Мне было интересно почитать. Носович, если Вы кусочками будете вводить текст в виде поста в фейсбук, то под ним должна появиться строчка: see translation. Если ее кликнуть, то получите вполне приличный перевод. Потом пост можно просто удалить после прочтения. Я уже несколько раз проверяла качество переводов - очень неплохо.
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/in-from-the-cold/ In From the Cold
Culture
By ANNE APPLEBAUM
March 8, 2013, 1:30 pm2 Comments
Johnnie Shand KyddEvgeny Lebedev in the London apartment of his friend the photographer Johnnie Shand Kydd.
The British establishment is a notoriously tough guard to crack —particularly for the wave of oligarchs who have been making London their home. So how come Evgeny Lebedev makes it look so easy?
In the novels of Balzac, it often happens that a provincial writer, poor but brilliant, comes to Paris, where he talks his way into critical success. In the stories of Henry James, this outsider is often an American girl who charms her way into European society. Anthony Trollope created “foreign-born” fin-an-ciers who bulldozed their way into the Vic-torian establishment too.
The provincial who makes it, the foreigner who is accepted, the Chicago meat-packing magnate who marries his daughter to an English Duke — we’ve heard all of these stories before. But we haven’t yet heard one told with a Russian hero. In the 21st century, perhaps Balzac will meet Bulgakov — and if so, the tale could feature a character based on the life of Evgeny Lebedev.
Born in Moscow, and raised partly in London, Lebedev is an elegant 32-year-old with a Regent’s Park flat, a perfectly trimmed beard and a post-Soviet fortune. His father (about whom more in a moment) was a K.G.B. officer in the 1980s, and Lebedev went to elementary school in Britain. He returned to London for high school, and emerged into the public eye a few years later — now as the son of a very wealthy man. Back in those days, he and the actress Joely Richardson had themselves photographed wearing matching his-and-hers tuxedos. At that time, he was “romantically linked,” as the tabloids in London had it, with Geri Halliwell, the former Spice Girl, as well as the model Sophie Dahl. For a while, he was best known for hosting charity balls attended by Anjelica Huston, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Fiennes and J. K. Rowling, among others. Entertainment was provided by the Black Eyed Peas, Mary J. Blige, the Russian Olympic ice-skating team and the Kirov ballet.
A decade ago, in other words, he would have seemed, to the British, a lot like the other London Russians. For there is now such a thing as a “London Russian”: since the 1990s, London has become the city of choice for the new Russian business class. They find it more hospitable than Paris, more cosmopolitan than New York — and more law-abiding than Moscow. They’ve discovered that British banks are happy to manage their money, British courts are happy to hear their cases, and British tax law means that no one asks questions about their investments abroad.
As a result, some 300,000 Russians are now thought to live in the city, a staggering proportion of whom have seven-figure incomes. A few, of course — Oleg Deripaska, Roman Abramovich — are billionaires. Huge parts of the city’s financial markets are now dominated by Russians. Whole chunks of the real estate market, including Belgravia, Chelsea and choice bits of the countryside, are dominated by Russians now too. “Moscow-on-the-Thames,” also known as “Londongrad,” has its own Russian restaurants, its own nightclubs, its own summer and winter balls. Bodyguards in dark glasses lurk behind ancient hedgerows, guarding Russian oligarchs’ stately homes. It’s a world that exists in parallel with British high society, but rarely intersects.
If he’d stuck to party-giving and party-going, Lebedev might have blended right in with his compatriots, their large houses and their supermodel girlfriends. He might easily have become one of those playboys featured in magazines, or the subject of gossip about his cars and his yachts. But a couple of years back, Lebedev took a different turn. Instead of treating London as a convenient parking lot for his money, he decided to become part of it. Instead of keeping a healthy distance from British high society, he decided to join it.
