She could have spent those summer days quietly tending her manicured garden in the spectacular mansion her daughter bought for her on a quiet corner of Beverly Hills.
She has long since retired from her academic work as a molecular biologist and there would have been visits from children and grandchildren who liked to splash about in the kidney-shaped pool with their beloved babushka.
Instead, at the age of 66, Elena Zhukova is at the center of international intrigues as the new girlfriend of media magnate Rupert Murdoch.
Since the Chron’s exclusive revelation that they were vacationing together on the Christina O, the iconic pleasure boat on which Aristotle Onassis seduced JFK’s widow Jackie Kennedy, the world has pored over photos of the two to see what they can tell us about the shrewd ninety-year-old whose capacity for surprise seems as unbroken as his appetite for female company.
Just months ago, the owner of The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and The Sun made headlines when he announced his engagement to a high-spirited divorcee, who described her engagement as a “godsend” only to call it off weeks later .
New love: Elena Zhukova (pictured) is at the center of international intrigue as the new girlfriend of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch
Murdoch has been married — and divorced — four times, yet he appears to remain an incurable romantic.
Since his fourth marriage to model Jerry Hall, ex-wife of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, there’s something quite touching about his love affairs. Admirers liken him to a brilliant but aging composer determined to write another great work while his ability still allows.
But this time around, the focus of allure is not only Murdoch, but also his attractive, dark-haired girlfriend, whose prominent older daughter Dasha was once married to Roman Abramovich, a household name in Britain as he used to be the owner of Chelsea football club and was subject to sanctions against him was imposed after the invasion of Ukraine.
Such is Elena’s connection to money and glamor that Tatler magazine could hardly help dubbing her this week as “Rupert Murdoch’s ultimate power rival,” thanks to her position at the heart of an influential connection that unites the art world, Russian oligarchs and a Famous includes Greek Maritime Dynasty.
But what about the woman herself? The story of her life in the Soviet Union and her comfortable retirement in sunny California after the communist era is not only a story of hard work and enterprise, but also of some extraordinary twists of fate.
Elena’s greatest fortune came when her daughter met Abramovich, who was once reportedly worth £11 billion. She was whisked away into the world of the super rich when Dasha bought her a six bedroom, seven bathroom home in upscale Beverly Hills in the coveted 90210 zip code.
Couple: Ever since the Chron’s exclusive revelation that they were vacationing together on the Christina O, the world has brooded over photos of the pair. Pictured: Elena and Rupert Murdoch
At age 51, due to illness, she retired from her job at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she held a medical-gastroenterology appointment.
Dasha, an art entrepreneur, after marrying and divorcing Abramovich is now the wife of shipping company heir Stavros Niarchos – a former lover of socialite Paris Hilton.
What we’ve learned about Elena is that behind the engaging smile that bewitched the media magnate lies a woman of steel and resilience.
She left Moscow for the United States in 1991 to take a job at a university in Texas as part of Russia’s “brain drain” after the collapse of the former USSR.
Even more impressive was that she was also a single mother – her marriage to Dasha’s father ended when their daughter was three years old.
When a second romance in America fell through, she raised the twins born during the relationship – a boy and a girl, Yuri and Katya – without any financial support from their father, it turns out.
Unlike her children, Elena has not spoken publicly about these domestic challenges.
A few years ago, Katya, now 31, chose Father’s Day to share a revealing post about the man she called her “dead father”: George Gause.
Instead of him, she wrote, she was “thinking about what an amazing mother I have and how nothing could be better.” In fact, Katya is invariably affectionate with her mother, and fondly recalls how Elena was so “clumsy” that she once dropped a cellphone in a bowl of borscht (beetroot soup), and how she was 54 years old before she learned to ride a bicycle.
The stereotypical Russian enthusiasm for consuming large quantities of alcohol can be found in Katya’s social media posts.
“My life is so Russian,” she explained after her mother’s friends tried to persuade her to drink with them.
