A meeting with Roman Abramovich is like the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy draws back the curtain to find the great and terrible wizard is no more than an old man hunched over a microphone. Abramovich, colossus of Russia’s tycoons, and now of British football, almost never gives interviews, so when he invites you to fly thousands of miles to see him in his far eastern state of Chukotka you accept. Chukotka is literally as far from Chelsea FC as it is possible to be – 12 time zones. Go any farther east and you start coming back.
When you land, you see that the only other plane on this stretch of windswept tarmac is a gleaming cream and white Boeing 767. Customised as a flying hotel, this is the transport of choice for the world’s multibillionares. For maximum contrast, the plane, polished down to its wheel hubs, sits surrounded by the dull aluminium bodies of decaying Mig fighters with red stars on their tail fins.
Then you take a ferry across the bay to Chukotka’s capital, Anadyr, a collection of buildings wedged onto an archipelago just south of the Arctic circle. Crumbling tower blocks and fish plants are here interspersed with gleaming new structures, all donated by Abramovich from his personal fortune: a new hospital, a sports hall, two museums, a university, nursery schools, even a four-star hotel. The landscape around is just heather and treeless hills. And then the governor’s mansion swings into view – a villa sitting high on a rocky outcrop overlooking the bay below.
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