On the night of October 8-9, 2007, Kommersant website published a full-page article (which also appeared in the paper version next morning) titled “We must not let warriors become merchants,” signed by Viktor Cherkesov, director of the Federal Drug Control Service. The day before, on Sunday, October 7, President Putin celebrated a milestone birthday — he turned 55. The article in Kommersant was addressed to the birthday boy, but it was not particularly festive.

Cherkesov complained to Putin about their long-time mutual friend Nikolai Patrushev, then director of the FSB and the KGB officer closest to the president. Relations among this trio had always been complicated. During the Soviet era, Cherkesov was a big shot in state security – he served as an investigator in the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, prosecuted dissidents, and once wrote a journalistic article under a pseudonym in his spare time. In the early 1990s, Cherkesov became head of the St. Petersburg branch of the FSB, which is a very high position. In 1998, as soon as Putin was appointed director of the FSB, he made Cherkesov his first deputy, reflecting a high level of trust. A Proekt source who knew Cherkesov recalled that Putin probably felt sympathy for his colleague — they both served in the Fifth Directorate at the beginning of their careers. Moreover, our anonymous writer, as many people who met him say, was not a self-serving person (indeed, investigators never found any secret wealth belonging to Cherkesov).

Patrushev is a different story: in the 1980s, he served in the Leningrad KGB as an aide to General Oleg Kalugin: he probably kept an eye on the disgraced intelligence officer on the command’s orders , suggests a friend of Kalugin × . Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Patrushev was involved in investigating economic crimes at the St. Petersburg branch of the KGB. His colleagues nicknamed him “iron ass” for his willingness to sit at his desk day and night. This skill brought Patrushev success — his boss Sergei Stepashin, noticed him staying late one day and, impressed by the officer’s diligence, later took Patrushev to Moscow. However, the young Patrushev had another merit. As head of the economic department, he was tasked with investigating the first criminal case against the future president. It was Patrushev who was assigned the “Marina Salye dossier,” compiled by a member of the Leningrad City Council who was conducting a parliamentary investigation into fraud in the city’s “Resources for Food” program. Deputy Mayor Putin oversaw this program: raw materials were exported from St. Petersburg and the surrounding region to the West, and food was to be imported in return. Many companies that received licenses to export metals, oil and other goods were set up by Putin’s acquaintances. They succeeded in exporting, but did not always manage to import. Salye collected a large number of documents that could well have destroyed Putin’s career. But they did not. After studying the papers, Patrushev found “no signs of personal gain, let alone corruption” in them , as Stepashin recalls in his memoirs and Patrushev’s former colleague confirms × .

However, even after such a favor, Patrushev did not become Putin’s most trusted security officer. When Putin was choosing his replacement as FSB director in 1999, he offered the position to Cherkesov. But Cherkesov refused, saying he was not yet ready for such a high position. Putin does not like refusals: the job went to Patrushev, who became the country’s chief security officer. During the first years of Putin’s rule, Patrushev and Cherkesov fought administrative battles, trying to determine which of them had cleaner hands and whose heart was burning more (the statement that a true Chekist must have a burning heart and clean hands is attributed to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret services). In 2007, the confrontation escalated: Patrushev’s people arrested Cherkesov’s deputy, who had been wiretapping FSB officers involved in corruption. So, Cherkesov decided to write a new article. He appealed to Putin through Kommersant as the bearer of true values of state security , claiming that there was a “war within the Chekist community” and that FSB leaders had turned from “warriors” into “merchants,” which would lead the country to ruin because the only thing that could hold it together (as it already did once) was a kind of “Chekist hook.” However, Putin did not appreciate Cherkesov’s dramatic appeal. He disbanded the anti-drug agency, and Cherkesov himself has since been moving between insignificant positions and suffering greatly.

Cherkesov died in 2022. His quarrel with Patrushev and, consequently, with Putin undermined not only the career of the unsuccessful publicist, but also his health. Patrushev, who prevailed back then, became the head of a real family of “traders.” Our story is about this family.

Nikolai Patrushev’s first major position was heading the Ministry of Security of the Republic of Karelia in 1992-1994 – this was a transitional period when the KGB, abolished after the communist coup, changed its name and became the FSB. In Karelia, Patrushev made many acquaintances, probably had an affair with a local woman, but most importantly, he began to offer his patronage for sale. Lauri Rautio, a Karelian businessman at the time, recalled that the leadership of the Karelian FSB did business with the Tambovskaya gang from St. Petersburg, helping them to import goods through the customs post in Vartsila without any problems. For his help, Patrushev received a reward from the gang: a used Toyota Corolla imported from Finland by one of Rautio’s companies.

Don’t be confused by the fact that the future head Chekist and leader of a wealthy clan of officials had a used small car. In the 1990s, when Patrushev was making his career in the FSB, the employees of this special service, like the country as a whole, were not very well off. Their salaries were being delayed, which led qualified officers to leave for the private sector. Those who remained in the agency failed one high-profile operation after another — from the live-broadcast storming of Budennovsk, which had been seized by terrorists, to the absurd murder of the commander of the Alpha group by his own subordinates. One of the reasons for all this was the chronic underfunding of the agency. Putin and Patrushev, having taken control of the country and the FSB, rushed to solve this problem in the only way they knew how: they forced businessmen to make private contributions to ensure the prosperity of the agencies. This was discussed at the president’s first meeting with the wealthiest businessmen in July 2000: Putin ordered the oligarchs to create a “special services support fund,” which immediately collected “several tens of millions of dollars” , Forbes magazine wrote, citing participants in the meeting × . Subsequently, several such funds were created, with the lapdog billionaires of Patrushev’s family, Igor Kesaev and Sergei Katsiev (more on them later), playing a particularly important role in them.