Now the supermodels are gone, at least the obvious ones. Lebedev has sold his old office in Mayfair, a neighborhood best known for hedge-fund managers and ladies who lunch. Instead, Lebedev works out of his business offices and arranges other meetings informally at his flat. In conversation, there is no discussion of his money or what it can buy. Instead, he speaks in dead earnestness about investigative journalism, the future of the media, freedom of speech. At the moment, he is keen to talk about how he has helped turn around a failing newspaper, the Evening Standard, which he and his father purchased in 2009, rescuing its journalists, and thus striking a blow for freedom of the press. His proudest achievement to date? It is, he says, that “we’ve proven that the print media can still make money!”
The same year that the Lebedevs bought the Evening Standard from its previous owners, who had been planning to close it, father and son also acquired The Independent and The Independent on Sunday newspapers, then operating at a loss. To save the Evening Standard, Lebedev and his editors took what many thought was a drastic step: they started giving it away for free. The circulation went up — and the advertisers came back. In February, the Evening Standard company, now profitable, was awarded a license to run a London television station, providing another boost of confidence in the company’s future.
He hasn’t won every battle. The Independent newspapers still lose money, and his foundation to promote investigative journalism shut down recently after no other donors offered support. Still, Lebedev continues to speak with enthusiasm of the “creativity” needed to “buck conventional wisdom” in journalism and to find new ways to print good writing.
At the same time, Lebedev himself keeps pressing, looking for more things to do, more ways to expand, more ways to make his mark as more than just the son of an ex-K.G.B. oligarch. Most recently, he has begun to write himself. He files stories for the Evening Standard from Somalia and for The Independent from the Central African Republic. He has interviewed the dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. He wrote a short memoir about growing up in Russia for The Guardian — he is particularly pleased, he says, when a paper he doesn’t own prints his work.
Why would a man who evidently doesn’t need to work for the money rush around the world’s battle zones? Partly, Lebedev says, it’s “for selfish reasons: I like to write.” Partly it’s because he wants to do something useful: “if it’s bringing attention to something — problems in Somalia, child soldiers in Africa” then it’s worth doing. He was recently in Juárez, the Mexican city plagued by drug troubles, and was “amazed at how God-forsaken it is.” That’s exactly the kind of story he says he likes to tell: about somewhere no one wants to go, no one wants to write about.
Of course there may be another motive as well. If all of this devotion to the cause of telling stories about faraway places makes Lebedev sound different from other wealthy London Russians, that’s because he would like to be very different indeed.
Clockwise from top left: Lebedev with Saed Ibrahim Abdullah, an unemployed fisherman, his wife and Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister of Gaza, at the al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City in 2011; Lebedev with Daphne Guinness; raising awareness for Unicef’s work in the Central African Republic; with Dame Edna Everage at the Savoy hotel in 2011.
This is not to say that Lebedev keeps a distance from his Russian identity. He travels often to Russia, mostly on business, and has a number of close Russian friends. He and his father support the Moscow Art Theatre and a Chekhov festival in the Crimea. Nor does he keep a distance from his family. In a recent Evening Standard “diary,” he reminisced about how “When my dad was in the K.G.B. here in London we used to visit the Soviet embassy country house in Kent and zip down to Hastings for the fairs, beach and Mr. Whippy ice creams.”
But he does spend a lot more time in Britain, where he keeps in touch with an even wider range of people, from Elton John (he is godfather to one of the pop star’s sons) to Tom Stoppard, the playwright, Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, and Boris Johnson, mayor of London. He goes to plays, and then takes the lead actress out to dinner. In his occasional columns he makes fun of the British and their inability to cope with snow.
A couple of years ago, I asked one of his close friends, the Moscow theater director Kirill Serebrennikov, whether Lebedev’s style is more English or Russian. “English,” he said immediately. Then he thought better of it: “No, Russian.” Then he thought again: “No, European. Or maybe English-Russian-European.”
Maybe that strange combination is the right answer, for if there is such a thing as an Anglo-Russian style, Lebedev personifies it. His excellent English is just slightly, subtly accented. His equally excellent suits combine English tailoring with distinctly continental quirks, an upturned collar or an unusual fabric. The Regent’s Park flat combines an English fireplace and a velvet English sofa with some unexpectedly contemporary lamps and a mock-zebra- skin footstool. But if Lebedev’s style isn’t really Russian and it isn’t really English, it isn’t at all “Russian oligarch” either. Although he says he has close Russian friends in Russia, “I haven’t come across anyone here who I want to be in contact with.”