In 2013, she wrote of her maternal grandmother, who settled in America to help her daughter Elena with the children: ‘Grandma sits at the table in a faux fur vest, one hand holding a shot glass of vodka, the other holding a shot glass of tequila.’
She later added, “Grandma picks her teeth with a sharp knife #drunk #Russians.”
Katya, a gallerist like her older sister, recently married Kour Pour, a half-Iranian artist. Exuberant wedding day pictures fill their social media accounts.
Her disheveled twin brother Yuri, who goes by the surname Chigirinsky, is a musician and composer working in the film industry. He is described as having “perfect hearing and the ability to quickly learn musical voices and instruments”.
Daughter: This time, not only is Murdoch the center of fascination, but also his attractive, dark-haired girlfriend, whose prominent older daughter Dasha (right) was once married to Roman Abramovich (left).
Elena’s seemingly content family life seems far removed from the affluent world of high finance and influence of which Murdoch is such an exciting part.
Still, her extreme wealth was no stranger, even if it wasn’t always the case. The story begins when Elena was born in Moscow in January 1957 into an intellectually elite family. “It was the usual, normal Moscow intelligence,” Elena later told a journalist who portrayed daughter Dasha.
Elena’s father was Lev Izrailevich Rudnitsky, a writer and director of the Moscow International Film Festival. He was married to Maria, Elena’s mother, although according to reports in a Russian newspaper, they later divorced. The family was Jewish and their home was a centrally located apartment in Moscow on Alexei Tolstoy Street.
As a teenager studying molecular biology, Elena meets tall and handsome fellow student Alexander Zhukov. Interestingly, Alexander’s first name was Radkin, but he took his mother’s maiden name, Zhukov – a legendary surname in Russian history as it is associated with World War II hero Marshal Zhukov.
After graduating, he had a job as a projectionist, which he left to start buying and selling personal computers. The couple got married, and in 1981 their daughter Daria, known as Dasha, was born.
The marriage didn’t last long, but Alexander’s entrepreneurial skills blossomed. He got involved in energy trading and began to amass considerable wealth.
Recalling her childhood, Dasha said: “I went to museums and the theater, I remember that I often went to the circus.” . . I had a happy childhood, was very close to nature and independent. “Moscow was very safe back then, I had a lot of freedom, at the age of eight you could take the subway through the city on your own.”
In 1991, Elena was offered a position researching diabetes at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. It was a step into an unfamiliar world, but as Dasha explained about her mother: “She really didn’t like what was happening in the medical community in Russia and the attitude towards scientists.” After the fall of communism, essentially, one had to put up with deal with the hustlers to really make a living.
“My mother couldn’t find a place where she felt comfortable. It used to be an educated group, the intelligence – then you suddenly needed completely different skills to survive. She just didn’t feel like she wanted to be a part of it.’
Mother and daughter moved into a nondescript apartment in a town where they knew almost nobody.
“It was culture shock,” Dasha said. “I had never seen (breakfast) cereal!” “Russia had cottage cheese and pancakes, not colorful circles wrapped in cardboard boxes.”
When Elena had only been in office for a few months, the Soviet Union collapsed and she decided to stay in the US. Baylor College of Medicine confirmed this week that Elena was a research associate from 1991-1994.
In May 1992, Elena gave birth to the twins. It is not known if she and George Gause, the father, ever married. He reportedly died in 2019, well after they split.
Little is known about him and their relationship, but it didn’t last long and there is evidence that Gause later started a second family with another woman.
In 1994, Elena, with her two-year-old twins and 13-year-old Dasha, sent her mother, Maria, to help raise her family in Houston. Her father Lev stayed in Moscow, where he died in 1999.
Shortly after Maria’s arrival, she received a job offer from UCLA and the family moved to Los Angeles. Elena’s mother remained in the United States until her death in 2019 at the age of 95.
Dasha’s father, Alexander, was now very wealthy and financed his daughter’s private education at the exclusive Pacific Hills school in West Hollywood.
