Hallelujah. Russia’s most Orthodox family has been found. They are so Orthodox that, compared to them, the rest of you will all burn in hell. And they will teach you to love the dear Lord. And if you don’t want to love Him, you’ll get punched in the face by a representative of an Orthodox fight club.
What is happening in Yekaterinburg right now? The whole internet is following these events, but the rest of the country is not, because television is not saying a single word about them. As I write this post, news alerts are coming in: “10 people detained, 40 detained, 70 detained.”
In fact, it’s all quite simple. There is the family of a local oligarch: very rich, ranked 25th on the Forbes list, with a fortune of $4.3 billion. His name is Igor Altushkin.
This Altushkin started out buying up scrap metal, then bought privatized Soviet non-ferrous metallurgy plants and imagined himself as some kind of new Demidov. Under Peter the Great, the Demidovs were famous industrialists and mine owners who helped launch the industrial Urals; many films have been made about them, and in a sense they are symbols of Ural industry.
Altushkin is beloved by the authorities. Putin gives him awards. Altushkin has excellent informal ties to those in power—we can see Igor Sechin’s son-in-law on his company’s board of directors.
Then there is Altushkin’s wife, Tatyana, who imagines herself a lady of the manor, a noblewoman.
Her mission is to educate and raise Russia’s unwashed, grubby, illiterate masses—Yekaterinburg first and foremost. That is not an exaggeration.
She has her own schools, financed by her husband. One is an Orthodox secondary school called the “Russian Classical School.”
She talks a great deal about education—she calls the modern school system a “liberal bacchanalia.”
She opposes any kind of “digitalization” and believes that primary schools should introduce lessons in writing with goose quills and ink.
At her school, they teach from Soviet textbooks, reissued on specially yellowed paper so that it feels like olden times. Tatyana Altushkina considers it extremely important to train schoolchildren to pronounce the Russian ending “-tsya” clearly. In other words, you’re supposed to say not “Altushkin is being awarded, and the country is being looted” in slurred colloquial speech, but to articulate the ending distinctly. Why any normal person would need this is unclear, but it is quite clear what this oligarchic family thinks of ordinary people. If they are the gentry in white robes, then we, apparently, are supposed to be peasants from films about the Demidovs—in coarse linen shirts, bast shoes, and birch-bark headbands. And the kind master will teach us to write with goose quills and pronounce “-tsya” properly.
So what is all the fuss about now?
Let’s put it plainly: the Altushkins decided to build themselves a monument. A huge church in the center of Yekaterinburg.
This despite the fact that Yekaterinburg is full of churches, including abandoned and half-ruined ones. Hardly anyone goes to them except at Easter—there are no parishioners. But none of that matters, because the main point is not faith, but building a personal monument, so that Wikipedia will say: the main church in Yekaterinburg was built by our local lords, the Altushkins.
Altushkin generously funnels money to the local authorities. He financed Governor Kuyvashev’s election campaign, he financed the local United Russia party machine, and in gratitude for that support the authorities gave him land to build this church. The only problem is that they gave him something that belonged to other people. Not a vacant lot, not an industrial site, not an abandoned building, but the square in front of the Drama Theater. People walk there. They like that square. They are not even really against a church; they just do not understand why, in order to build one, you have to take away their square. That is fairly obvious reasoning, wouldn’t you agree? But Altushkin and Governor Kuyvashev are the masters, while we are the serfs, and no one listens to the serfs’ opinion. And when people first came out to protest, they literally sent thugs from the martial arts academy of the Russian Copper Company, which belongs to Altushkin.
Everything Kuyvashev, Altushkin, the local authorities, and these strange men with crosses tattooed on their chests do is dressed up in the language of Orthodoxy, patriotism, and love for Russia.
And anyone defending the square is portrayed as somehow not quite Russian. They do not respect native traditions enough, they look to the West, they have fallen under its corrupting influence. We brought this on ourselves! Tatyana Altushkina was right when she celebrated the appointment of the new education minister: the 25-year liberal bacchanalia in schools is coming to an end! Very good. We do not need Western liberal bacchanalia in Russian schools.
And here, dear Altushkin family, I am forced to quote your favorite book—the Bible: “Outwardly you appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
What is it that I see in this image?
This is a record showing that Tatyana Altushkina holds British citizenship. It is an entry from a database that copies names and surnames from the official electoral rolls. We have access to it, and there we found this remarkable little record.
