The adventures of an oligarch

FICTION: Garkhov's DiaryBy Stephen Dewar CreateSpace, 362pp.£15.17

WHEN ONE HEARS the term “Russian oligarch”, a host of images spring to mind. There’s Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club, with a fleet of luxury yachts larger, and perhaps more heavily armed, than this country’s navy. There’s Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the Communist Party’s financial expert, then Russia’s richest man and now languishing in prison.

There are, of course, oligarchs and oligarchs. The oligarchical class was created in the Yeltsin era under a scheme called “loans for shares”, which was similar to the Anglo Irish Bank scheme by which the bank gave people loans to buy shares in it. But in the Russian case the stakes were much higher. The men, and they were almost all men, who got the loans to buy the shares became immensely wealthy by getting their hands on Russia’s vast mineral resources.

Those men constituted the Premier League of oligarchs. There were others who regarded the gun as a legitimate business tool, and there were others still who saw their niche in the market and worked hard to join the super-rich.

Some, like Abramovich, have used their vast wealth with some taste. Vladimir Bryntsalov, owner of Russia’s biggest pharmaceutical firm, on the other hand, has become the global economy’s king of kitsch. The interior of his Russian mansion is, like an eclipse of the sun, best viewed through heavily smoked glass.

In my years reporting on the Soviet Union and, after its dissolution, on the "Newly Independent States", I didn't meet a single oligarch. I didn't move in oligarchical circles in Moscow because my Irish Timessalary could not rise to it. I did, however, meet one in Dublin. That oligarch's name is Leonid Nevzlin, and he now lives in Israel. If he returned to Moscow he would face several charges of conspiracy to murder, so he stays put. When I met Leonid Nevzlin in Dublin many years ago he took me to lunch at l'Ecrivain, so he is obviously one of those oligarchs who has good taste. If Oleg Garkhov were a real person he would not qualify on that count.

Oleg, known to his friends as “Oli” Garkhov (Oli-Garkhov: geddit?) is a fictional character, and his “diary”, by the Irish author Stephen Dewar, portrays him as being in the Bryntsalov rather than the Abramovich category. His wealth does not come from oil or gas or aluminium. He is not a banker or a financier. He is not a media magnate. He is not in pharmaceuticals. He doesn’t own Yandex, the Russian equivalent of Google.

Oleg Petrovich Garkov made his money from fertiliser. In short, he is in the manure business. But, as the Yorkshire tykes say, where there’s muck there’s brass, and Oli is up to his neck in both. His character is something of a blend of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Borat. Many will suspect an element of condescension in this treatment, by a foreigner who looks down his nose at Russians, but people such as Garkhov are despised and ridiculed by Russians themselves, so Dewar, unlike Borat’s creator, is in the clear in that respect.

The book is an enjoyable romp in which Garkhov’s son Boris becomes a drug dealer while at Eton, perhaps not the first alumnus of that school to go into that particular business. “I’m not a gangster,” he tells his father. “I’m just trying to be a businessman like you. I saw a market opportunity and I just tried to take advantage of it.” Needless to say the father and the prodigal son are reconciled instantly.

His daughter Masha shows signs that she may – or may not – be a lesbian, but her sexual proclivities are dampened by a burning desire to oust Vladimir Putin from power. Other characters who swim through an ocean of vodka, champagne and liquid fertiliser include Garkhov’s two wives and three mistresses, his hit man (alias head of security), a hapless American business adviser and a couple of Scottish aristocrats on the make.

Garkhov’s diary is an enjoyable piece of literary slapstick. The humour falls flat now and again, and the book could have done without a gratuitously stereotypical reference to an unnamed “drunk Irishman”.

Seamus Martin is a journalist and a former Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times