramovich moved in with his grandmother in her one- roomed flat on Moscow's Tsvetnoi Boulevard, a relatively

salubrious and central location, but it was his Uncle Ah- who appears to have taken over the role of looking after h,,,, This short, twinkly-eyed man with receding hair that is _now almost white carefully monitored his progress at school and provided him with the emotional security to prosper Nadezhda Rostova, his form teacher from about age eleven onwards, remembers Abram as contributing enormously to Roman's development, giving the boy a lot of attention and care. She says he was always well dressed; a cultured, stylish child. Indeed, she considers that Abram was more doting than most fathers. Whenever Abramovich's exam results were due, he would rush to the school to see them. 'Roman would never have turned out as he has without so much love,' says Rostova. 'I think it was my love and Abram's love that made him the outstanding person he is today.'

That said, he had a difficult start. Rostova vividly remem­bers Abramovich's first day at School No. 232 on Trubnaya Street, where she still teaches: 'When his Uncle Abram brought him here on his first day, both his arms were in plaster.' He had fallen off a swing and broken both arms. 'He was a very lovable boy but that made me feel even more love for him,' she adds. 'His behaviour made people love him. His classmates all felt very warm towards him.'

If this sounds a little over the top, it is worth highlighting what Abramovich has done since for his alma mater. Many Russian schools are run down and poorly decorated but the 600 pupils at Abramovich's old school appear to want for nothing. The headmistress, Ludmilla Prosenkova, is justly >roud of die gleaming new gym with immaculately polished roodei} floor, wall bars and basketball court; the computer >om which boasts thirteen state-of-the-art computers, along with televisions, video players, and music centres; and the canteen about to be fitted out with the latest in Italian designer kitchen equipment. In all, five rooms and the brand new extension built at Abramovich's expense by has Uncle Abram's construction company have small brass plaques immortalizing Roman Abramovich as the generous donor. The teachers have even produced a colour-photocopied brochure celebrating his achievements* which includes the wording of a fax from the school to its benefactor.

Dear Roman Arkadievich,

The pupils and teachers of School 232 thank you for your enormous kindness to us. The good work done by you will always be remembered. When we use the gym we think of you. When we eat in the canteen we think of you. When we use the computer room we think of you ...

The style is reminiscent of the cult of personality promoted under Stalin. In the Forties and Fifties, newspaper articles lauding the building of a new stadium, for example, would say, 'Sportsmen are thinking of Comrade Stalin with grati­tude'. In general, he would be paraded as the best friend of everyone from children to border guards. And so it is with Abramovich within the walls of School No. 232. There are even plans to create a school museum dedicated to the achievements of distinguished old boys. It seems likely that Abramovich will find that a section of the museum has been devoted entirely to him.

His own sentiments are almost equally fulsome. On 13 February 2001, he sent a telegram to the headmistress from the remote republic of Chukotka, where he was now governor: Dear Ludmilla,

The fiftieth anniversary of your school is another opp_Qr tunity for me to express my great gratitude for the edu cation and the knowledge that we, your students, received there. No matter where destiny has taken us we must all remember that the school is not just a building but the foundation for the future, the place where we received our earliest experience and knowledge.

Yours gratefully,

Roman Abramovich

The love-in between Abramovich and School No. 232 is i_n sharp contrast to his relations with his old school in Ukhta, however. There the deputy headmistress, Irina Alioshina, says bitterly: ^cWe asked Roman Abramovich for help but he ignored it He didn't send a single rouble.'

Abramovich was, by all accounts, a diligent rather than inspired pupil. He never won any school prizes and Rostova describes him as 'an average student'. Even his number one tan, the headmistress, concedes that he was not academically gifted. There were, however, early signs of the streetwise streak that was to help him outstrip his more academic peers. If be had failed to do his homework, he had an uncanny ability to make very educated guesses in response to ques­tions. Aside from his academic work, he regularly went on school trips to towns such as Brest, St Petersburg (then Leningrad), and Pskov and people remark on the curiosity be showed on these trips, his insatiable thirst for knowledge.

After nme years of working hard and winning friends, Abramovich left the school in 1983. Rostova, at least, had faith in his prospects. '1 knew Roman better than anybody else,' she said, 'and I can teU you that he was preparing himself for his big career from the day he arrived heTe at 232. His first wife said so in an interview — it was probably the only true thing she said.' As things turned out, the 'big career' was to take some years to come to fruition.