We of course checked the lists themselves as well, and can say with complete confidence that the database is not misleading us. From 2011 to 2018, Tatyana Altushkina regularly registered her right to vote in the United Kingdom. She is a British subject and swore an oath of allegiance to the British monarch.
A brief but important aside is needed here. This does NOT mean that Altushkin himself does not also have British citizenship. He very well may. We are using a list of people who registered as voters. You can quite easily have citizenship and simply not register. As for the six children, they are entitled to British citizenship automatically.
So tell me, my dear Altushkins, why are you not fighting to make children in London write with goose quills too? How do you like the “liberal bacchanalia” of the British education system? Don’t you want to fight that as well? Especially since you have the opportunity, with your citizenship and all. You like beating people who oppose your construction plans—so go ahead and build a church next to your London home.
Ah yes, the house.
It is located in one of the most elite areas of the British capital—Holland Park, in Kensington and Chelsea.
A house like that costs at least £15–17 million, even assuming the most modest interior finish.
And of course the Altushkins’ home is anything but modest. Unlike in Russia, where the Altushkins simply build whatever they want in the middle of the city, in London they behave very differently: they have to painstakingly clear every tiny change with the local authorities—from altering a fence to planting a single bush.
As a result, the local council’s website contains extremely detailed floor-by-floor plans of this mansion.
It has five floors, 10 or 12 bedrooms, a movie theater, an elevator, and on the basement level a swimming pool, gym, spa area, dance studio, and servants’ quarters.
You can study how they asked city hall for permission to replace tiles and a garage door, how they argued that the fence needed to be altered slightly so the property would be less visible from the street. And then they waited months for approval.
By the way, on the next street over, the family of David Beckham lives. They bought a house exactly like the Altushkins’ for £31 million.
The Beckhams will probably be quite surprised when you start building over the nearby square in Holland Park and bring in your supposedly Orthodox enforcers to guard the construction site.
But unlike the Beckhams, Altushkin apparently found one mansion in Holland Park insufficient. We also discovered a separate apartment belonging to Tatyana Altushkina a few houses down on the same street. A modest five-room place. Worth around £1.5–2 million.
We also discovered that at least one of Altushkin’s sons, David, was born in London in 2006.
In that same year, a certain Igor Alexandrovich Altushkin was born in London. Judging by the patronymic, this is most likely Igor Altushkin’s grandson.
And here is the Altushkins’ son Timofey flying to London on a private jet.
And here he is showing off his headphones, which cost €60,000. That is more than 4 million rubles—for headphones.
And here he is showing off his Lamborghini, worth 25 million rubles.
Okay, okay, you Altushkins are very rich. You can afford houses in London and Lamborghinis, and you can live wherever you want—that is your business. But if you already have everything, or almost everything, do you really also have to take a public square away from the residents of Yekaterinburg?
As we can see, the Altushkin family lives across two countries. They have taken citizenship and sworn loyalty to two states. They have every right to do so. But it is deeply ugly that in one country you treat everyone like your servants, while in the other you dutifully obey the law because you know that for a tenth of what you do in the Urals—in both Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk—you would be thrown in prison there immediately.
Want a constructive proposal? One for Governor Kuyvashev, for the city’s residents, and for Igor Altushkin. Here it is.
This ill-fated church in the square is being built by two Orthodox oligarchs. Altushkin, and the other one—Kozitsyn, the owner of the UMMC holding company and Altushkin’s partner.
And this UMMC holding company is the largest landowner in Yekaterinburg. That is a legal fact. They could easily find another place to build this church. For example, they could refrain from putting up yet another shopping center or residential complex on a prime site, as is planned for the former instrument-making plant or the Simanov mill.
Messrs. Altushkin and Kozitsyn, if you are truly so Orthodox, give up your personal profit—especially since it will not make you poor. Build the church there. Those sites are no worse.
Build your school there too, where everyone will write with goose quills. There you can play the gusli (a traditional Russian string instrument) and eat turnips. There, instead of computer science, schools can teach fistfighting. There you can indulge any whim or eccentricity you like, with your own money and within the law. But do not take what belongs to others. Do not try to prove to us that you are the most Russian of Russians and the most Orthodox of the Orthodox, while everyone else is a demon, as your supporter Vladimir Solovyov said. Do not lie, and do not be hypocrites. If you really do believe in God, He does not like that.
Thank you, and don’t forget to regiSTER for Smart Voting.
P.S. My program “Russia of the Future” will definitely air today. See you live on Navalny LIVE at 8:00 p.m.