On March 27th 2007, Vladimir Putin held a party at the Kremlin for the 80th birthday of the world famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. It was to be the cellist’s last public appearance, and his frailty was evident to all present—he had left his hospital bed to attend the celebration.
Addressing Slava—as he was known to his family and friends—Putin said: “Dear Slava, from the very bottom of our heart we wish you a happy birthday. We not only love, know and remember your anniversary but we will also do everything to be worthy of it.” Rostropovich responded: “I feel myself the happiest man in the world. I will be even more happy if this evening will be pleasant for you.” Then, taking Slava by the arm, Putin hung a red sash over his shoulder and pinned a large silver and gold starburst medallion to his lapel—the order of Services to the Motherland.
Earlier that evening Putin had told Slava: “In all your life and creative work you have many times shown the truth that art and morality together supplement each other and constitute a single goal. In all of the world you are known not only as a brilliant cellist and gifted conductor but as a confirmed defender of human rights and freedom of spirit and an uncompromising fighter for the ideals of democracy.”
Photographs of the event show the two men sitting opposite each other, Rostropovich accompanied by his wife, the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, and his daughter. Putin grins, and the Rostropovich family look distinctly ill at ease. Exactly a month later, Slava died, and two days after that Putin laid red roses on the coffin as Slava was given the full honours of what almost amounted to a state funeral, with thousands of mourners present. In a telegram to the family, Putin offered this paean to the departed giant of the classical music world—“Spiritually generous, never indifferent, determined, fiery. So he will remain in our memories.” All this attests to the apparent high regard, even affection, with which he remembered Rostropovich. A later event, the unveiling of a monument to Rostropovich in 2012, saw him again take the opportunity to pay tribute to his departed friend: “I’m proud that I knew Rostropovich. He was not only a great musician; he was a great humanist and just a wonderful person.”
Putin would have wished that his gesture in hosting the party and recognising the great humanitarian efforts of Rostropovich (such as his playing Bach next to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and rushing to Moscow from Paris to support Yeltsin during the 1991 coup) would be seen as a sign of his kinship, in line with that of his dedicatee, not to mention his cultural awareness.
Not a lot has changed since Soviet times in the way Putin uses cultural icons (such as the ballet dancer Sergei Polunin and the conductor Valerie Gergiev) as endorsements to his cause. But being a crony of Putin could amount to having a sword of Damocles over your head. Witness the Icarus-like careers of several oligarchs.
In the case of Rostropovich, both parties must have known that the end was in sight, so on the one hand no debt would need to be repaid and on the other, Putin’s effusiveness could only be seen as a gesture of magnanimous goodwill and generosity—albeit at the eleventh hour. Any contract between them was, conveniently, about to expire, and whatever his private thoughts, no one could accuse Putin of not paying the appropriate public obsequies.
Putin would have been 22 when Rostropovich was first pushed out of Russia in 1974 for his unpatriotic support of the Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, so would have been aware at the time of the great cellist’s “misdemeanours”—in the view of Brezhnev’s regime—for which in 1978 he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. Slava said he had been robbed of his citizenship “by the stroke of a dictator’s pen”.
The regime had been infuriated by Rostropovich’s letter to the international press in 1970, defending Solzhenitsyn, who was being attacked in the Moscow press after being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In the letter, Rostropovich highlighted the egregious errors made by a previous regime in its treatment of Boris Pasternak after his Nobel nomination, and suggested that similar handling of Solzhenitsyn would amount to complete hypocrisy. (As a student of Rostropovich in Moscow from 1969 to 1971, in October 1970 I was myself involved in conveying a message to the British Embassy on behalf of Rostropovich, alerting it that Solzhenitsyn was planning to defect to England, a scheme which never came to pass.)
Rostropovich stuck to his guns in spite of the danger it would bring to him and his family. The history books were swiftly rewritten—Vishnevskaya’s name was expunged from the cast lists of the Bolshoi opera first performances, as though she had never existed.
Rehabilitation is a whimsical tool in Russia when it suits the regime; when the accused turn out to be the heroes of a later regime, the powers that be apparently have no problem in burying the hatchet. Examine the case of the late (as we understand) Yevgeny Prigozhin. In 1981, aged 20, Prigozhin was sentenced to 12 years in jail for robbery and assault, including choking a woman until she lost consciousness, according to court documents from the time. His rehabilitation proved to be short-lived.