His explanation is careful. Though they may live in Belgravia, the London Russians have, he says, a “Brighton Beach mentality”: They don’t bother to learn English. They don’t try to fit in. Worse, they went quickly from life in the Soviet Union to life in the fast lane, and “it’s all about showing it off as much as possible.”
What he doesn’t say is that the Russians now fill the social niche once occupied by oil-rich Arabs in the 1970s: London is happy to make money off of them, but laughs at their vulgarity behind their backs. They buy large houses that stand empty. They purchase yachts that they rarely use. They spend fortunes on a whim. When abroad, they are said to order sushi from their favorite London restaurants and have it delivered by private jet. True or not, people believe such stories because they seem so very plausible.
Wealthy Londoners in particular like to tell stories of their children’s Russian private school classmates, their exotic vacations, their elaborate birthday parties, which can feature multiple performing clowns and chocolate fountains. An acquaintance of mine once went to pick up his son from the home of his school friend, the son of a very wealthy London Russian, and discovered both children sitting by a black swimming pool, wrapped in black bathrobes, ordering lunch from the maid.
Lebedev has nothing to do with this particular crowd. He isn’t seen at Courchevel, the French ski resort that becomes Moscow-in-the-Alps around Orthodox Christmas. He doesn’t spend time with Naomi Campbell, the supermodel who now lives part-time in Moscow with her real estate mogul boyfriend, Vladislav Doronin. He collects contemporary art, but slowly and carefully. In an article in The Spectator a few years ago, he condemned by implication the multiple Russians who have been splashing out, of late, at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, buying up modern art at inflated prices. “Art auctions,” he wrote, “have become testosterone-driven contests to discover who’s got the biggest wallet.”
No wonder he finally comes up with this formula to describe himself: “The Russian sense of identity is very strong — when you are born Russian, you remain Russian. But I love England, I love its values, its libertarian values, its open-mindedness, liberalism, free thought.” He means it — which is why the English are starting to love him back.
Clockwise from right: Lebedev with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench in 2012; on the front lines in Mogadishu, Somalia; with Hamid Karzai in the presidential palace in Kabul.
On the surface, as I’ve said, it’s a common enough story: outsiders have entered British society since the days of James and Trollope. Still, the origins of Lebedev’s fortune do lie rather farther away from Regent’s Park than most. If Evgeny was born into one system but really grew up in another, his father, Alexander, has a career very much rooted in the Soviet past. Back in the 1980s the K.G.B. employed him to do “economic monitoring,” first in Moscow and then in London. That means that he read the newspapers (most secret services get their best information from “open sources,” he says), especially the financial press. At a time when nobody else in Russia even understood stocks and bonds, he started buying and selling third-world debt, most of it owed to the Soviet Union.
I encountered the elder Lebedev a couple of years ago on a freezing day in Moscow, in a half-finished house surrounded by armed security guards and cluttered with paintings waiting to be hung. The only completed room at that time was the basement, which contained a swimming pool. He wasn’t especially keen to talk about the missing pieces of his story (who provided the seed money for those early investments, for example). But he did acknowledge that he had parlayed that sum into a fortune, acquiring a bank, an airline and even a potato farm.
Like his son, he has sought distance from his origins, and at a certain point his career took a different turn from that of other newly rich Russians. Lebedev acquired Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper in Russia most willing to criticize those in power, which he owns with Gorbachev. Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s most famous and outspoken journalist, was employed by the newspaper until she was gunned down midday under mysterious circumstances in 2006. Like his son, Lebedev senior has thus thrown himself wholeheartedly into the business of journalism, free press and free speech.
To his journalists, he is a kind of hero. Novaya Gazeta’s editor, Dmitry Muratov, says Lebedev doesn’t interfere in editorial decisions, as so many Russian proprietors might. But he does help resolve legal problems (“and we are a 24-hours-per-day machine for producing problems”). According to Muratov, he has even helped whisk journalists and sources out of Russia, when they are under threat. Journalists at the newspaper are regularly arrested, beaten and even murdered for their reporting, much of which concerns elite corruption.
