The Buddha of Siberia

Opening up a nesting doll.

‘So many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me – a long, long road without a goal…’
—Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

You might measure Evgeny Lebedev by the blast radius of his life, which, as it happens, is extremely wide. He’s employed hundreds of people, owns properties from Umbria to Hampton Court and controls two British newspapers. You might also take stock of his interests. Evgeny loves elephants and, like an elephant, he has an inscrutable memory as well as an outsized presence that is all too conveniently ignored. A holistic account of Evgeny’s story – which encompasses the KGB, the Spice Girls, Spanish matadors and the House of Lords – has been attempted many times. However, there is not simply one Evgeny. Instead there is an overlapping sequence of Evgenies (Evgenii), each one straining to envelop the rest. We’ve decided to proceed through this Russian nesting doll layer by layer, beginning at the centre, with a small child incubated at the heart of the Soviet state, speeding towards the end of history.

evgeny, son of alexander

Evgeny Alexandrovich Lebedev is, more than anything else, the son of his father, Alexander Yevgenievich Lebedev: a former KGB agent. Alexander became an oligarch after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he used to his advantage, taking over a Russian bank with shares in Gazprom, Russia’s state oil and gas company.

Evgeny’s early years were spent down the road from the Kremlin, living in a comprehensively bugged apartment block reserved for important Soviets. Nikita Khrushchev was a neighbour when his parents moved in and Evgeny remembers a geriatric Vyacheslav Molotov fumbling his way down its lofty, pink corridors. Before his father became rich, the Lebedevs lived relatively humbly. He recalls his mother spending hours queueing for basic goods and his father driving a spluttering Lada. Both his grandmothers wept when Stalin died. His first holiday was to the ‘radioactive wasteland of Chernobyl’, where Evgeny watched his grandfather, an accomplished biologist, shoot a duck, check it with a Geiger counter and prepare it for dinner.

Evgeny moved to London at the age of eight when his father was assigned to do ‘economic monitoring’ for the KGB at the Soviet Embassy. The Lebedevs took up residence at Earls Terrace, Kensington, and Evgeny was sent to a Church of England primary and later the ‘socialist Eton’, Holland Park School. During this time, Evgeny recalls that he had no idea about his father’s profession; when asked, Alexander insisted he was a diplomat. This persisted until an 11-year-old Evgeny discovered his father’s medals tucked away inside a drawer. Nonetheless, he carried the secret ‘with pride’.

It was around this point that Lebedev Senior began to amass extravagant wealth. Alexander once called himself a ‘financial Mozart’, but, in truth, his insider connections put him in the best possible position to benefit from the 1990s firesale of the Russian state. After that, the Lebedevs began their new lives: Alexander as a billionaire, and Evgeny, who was sent to boarding school in Mill Hill, became London’s ‘billion heir’.

Alexander is a smart man. You don’t get a position in the KGB’s foreign intelligence services without being a smart man. And although Evgeny has certain smart attributes, he’s not his dad. Bearing his capabilities in mind, we doubt he could have achieved what his father achieved, accruing billions by making the right deals, at the right time, with the right people. If put in terms of Russian literature (terms Evgeny would likely prefer) his intelligence seems more akin to the effective guilelessness of Prince Myshkin.

However, that’s not to say Alexander didn’t also benefit from his son. Putin once claimed that there was ‘no such thing as a former KGB agent’. Alexander managed to convince Britain otherwise, something that would’ve been much more challenging without another less suspicious-looking Lebedev – one that had become naturalised to the British establishment.

Like Myshkin, Evgeny is defined by his lavish inheritance, but attached to this inheritance is the scrutiny of western intelligence agencies concerned with his father’s Kremlin links as well as, presumably, the psychological baggage that comes with having never truly earned your position. Evgeny’s somebodiness is hereditary. In the end, his identity as the son of a Russian oligarch will grow too heavy and he’ll become trapped by it. He’s on a long road to a lonely place, one fretted with gold, gimmicks and great, big parties.

evgeny, party boy

Becoming a member of the British upper class is easier than you might think, provided you have enough money to spend on plush social mixers. A party thrown by the Lebedevs in June 2006 – which included arboreal contortionists, a troop of Cossacks, Golden Oscietra caviar and a dancing circle of Orlando Bloom, Mikhail Gorbachev and Salman Rushdie – cost upwards of £2 million in today’s money. This ‘midsummer Russian fantasy’ party initiated what would become an enduring aspect of the elite London calendar.

