→ Von and Enes at Shop & Bar Denis Simachev, Moscow, 2012. The trendy establishment draws a fashion and media crowd with an atmosphere that alludes ironically to Soviet-era Russia.
Alexander Dobrovinsky I’m a divorce attorney. I’d say roughly $300 billion in assets have been involved in divorce cases I have settled. I am verywell known. To date I have not lost a single case. If the desired result was dividing every- thing half and half, you wouldn’t be sitting here talking to me, my dear. Anybody can divide money half and half. My task is to make a 5 percent to 95 percent split. Todaymany of my clients are between forty- ve and y- ve years old. These are the people who made a fortune of between, say, $600 million and $30 billion a er perestroika, a er the collapse of the Soviet Union. The life- style is to have a Rolls-Royce and a nice house on Rublyovka Road, which is where you have to be. You must have the apartment in Moscow and the house in the country. A house in Italy or in France. A plane. Awife and two kids. Two mistresses. Bank account in Switzerland. And I would say a small collection of something— paintings or jewelry or watches. Watches are very popular here. The average client was married before perestroika. The couple grew up together, got rich together, and then all of a sudden a lot of the men look around and say, “Well, OK, I will leave her a small fortune, and she has to be very glad about that. And I can permit myself to leave with this young bodywith long legs.” I know one guywho, every two years, marries a twenty- one-year-old girl. He’s on his seventh marriage,
and always the same-age lady. By twenty-three, she’s out. I think the erection is a very important thing in this country. The biggest divorce case that I had was the couple who had to split $34 billion. The liquidation of the companywas $30 billion, the collection of paintings was $1.5 billion, and the rest was cash and di erent assets, like houses. I represented the gentleman. This guy’s com- pany and his factories happened to be in Russia, but he’d built his fortune o shore. It was so well done that even the courts in Cyprus and England were incapable of nding out whether the money belonged to him (though everyone knew it did). The ladywanted $17 billion for herself. I asked her, “What are you going to do with that amount of money?” She said, “I want to prove to my ex-husband that I am capable of doing something.” We were in courts all around the world for four years. Finally she received $200,000. At the beginning I had proposed to her $600 million, and in the end, she received $200,000. What to do?
← Noted divorce lawyerAlexander Dobrovinsky, 58, with rugs from his large collection of Soviet-era propaganda, Moscow, 2012. “I started to collect it for nothing,” he says. “Ten years later, it had become very fashionable to collect our past. The last time that lawyers valued the collection, it was worth something like $350million.” La Russe show inMoscow, 2012. “With the revolution, we lost our roots and have a pain deep inside,” Romantsova says. “Right now, we want to show the whole world that Russia has culture and traditions.” → Models in “peasant chic” on the runway at Anastasia Romantsova’s A
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