Over the past two days, I’ve been asked a hundred thousand times: do we know anything special about Viktor Zolotov, Putin’s former personal bodyguard, who has been put in charge of the newly created National Guard.
Okay, here are a few details that paint a good picture of the man. (If you need a biography/profile, the best one is in The New Times)
Everyone who knows him personally told me the same thing first: “He’s the kind of person who would shoot without any hesitation—and even wants to shoot.” That is probably one of the key explanations for this appointment: the Interior Ministry will start shooting, and so will the Defense Ministry (they fired for Yeltsin too), but in all those cases there would have to be orders, a certain chain of responsibility.
Here, the distance from the thought “they’ve taken to the streets and will seize my billions” to pulling the trigger is dramatically shortened, with no weak links in between.
Zolotov is rich. Very rich. He’ll shoot to protect what’s his. No ordinary general owns assets like these.
A list of the known assets was compiled by Novaya Gazeta, which estimated their cadastral value (not market value) at 120 million rubles:
But that sum is small (ha-ha) compared with what the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) found. We are publishing for the first time information about an apartment belonging to Zolotov’s daughter, Zhanna. The apartment was bought in 2011; it is located in a luxury building on Lomonosovsky Prospekt and measures nearly 500 square meters (about 5,400 square feet).
A square meter in this building costs more than 10,000 dollars, so today the entire apartment can be valued at $5 million, or 343 million rubles.
Just take that in: families from Putin’s inner circle buy 500-square-meter apartments. Their apartments are as large as our dacha plots (country cottage lots).
Add to that another asset—a land plot measuring 11,868 square meters (about 2.93 acres), which I’ll discuss below. Its approximate value is 200 million rubles.
So the Zolotov family’s known property alone is worth more than 663,000,000 rubles.
Not bad for a serviceman’s “earnings.”
Zolotov is vain. For his home, he grabbed none other than the dacha of the legendary Mikoyan (Anastas Mikoyan, a top Soviet statesman). The very same man who helped build the entire Soviet industrial system. He started under Lenin, served and survived under Stalin, outlasted Khrushchev, and finished under Brezhnev—hence the popular saying: from Ilyich to Ilyich, without heart attack or paralysis.
So it is at the former Soviet state dacha Zubalovo-2—where Mikoyan (mostly), Voroshilov, and Shaposhnikov lived at various times—that our cardinal’s guardsman now resides. Next to Mikoyan’s old house, he built a new one measuring 1,000 square meters (about 10,800 square feet). Mikoyan, the fool, was apparently too embarrassed to do anything like that and lived in just 260 square meters (about 2,800 square feet).
Then again, it’s clear why Mikoyan was too embarrassed to build like that—next door, at Zubalovo-4, stood Stalin’s dacha.
Here are the memoirs of Stalin’s daughter, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, which describe the location of this dacha quite precisely.
Zubalovo-2 is also mentioned in Sergo Mikoyan’s memoirs.
That ice cellar is still there today. Zolotov even proudly lists it in his declarations:
These days, Viktor Zolotov probably stores his hats there—out in the open air, away from the cold, they spontaneously combust.
The Zubalovo estate—which includes both Stalin’s Zubalovo-4 and Mikoyan’s Zubalovo-2—was transferred to the Defense Ministry, after first carving off a hectare of land (10,000 square meters / 2.47 acres) for Zolotov.
All the extracts for the property mentioned in this post.
Land there is now selling for 2 million rubles per sotka (a sotka is 100 square meters). At that rate, the plot is worth at least 200 million rubles. And that’s without even factoring in its historical value. Meanwhile, Zolotov’s salary for 2014 was 6.5 million rubles.
Zolotov personally handles the organizational side of Putin’s corruption. He works closely with the people involved in it.
You of course remember Putin’s palace in Gelendzhik. It has been repeatedly reported that Zolotov personally oversaw the construction, constantly visiting the site.
Let me remind you of our investigation, “The managers of Putin’s palace receive government posts, houses, citizenship, and banks.” It mentions Lanfranco Cirillo, the Italian architect who built Putin’s palace in Gelendzhik.
It was to him that Zolotov’s son Roman either sold or gave his house in Gelendzhik (seafront, prime location).
My guess is that the house was simply put in the name of that shady Italian so as not to provoke people with real estate like this belonging to the family of a “public servant.”
One last thing, and this is more in the realm of the absurd. The Zolotov family makes movies :)
Real ones.
In this photo are sitting Nikita Mikhalkov, Yury Chechikhin (the elder Zolotov’s son-in-law), and the younger Zolotov, Roman.
Roman Zolotov is even listed on industry websites as a film producer and actor:
For example, they made the TV series *Vorotily* (*Big Shots*). That’s one case where they could definitely have taken the script from the lives of people close to them.
They make comedies too. Though, judging by the “budget/box office” figures, it’s not a very profitable business venture:
Interestingly, Roman Zolotov, while being a “producer and actor,” also somehow managed to work within the Interior Ministry system, in that very FSUE Okhrana, which the day before yesterday was placed under his father’s command.
Everyone is scratching their heads: why the hell attach to the National Guard an outfit that handles alarm systems and guards houses and apartments? But it’s simply a lucrative little operation used to finance movies. It was handed to the family as a feeding trough, and they’ve been dragging it along with them through life.
Those are the kind of guardsmen Russia has.
Then again, like cardinal, like guardsmen.
P.S. Thanks for the investigation go to Georgy Alburov and the head of ACF’s St. Petersburg branch, Dmitry Sukharev. They are both taking part in the primaries, so register and vote for them.