Evgeny’s name soon became synonymous with the opulent events he curated to attract Britain’s A-listers. According to society photographer, Dafydd Jones, Evgeny often appeared ‘stiff, not much expression… a very mysterious character dominated by his father’. Nevertheless, he acquired important acquaintances such as Elton John (who made him godfather to his son, Zachary), Hugh Grant and infamous party boy, Boris Johnson. Johnson hit it off with Evgeny at a £500,000 fundraiser thrown at the Lebedev’s renovated Hampton Court mansion, Stud House, which contained various erotic candelabras, a preserved dwarf skeleton, a Victorian-era hip replacement and, reportedly, a butt plug in the shape of Vladimir Putin’s head and torso.

The Lebedevs would often invite guests to their villa in Umbria. Of their two Umbrian villas, the more publicised is their Palazzo Terranova – patrolled by Evgeny’s pet wolf, Boris, named after Yeltsin – which has been the site of much jubilation. At one point Italian intelligence agencies decided to monitor it, worried it was being used for ‘espionage purposes’. It’s hard to say when the monitoring began, but there’s a good chance the agents witnessed Katie Price announcing that ‘Champagne and Pricey don’t mix,’ before exposing her bare breasts to Boris Johnson.

These parties may have sounded glamorous, but in practice they tended towards a distinctly Year 9 house party kind of tone. In 2018, Rory Stewart was approached during the annual Conservative Party conference, and invited to Evgeny’s Italian mansion. ‘There were going to be girls,’ Stewart recalls them saying. Likewise, according to Tortoise’s Paul Caruana Galizia, attendees who snuck off to bed early would be woken by other guests (apparently including Johnson) hammering on the door and shouting, ‘You have to dance with Evgeny!’

The young Lebedev’s lavishness enmeshed him into British tabloid mythology. Evgeny was named Britain’s third most eligible bachelor by Tatler, while Private Eye implied that he was a closeted homosexual – repeatedly calling him ‘Two Beards’, an allegation he is yet to reply to. He was reported to be ‘romantically linked’ with Sophie Dahl and Spice Girl, Geri Halliwell – a relationship which, according to the Sunday Mirror, fell apart because Halliwell couldn’t make enough time for him between tours. A 2007 TMZ article featured a picture of the two alongside the caption ‘Halliwell’s latest man is a futuristic melding of Enrique Iglesias crossbred with the villain from Octopussy’. But Evgeny’s reputation as a tabloid Trimalchio was about to change and, following a deal at the Connaught hotel, he found himself wielding a powerful tool.

evgeny, media baron

By 2009, Evgeny’s father already owned a major stake in a newspaper, Novaya Gazeta – the (now-closed) main organ of loosely controlled opposition in Russia – which he bought in June 2006, a few months before its most decorated journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered in the lift of her apartment block on Putin’s birthday. Three years later, Lebedev Holdings acquired the majority stake in the Evening Standard from Lord Rothermere for a nominal fee of £1 and a commitment to invest £25 million. In 2010, they bought the controlling share in The Independent too, for the same comically cheap price, with an even smaller commitment. Alexander delegated the running of both papers to Evgeny, who had just turned 30.

To give Evgeny his due, the papers prospered during the new regime. The Evening Standard rendered its rivals obsolete after it became free, increasing its circulation from 250,000 to 600,000 and The Independent cut its losses by more than £15 million between 2010 and 2015. They also launched London Live and the i paper, the first new national daily newspaper to be printed in the UK since 1986.

The Lebedevs qualified their entry into the British newspaper-owning class by rhapsodising about press freedom, prompting fawning coverage. However, this narrative was undercut in 2019 when a government lawyer accused both papers of being ‘part-owned by the Saudi Arabian state’ via ‘a series of unconventional, complex and clandestine deals’. Both papers insisted that concerns about their editorial independence were unfounded, and that they were not influenced by financial backers.

Operationally, Evgeny was, by some accounts, a strange senior executive. He had an extremely handsome security team (one of his bodyguards was captioned in Tatler as ‘hot Andy’) and hired an enormous cadre to work with him at his tiny office in Northcliffe House, in which he’s said to have kept an ornamental box of dead flies. ‘He’s not dumb,’ one former employee told us, referencing his photographic memory, ‘but he didn’t appear to have any sense of working at something… like he wanted to turn up, get his picture taken, look connected and important and piss off again.’