Yet Lebedev continues to support them, and not only for their own sake. He explains his ownership of Novaya Gazeta like this: “I dream of being seen by people as just a publisher, as an investigative reporter.” He does not dream, in other words, that he will be remembered as an oligarch, a playboy or a K.G.B. man who parlayed connections into money. In conversation, he periodically launches into long and sometimes confusing accounts of scandals that he has investigated (or would like to investigate), including the financial relationship between certain other London Russian billionaires and the Russian president.
This passionate curiosity hasn’t won him many friends among the Russian authorities. Masked policemen have raided the offices of his bank. His airline has recently been grounded for alleged safety concerns. Lebedev himself is personally in trouble after slugging another tycoon on a television program in 2011. Almost gleefully, Russian investigators have labeled the assault a case of “hooliganism motivated by hatred of a political group,” a charge that could carry a sentence of up to several years in prison. Similar charges were made against the women of Pussy Riot, the political punk band whose members were arrested after staging a “punk protest” in a Russian Orthodox church last year.
Not surprisingly, Evgeny claims that the elder Lebedev’s troubles will not affect his own London operations, which have, he says, “secure funding.” He argues that the Russian authorities can’t back up the “political hatred” accusation. Just because they can’t back it up doesn’t mean they won’t pursue it, of course. Nor does it mean that a Russian court won’t decide against the senior Lebedev. Evgeny isn’t giving anything away. “I hope justice will prevail,” he says.
And if it doesn’t? One feels certain that Evgeny will keep going, and keep trying to clear the family name on his father’s behalf.
From left: His father, Alexander Lebedev, with his wife, Elena Perminova, and their son Nikita; Lebedev with Jerry Hall, Elizabeth Jagger and Lily Cole last year in Sandwich, England.
The Lebedevs’ foray into media initially raised hackles in London. At the time of the sale, British journalists speculated about whether the Evening Standard would now become a propaganda mouthpiece for the Kremlin: “Welcome, Comrade Proprietor,” wrote one acidic commentator. Russia-watchers began screening the Lebedevs’ London papers for pro-Putin or anti-Putin messages, wondering what game he was playing.
Yet the Lebedevs are hardly the first British newspaper proprietors with complicated business or personal histories. The Daily Telegraph is owned by the secretive Barclay twins, who live in a mock-Gothic castle on one of the Channel Islands. The Daily Mirror was once owned by Robert Maxwell, the tycoon who allegedly threw himself off a yacht just before his finances unraveled. The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun are owned by Rupert Murdoch, of course, whose British media empire was tarnished by the phone-hacking scandal last year.
In that company, it has to be said that the Lebedevs — even with the murky roots of their fortune — appear surprisingly tame. Evgeny has met with the British prime minister, David Cameron, as well as his coalition partner, the Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg. He liked both of them, he said, because they are “ordinary blokes,” not remote and opaque as Russian politicians tend to be.
Somewhat to their own surprise, the journalists who work for his newspapers generally like Evgeny too. The sniping that surrounded him at the beginning has faded away. Personally, Evgeny says he isn’t bothered by the “stereotype” of Russians in London, even when it sticks to him: “We deserve it.” Yes, some people might pigeonhole him that way but, he implies, he’s self-confident enough nowadays not to be bothered.
One can see why. Anyone can buy celebrity friends in London, after all: there are minor members of the royal family whose presence can probably be rented by the hour. But to write cover stories for respectable newspapers, to count among your acquaintances London’s best writers and playwrights, to organize a media campaign to raise funds for Unicef and get the British to contribute — those are things that only insiders can do. Evgeny Lebedev is fighting hard to make his family’s fortune respectable, and so far he seems to be winning.
Родители - бедные иммигранты из Литвы. Спал в одной комнате с тремя братьями и родителями. А лет 15 назад построил для своей Сары, сбежавшей из Израиля от большого патриотизьму, отель Venetian. Очень она любит все итальянское вместо еврейского. 
Это серьезно. 
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