![]() ![]() Nor could he explain, to anyone’s satisfaction, what he was doing there. He pumped plenty of his own money into the region, but appeared to derive no pleasure from his new job. Shy by nature, he was not a natural politician. “People here don’t live, they just exist,” Abramovich marvelled. ![]() After he was elected governor-he got ninety-two per cent of the vote, his closest challenger being a local man who herded reindeer-he was confronted with the baying of his new constituents: “When will we have fuel? When will we have meat?” There was no Chinese food in Chukotka. When Abramovich arrived, the human population was meagre, and struggling with poverty and alcoholism. The winds are fierce enough to blow a grown dog off its feet. But now, he announced, he was going to relocate to the remote Chukotka region, a desolate Arctic hellscape, where he would run for governor.Ĭhukotka, which is some thirty-seven hundred miles from Moscow, is comically inhospitable. A man of cosmopolitan tastes, he favored Chinese cuisine and holidays in the South of France. He owned nearly half of the oil company Sibneft, and much of the world’s second-biggest producer of aluminum. Abramovich, an orphan and a college dropout turned Kremlin insider, had amassed a giant fortune by taking control of businesses that once belonged to the Soviet state. ![]() Roman Abramovich was thirty-four years old-baby-faced, vigorous, already one of Russia’s richest oligarchs-when he did something seemingly inexplicable. ![]()
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