In 2017, Evgeny brought in George Osborne, and later, Emily Sheffield, David Cameron’s sister-in-law, as editor of the Evening Standard. It has also been claimed that there had been a list of about 25 people that could not be subjected to negative coverage. His familial ties helped him to secure some high-profile interviews, such as when he questioned Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. However, the journalist, Natalia Antelava, present at the time, recalls Evgeny taking up a weird line of questioning, asking Lukashenko’s opinion on group sex.

In a shower of gold, Evgeny transformed the Evening Standard’s annual Theatre Awards into a glamorous fixture. Evgeny seemed to enjoy these ceremonies so much that one year, according to a journalist covering him at the time, he appeared in every single photograph and had to be cropped out of most of them. Another year, that same journalist says, he arrived twice: once with a gaggle of celebrities and again when Prince William suddenly made an appearance.

Becoming a newspaper baron famously allowed Evgeny to deepen his relationship with Johnson. They regularly dined and drank together – even spending a night sleeping rough on Gresham Street’s piss-spritzed pavement for a homeless veterans campaign. The Evening Standard has consistently backed Johnson. It boosted his mayoral re-election bid in 2012; supported his Garden Bridge proposal, which cost taxpayers £43 million and was never built; endorsed Johnson in both of his bids for the Tory leadership, and again in the 2019 general election (which the pair celebrated the next day at Alexander’s ‘caviar-fuelled’ 60th). And it wasn’t all one-way traffic. In 2020, he was given a peerage by the newly anointed PM. He is now formally Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation.

The Independent recently announced it was taking control of BuzzFeed and HuffPost while, following a turbulent few years and a drop in circulation, the Evening Standard is now relaunching as a weekly publication. There’s a reportedly bleak atmosphere in-house, and grievances from anonymous staffers have begun to appear online. Journalists allege that their work frequently ran up against executive egos. Some claim editors would spike stories due to personal grudges. Others reported a ‘toxic atmosphere’ at the paper where senior figures would shout at them in the newsroom. Evgeny’s impact on all of this is hard to pin down. Besides, for a large part of his proprietorship, he was busy enjoying himself.

evgeny, homme du monde

Evegeny appears to suffer from the classic syndrome of a billionaire’s son, whereby, despite having every available resource, he struggles to define himself beyond his wealth. After he becomes a media baron, Evgeny starts editorialising his shifting interests. If Emily Dickinson was, in her words, ‘out with lanterns, looking for myself’, then Evgeny is out there too, but with a military spotlight, mounted to a private jet.

In 2013, Evgeny’s spotlight fell on bullfighting, and he enlisted the trainee matador and journalist, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, to show him the ropes, who, in turn, introduced him to the esteemed Spanish bullfighter, Enrique Ponce. Fiske-Harrison says Evgeny refused to enter the ring (a claim the budding matador’s spokesperson denied at the time). A picture then surfaced of Evgeny wearing a full traje de luces – suit of lights. Fiske-Harrison equates this to ‘a journalist turning up to a war zone dressed as a four-star general’. Around the same time, Evgeny set his newspapers to the task of saving the world’s elephants, and journalists at the Evening Standard were compelled to run as many elephant stories as possible – no doubt a difficult task for a London paper.

Evgeny employed a number of intrepid reporters, but he also felt the need to become one himself. He visited the recently assassinated Gazan Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, ‘bloodthirsty warrior[s]’ in northern Kenya, and even rocked up to Mogadishu, flanked by African Union troops. ‘It’s almost a crime to have the ability to see these places and understand them, and give a balanced account of what’s going on, and not do it,’ he once told the Guardian. Some might argue that, as a billionaire, Evgeny is actually profoundly ill-suited to understanding the plight of war-torn populations. ‘If you send somebody else, it’s not really your project,’ he continued, ‘I realised I’m more interested in doing it myself.’

Inside Stud House there’s a vast library of first editions, including a signed copy of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Although his employee says ‘he’d never read any of them’, Evgeny keenly markets himself as an intellectual. With a strange, Russo-English accent, like a villain from a noughties-era video game, he’s interviewed ‘big thinkers’ such as Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson.