A curious postscript to the death of Rostropovich took place in September 2007. He and his wife had been astute collectors of Russian and Soviet art at a time when many of the objects were not considered to be of great value, but after the fall of Communism and the surge of interest in all things Russian, particularly amongst overseas-domiciled Russians and art-hungry oligarchs, prices rocketed and the major European and American auction houses cashed in on the bonanza.
The “Rostropovich Collection” was scheduled to go up for auction in London on September 18th 2007. On the evening prior to the sale, Sotheby’s held a reception—as they often did with important art sales—to woo potential buyers, the ambience of informal hospitality massaging the wallets. Many people had travelled to London for the event. I attended as a very small-scale collector, hoping that I might find a memento of my former teacher. When I arrived at the champagne reception, festooned by an array of lavishly bedecked nouveau-riche Russians all hoping to get a much larger slice of the cake, it became apparent that many had failed to spot the small notice pinned to the door conveying the information that Sotheby’s were sorry to announce the cancellation of the sale, due to the fact that the entire collection had been bought that day by a private investor. As the ripple gradually spread across the gathering, it was quite obvious that a number of disgruntled would-be buyers decided to drown their sorrows, and no doubt in some cases their ire, in the free-flowing champagne, courtesy of Sotheby’s (or perhaps the invisible new private owner) as a consolation prize.
That person eventually emerged as Alisher Usmanov, who had paid an undisclosed sum of about £25m. Surprisingly, Sotheby’s let it go for that amount.
When identified, Usmanov made an admirable statement that such an important collection should be kept together and made available to the Russian people. At the same time, the director of the Russian Federation said that though the Federation lacked the funds to buy it, they had presented some guarantees that the transaction would be in the interest of the Federation. In other words, they had persuaded Usmanov that it was also in his interests to buy it. In an ironic twist of fate, instead of opening a dedicated museum for the collection as promised, Usmanov went on to present it to one of Putin’s palaces, ensuring that Putin had not only added Rostropovich to his roster of “friends”, but also gained his friend’s art collection.
Passing the collection on to Putin was, in hindsight, an astute move on Usmanov’s part. In 2022, it was reported that German authorities had confiscated 30 other paintings, Fabergé eggs and other important art works from the now-sanctioned Russian oligarch’s collection (Usmanov has stated that the eggs were in fact low-value souvenirs). At the same time, a $600m yacht linked to Usmanov was reportedly seized by German authorities, and sanctions were imposed over his close ties to Putin. Since then, a series of searches of Usmanov’s property by German law enforcement in 2022 have been ruled unlawful; the wider investigation into the businessman by German authorities continues.
No doubt Putin would argue that just as his affection for Rostropovich demonstrated his cultivated appreciation of music and musicians, Usmanov’s affection for Putin was demonstrably visible through the paintings hanging on his walls—only sceptical western commentators might question Usmanov’s motivation. Not surprisingly, the astute Usmanov has also wisely spread his charitable giving throughout many international charitable causes, which, until recently at least, have guaranteed more praiseworthy publicity than his vast network of suspect money-laundering operations.
Sergei Roldugin is another cellist of some notoriety—if not note—who was described by the Guardian in 2016 as “Putin’s best friend”. It was Roldugin who introduced Putin to his wife Lyudmila, and the cellist is godfather to Putin’s daughter Maria.
Unlike Rostropovich, however, and unlike a whole roster of brilliant cellists of his generation (many of whom had been students of Rostropovich) his career has never captured the attention of musical cognoscenti. Surprisingly, as a 29-year-old he was awarded the third prize at the 1980 Prague Spring Festival Competition—a competition won many years before by Rostropovich. Judging by the strength of his YouTube appearances, Roldugin would be unlikely to secure a back desk position in a provincial Russian orchestra. Time has robbed him of some quality that must have been evident to the festival judges.
Whatever Putin may have thought about Roldugin’s cello playing, early on he might have spotted additional talents lying in other directions, and possibly even encouraged his friend to expand his career outside music. Whether or not he did, Roldugin’s description on Wikipedia as a “Cellist and Businessman” is certainly appropriate, if viewed from the wrong end of the telescope.
Roldugin was the solo cellist with the Mariinsky Orchestra when they played a victory concert under Valery Gergiev in the ruins of Palmyra in May 2016. The Roman amphitheatre where the concert took place, a site of previous ISIS executions, was filled largely with Russian troops, while the Russian State TV channel trailed the concert as “A Prayer for Palmyra”. It is not hard to imagine that even Gergiev, though himself a Putin supporter, used to working with the world’s finest soloists, must have taken some persuading to accept Roldugin as soloist.