Dasha grew into a strikingly beautiful and capable young woman. Her father had settled in London, like many of the oligarchs who enriched themselves for all in the post-Soviet empire, and she flew frequently to Europe for luxury vacations.
With his money he financed tennis lessons and an extravagant lifestyle. An early idea to follow her mother into academia was scrapped as she found chemistry too daunting. Instead, she enrolled at UC Santa Barbara and read Russian literature.
Elena’s career also flourished. From June 1994 to March 2007 she was employed full-time at UCLA and authored a number of academic papers.
Former colleague James Sinnett-Smith, a scientist, told us: “Her expertise was in molecular biology.” We worked together a lot and she was an accomplished scientist and also a very nice person, always helping people. She was definitely respected among her colleagues.
There were setbacks along the way, not least when Elena’s former husband, Alexander Zhukov, was held in prison in 2001 for arms smuggling. He spent six months in an Italian prison on suspicion of involvement in arms trafficking during the Balkan civil wars; No charges were brought and he was later released.
At the time he was a very wealthy figure in the oil business – his fortune was said to be around £5.5bn – and controversial. An investigation by the Guardian newspaper found he had not paid tax as a UK resident for 13 years thanks to a complex web of offshore companies, according to the 2016 leak of confidential documents, the Panama Papers .
In 2005, his daughter Dasha moved to London to live with him and was one of the capital’s “Itski girls” who mixed easily with the offspring of other wealthy families. Lord Freddie Windsor, son of Princess Michael of Kent, was a friend.
There was a romance with Russian-born tennis player Marat Safin – and then Dasha caught the attention of married oligarch Roman Abramovich, who was 40 and 24 at the time. They married after his divorce in 2008 and overnight her mum Elena’s life was transformed – not least with her new £7million home. A former UCLA colleague said, “She came from a wealthy background, then her daughter married Roman Abramovich.”
After her retirement, her primary role was to be a mother and grandmother. Dasha and Abramovich had a son, Aaron, who was born in London in December 2009, followed by Leah Lou, who was born in New York in 2013.
Dasha gave birth to another son, Philip, with her second husband, Niarchos.
Through her marriages, Dasha has become a fixture in New York’s super-rich art scene — where she serves on the board of directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art — and her mother has accompanied her to high-profile, high culture parties.
Which brings us back to Murdoch. One of Dasha’s art world partners is Wendi Deng, the magnate’s third wife and mother of his two youngest children. It was Wendi who hosted the big family reunion where the couple met earlier this year.
A man who never lets the grass grow under his feet, Murdoch was intrigued by the slim Russian, who is 26 years his junior, and invited her to spend time with him and his extended family – including daughters Grace and Chloe Deng to spend their summer cruise .
Inevitably, the focus was not only on a possible budding romance, but also on the money. After four marriages and one failed engagement, Murdoch knows the road to lasting happiness has been costly.
But over the years, tales of generous compensation for his ex-wives have continued to flow. For example, we know that Wendi and Jerry got a fraction of the deal with Anna, his second wife, to whom he was married the longest.
Even Anna’s settlement fell far short of the $1.7 billion figure that was freely floating around at the time of their divorce.
Does it all matter? Through her daughter Dasha, Elena has been wealthy for years and is at home in an affluent milieu of private jets, luxury yachts and multiple residences.
What happens next remains to be seen, but it seems Rupert Murdoch is interested in filling the vacancy for a consort.
His romance with radio host and former dental hygienist Ann Lesley Smith ended in April this year, just days after they announced their engagement. They had only been together for seven months.
After a turbulent five-month relationship, he became engaged to fourth wife Jerry Hall, publishing an engagement ad in The Times in January 2016 and walking them down the aisle in March.
Could this new love affair progress at a similar pace?
Elena’s old colleague James Sinnet-Smith says he was unaware of the pictures of her on holiday with Rupert Murdoch, but added with a laugh: “Good luck to her.”
Additional reporting: Barbara McMahon in Los Angeles, Daniel Bates in New York and Will Stewart in Moscow