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For Russian Glamour Girls, Fame's All In The Name

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By NATASHA SINGER, The New York Times

Published: December 17, 2007

MOSCOW - Americans who love celebrities follow the escapades of Lindsay Lohan and Angelina Jolie. The British consume themselves with the romantic lives of their royals. But in Moscow, where raw political power and big money hold sway, it is the children and grandchildren of politicians and oligarchs whose love lives, fashion tastes and socializing are widely chronicled.

They are women such as Dasha Zhukova, 26, daughter of a Russian tycoon and reportedly the girlfriend of another, Roman Abramovich, 40, who owns the Chelsea soccer club in London. She might turn up at a reception at Spasso House, the residence of the American ambassador here, or in Los Angeles with Abramovich to watch his team play David Beckham's.

And they are women such as the sisters known as "the Gorbachev girls," Anastasia and Ksenia Virganskaya, 20 and 28, respectively, granddaughters of Mikhail Gorbachev and who recently appeared at a party with Donatella Versace in gowns chosen by the designer.

These and other well-connected beauties are the It Girls of Moscow, part of a transnational jet set that shows up from Monaco to Ascot.

Entertainment programs on Russian television interview them, and local glossy magazines register their every heartbreak and hemline.

"We don't have our own Angelina Jolie or our Britney Spears with the resources to wear fancy clothes," said Ksenia Chilingarova, a poet and magazine editor.

Chilingarova, 25, is an It Girl, too, the daughter of Artur Chilingarov, a deputy speaker of Russia's lower house of Parliament and a polar explorer. (He gained international notoriety last summer for claiming a chunk of seabed under the North Pole for Russia.)

At 11 a.m. on a recent Friday, Chilingarova was dressed in evening attire - a common sight in Moscow because constant traffic jams prevent people from going home to change at the end of the day - for a party that night to be given by crystal purveyor Nadia Swarovski.

"The reality is that the children of famous people are so popular because they have the money to dress up, wear jewelry, travel to Paris and London and be photographed doing it," Chilingarova said.

Indeed, the party pages of Russian editions of Harper's Bazaar, Hello, OK, Viva and Gala are so popular that readers flip to the back to read them first and to check out what local socials are wearing, said Shakri Amirkhanova, editor of the forthcoming Russian version of the British society magazine Tatler.

"If they work in fashionable jobs, if they wear a mix of designer and high street clothes, if they go on spiritual retreats in Tibet and drink green tea and do yoga and have iPhones, other people will follow," she said.

There is some historical precedent for this phenomenon. In czarist times, members of the nobility followed the doings of the ruler's entourage. And in some ways, the new Moscow high society replicates the social structure of the old Soviet caste system, in which children of the nomenklatura attended the same elite schools and social events.

"Russia has always been a monolith state, and Russians have always been obsessed with people in power," said Nina Khrushcheva, a professor in the international affairs program at New School University. "So now it is a monolith state with tall, blond leggy girls who promote themselves as the children of power."

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