From the oil business behind the scenes at the Kremlin to London to Ukraine, Roman Abramovich embodies the changes in post-Soviet Russia and the Putin years
Attentive but fleeing attention, that would be the billionaire’s paradox. A key figure in modern Russia, he prefers discretion behind the scenes to front and center. He has established himself as the most famous and mysterious of the “oligarchs” – those entrepreneurs who, at the time of the collapse of the Eastern bloc, profited from privatizations by working with the Kremlin. Famous, Roman Abramovich He has achieved this through his extraordinary career, which has linked the upheavals of Russia, from perestroika to Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian drift. Three-year-old orphan from a Soviet-Jewish family, patron of the cultural avant-garde or the Jewish community and even a shadow diplomat since the outbreak of war in the Ukraine, he knows how to make himself indispensable.
The man is mysterious by nature, assure those who visited him. Described simultaneously as reserved, calculating, efficient, or devoid of emotion and worth, his character contrasts with that of most oligarchs, who are otherwise arrogant and overbearing. Often dressed in simple jeans and with a three-day stubble, the shy fifty-year-old rarely looks the person he is talking to in the eye. “His genius was being a nice dog: while the other businessmen barked, he remained loyal with his head down,” describes Bill Browder, the former manager of Russia’s largest foreign investment fund, Hermitage Capital Management, who first met him over coffee in the mid-1990s.
An attitude that would make Roman Abramovich the archetype of the “honest broker”. In international relations, this term denotes a person who is accepted by all parties as impartial, but who never forgets his personal interest. Since the 1990s, according to Bill Browder, he has gained a reputation as “the one who allows conflicts to be resolved”. Could it be these talents of an elusive and influential mediator that hold the mystery he is shrouded in?