Following the collapse of Communism, western capitalism created a simmering fervour amongst Soviet wannabe business tycoons. It was to be expected that generations restricted in their business ambitions by the Soviet system should be waiting in the wings to realise their aspirations. Long before the demise of the Soviet Union, world-famous Russian musicians who travelled abroad, like Rostropovich, were aggrieved at the State Concert Agency, Goskoncert, reducing their rightfully deserved fees to a much smaller percentage after the deduction of their so-called “commission”. Many musicians managed to find ways around this by making private arrangements with concert agents in the west. One can hardly blame them—while their international colleagues were able to command appropriate fees, the USSR kept them on a long leash financially, making them political pawns in a system that shamefacedly promoted them as cultural icons of the Union. I myself saw evidence of this when, after a rehearsal, I had a rare view of Slava’s empty cello case, which in order to open he had to lay flat on the floor, as the cello rested on wads of currencies of different denominations. He was also well known for wanting to be paid in cash before the concerts started. During the last 30 years of his career he was one of the most highly paid international classical musicians.
But Rostropovich’s wealth palls into insignificance compared to that of Roldugin. In defence of Roldugin, Putin said that he had earned money legitimately from dealing in musical instruments and concertising, at the same time donating money to state institutions. Roldugin is extremely rare among musicians in owning a cello by Stradivarius, reputedly costing $12m (the most prized Italian violins and cellos command huge premiums, usually lent to musicians by banks or private investors). He would have to have had a stellar career both as a cellist and instrument dealer to have earned anything like that. After the revelations in the 2016 Panama Papers, it emerged that vast amounts of money had been invested via offshore companies in Roldugin’s name. In court, the lawyers who handled the transactions became the sacrificial lambs, rather than Roldugin. Shy of questioning on such matters, he told the New York Times in 2014 that he “was no businessman”, and in 2016 attributed much of his wealth to donations from businessmen to finance the purchase of expensive musical instruments for Russian musicians.
Meanwhile he maintained a cloak of respectability in the musical world. He was made a professor at the St Petersburg Conservatory, and served as the conservatory’s rector in the early 2000s. He is also guest conductor at the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, and has received a “People’s Artist of Russia” prize—a kind of Russian equivalent of the OBE. To this he can add numerous other awards including the notable, if quaintly named, Kazakhstan “Order of Friendship”. He also instigated—with the help of an endowment from Putin—the renovation of a building to house the St Petersburg Music House, a school for young musicians of which he is artistic director. All of this qualifies him uniquely, in the view of the Russian people, to be seen as the successor to Rostropovich. He also lets it be known that playing private concerts for Putin and making the president aware of young musicians is part of his musical life, ensuring his status as a benefactor to the next generation.
He was like a brother to me,” Roldugin has said of Putin. As an erstwhile sibling, there have been widespread allegations about his “sub fusc” activities as a businessman, including reported transactions with numerous secret offshore entities on behalf of the president. Thirteen years ago he proffered that his 3.9 per cent stake holding of shares in the Bank Rossiya (known as “Putin’s wallet”) dated back to “a very long time ago”. 2014 documents from a Swiss bank revealed that he was personally making £6.5m a year and had almost £19m in cash from his stake in Video International, a Russian advertising agency.
If all this represents a cut of his friend’s affairs, one can only speculate as to the vast wealth that has been spirited away on behalf of President Putin. But with his activities made known to the world in recent years, it may be a matter of time before Roldugin’s apparent usefulness runs out—and his cellistic skills alone may not be quite strong enough to hold Putin’s ear. Unless of course the mellifluous sound of his Stradivari can help to lull Putin into a benevolent retirement.
Unfortunately, years allegedly spent handling bank notes for people have left Roldugin looking very much like a stony-faced member of a Brezhnev Politburo line-up; if the music stops he may have to pay the piper. And be warned Roldugin: fratricide was a useful tool of many Russian czars of the past.
In the meantime, however, he has no doubt used his skills at putting a little money aside to make arrangements to add a touch of luxury to his own retirement home.
This story has been updated to make clear that the $600 Dilbar yacht is linked to Alisher Usmanov but does not belong to him; that Usmanov disputes the nature of the collectable eggs reportedly seized in 2022; and to account for the finding in May this year that a series of searches of Usmanov’s property by German law enforcement were ruled unlawful. We note also that Usmanov disputes the characterisation of the Konstantin palace as “one of Putin’s palaces”.