Similar to Peterson, Evgeny enjoys out-there nutritional tactics. According to a profile in the Spectator, Evgeny once took up something called a ‘doll’s house diet’, which involves eating tiny little plates of food using miniature cutlery. Likewise, Evgeny’s interests have recently taken a distinctly New Age turn. In April 2020, his channel, London Live, broadcast an interview with conspiracy theorist, David Icke, and this year he launched a new official Evening Standard podcast series called ‘Brave New World’.

The podcast largely discusses psychedelics, anti-ageing research and a nebulous phenomenon called ‘biohacking’, a sort of DIY life-sciences movement. One episode with ‘biohacker’ and toilet paper heiress, Davinia Taylor, sees him discussing the evils of vegetable oil. ‘When’s the last time you squeezed a carrot and got oil out of it?’ Taylor asks. Another features Evgeny working out and walking barefoot with Ben Greenfield – an author who once injected stem cells into his penis – to ‘absorb the negative ions from planet Earth’.

It doesn’t seem like many people are actually watching these features; the view count tends to plateau among the hundreds on YouTube. Evgeny also uploads them to his new TikTok account, but, as we go to print, that only has 25 followers (he follows 61 accounts, including Tom Odell, Ellie Goulding and his own newspaper).

In July, he decided that the British ruling class might be more receptive, using his third address in the Lords chamber since 2019 to discuss ‘longevity research’ and the nature of ageing. During that speech Evgeny declared his interest as a trustee of the Hevolution Foundation, chaired by Prince Mohammed bin Salman, which brings us, neatly, to our final Evgeny.

evgeny, potential security risk

Profiles of Evgeny tend to focus on his fanciful character. Sure, he’s colourful, and when you look at the chargesheets of Britain’s past newspaper barons, Evgeny comes off well by comparison. However, his father’s connections to the Kremlin, twinned with his own political ties, provoke security concerns.

Alexander’s relationship with Putin’s Kremlin has gone through peaks and troughs. During the late 1990s, he eased Putin’s path to power, using his security company to monitor Yuri Skuratov, then Prosecutor-General and rival to Putin, who later left his role after a sex tape scandal. However, when his tabloid published Putin’s plans to leave his wife for a young gymnast, Alexander fell into the Russian leader’s bad books – where he remained until around the time he took over the Evening Standard.

Before the annexation of Crimea, Alexander’s investments in the peninsula were prospering. Leaked Kremlin emails revealed that he had been corresponding with Putin’s chief of staff, making appeals about his extensive investments (some of which breached EU sanctions). The same leak revealed that Alexander had actively tried to help Putin win western approval for the annexation of Crimea. An Italian intelligence report shown to members of the Italian parliament in 2021 claimed Alexander had continued to participate in annual KGB meetings beyond his stated retirement. Today, Alexander has been sanctioned by both Canada and Ukraine. Canadian intelligence put him in the category of ‘Russian disinformation agents’ – not ideal for a long-time bankroller of two influential UK newspapers.

Evgeny presents himself as a dissident, but his public pronunciations regularly resemble the Kremlin line. In 2013, Evgeny questioned whether Russia murdered Litvinenko, suggesting that MI6 may have been the real culprit. He also used a 2014 appearance on The Andrew Marr Show to wade in on Crimea. ‘Crimea,’ he said, ‘has been for many centuries, part of Russia’. In 2015, he penned an article for The Independent encouraging the UK to ‘make Vladimir Putin an ally’.

Three years later, after a NATO summit dominated by the Skripal affair, Boris Johnson – then Foreign Secretary – flew to the Lebedevs’ Umbrian palazzo without government officials. No minutes were taken. In November 2019, Johnson refused to publish a report examining Russian infiltration into British politics. After making Evgeny a member of the House of Lords in 2020, he again refused to release security advice he had been briefed with – allegedly intervening to ensure the withdrawal of an assessment by the intelligence services that Evgeny was a security risk (an assessment strenuously denied by him).

The war in Ukraine has inverted the fortunes of the Lebedevs. The social capital of super-rich Russians in Britain has plummeted, and the state has come after them with a barrage of sanctions, freezing their assets. Following an energy crisis sparked by the invasion, Evgeny’s Conservative political allies were swept away in the last election. His allure and relevance is at an all-time low.

If we’d anticipated access to be more achievable, we’d probably have ended this profile with a scene of him scrambling around his Palazzo Terranova – now reportedly up for sale – in the dark, pursued by a wolf. But, having chosen to write this without him, we’re forced to end it with a recollection from his former employee: ‘I felt kind of sorry for him; he is obviously just trapped in this thing.’