In the 1990s, a circle of Patrushev’s closest confidants and colleagues from the FSB formed around him—many of them had moved with him to Moscow from Karelia. They were all corrupt as well.

In 2000, Patrushev would refer to all these people as “neo-nobility” . Patrushev used the term “neo-nobility” to describe FSB officers in an article for Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2000 × . At first, it seemed that the director of the FSB was simply using a rhetorical device to show that the prestige of the security service had finally been restored after the decline of the 1990s. However, it later became clear that Patrushev was not exaggerating at all. In 2007, he, his sons, and his wife received the title of hereditary nobles from “the head of the Russian Imperial House, Her Majesty Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna Romanova” (this is the wording of her title that she herself uses). This Spanish subject is one of the indirect heirs of Nicholas II. After perestroika, she became very active in Russia, supporting Putin and satisfying the desire of security service officers and corrupt officials for court titles.

Family has always meant a great deal to nobleman Patrushev. During the Soviet era, his parents (his father was a sailor and his mother was a civil servant) received 20 cubic meters of logs and a plot of land in the Priozersky district of the Leningrad Oblast from the state and built a wooden house there all together. “Seven rooms for seven families, it’s a bit cramped, but there’s enough space for everyone,” said Viktor Patrushev, the older brother of the country’s chief security officer, in a 2007 interview. So, the rooms must have been allocated to Nikolai and Viktor and their spouses, their parents, as well as the families of Viktor’s sons Alexei and Vladimir, and the families of Nikolai’s sons Andrei and Dmitry. In that interview, the brother of the country’s chief Chekist openly played on people’s sympathy: he claimed that he lives in a modest three-room apartment in St. Petersburg, where “the only valuable thing is a family icon given to him by his younger brother.” And even this apartment allegedly was obtained by the Patrushevs not through connections and patronage, but with money honestly earned by Viktor “unloading train cars.”

Though Viktor Patrushev wasn’t a security officer, he rarely appeared in public. So why did he give the first and only interview of his life? The thing is, not long before that, the Patrushev family got into a scandal. Journalists discovered that the Patrushevs had made a tourist trip to the South Pole at the expense of the state. They first flew to Chile on an FSB service plane, and from there, again on a government helicopter, they traveled to the Russian Antarctic base. Among the passengers on these flights were three members of the Patrushev family (FSB head Nikolai, his son Andrei, who at the time was a graduate of the FSB academy and an employee of Rosneft, and his brother Viktor), as well as the FSB director’s close friend Vladimir Pronichev, also a Chekist, who was head of the border service at the time. The authorities were unable to explain what this group was doing in Antarctica, where there are certainly no border posts, during the New Year holidays, so Viktor had to take the fall for everyone: his interview was published in the servile Izvestia newspaper and was intended to show that the Patrushev family was not interested in material wealth.

But what is the reality? The reality is that the Patrushevs have been making money from informal rent for years — they provided various companies (often dubious ones) with “lucky charm” services. Russian businessmen usually use this term to refer to a well-known person whose presence in a company is supposed to protect the business from government audits and bandit raids.

Like his younger brother, Viktor Patrushev graduated from the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute and worked in a design bureau, which he left when the Soviet Union collapsed to work as a car mechanic , as Viktor himself stated in the same interview × . His career as a mechanic took off rapidly as soon as his brother became head of the FSB in 1999 — Viktor was hired as deputy director for the Northwest region at Megafon. This mobile phone operator was then linked to Putin’s inner circle — its secret shareholder was probably Leonid Reiman, a former Leningrad telephone operator whom Putin appointed as Minister of Communications even before becoming president : from August 1999, he was head of the State Committee for Communications, and then became the minister in November × . This was the beginning of Viktor Patrushev’s long but non-public career. He then joined the boards of the Dynamo sports society (supervised by the FSB) and the Dynamo-Leningrad Oblast volleyball club (volleyball is the favorite sport of his Chekist brother). He was also appointed to the board of directors of the Frunze Health Resort in Sochi, where Chekists vacation, despite the facility being owned by tobacco oligarchs Kesaev and Katsiev. In 2012, Viktor became president of the St. Petersburg company Nord, which belongs to gangsters from the same Tambovskaya gang with whom his brother Nikolai collaborated. . Over 80% of Nord’s capital was controlled by the family of Sergei Shevchenko. Shevchenko was an associate of Tambovskaya gang leader Vladimir Kumarin. In 2001, Shevchenko was tried for extortion, and in 2004, he was killed in Cyprus. Another member of the Tambovskaya gang, Mikhail Glushchenko, was convicted for this crime × . This legal entity owned valuable assets that were formally unrelated to the interests of the security services: the Metropol Hotel and Restaurant (where not only Leonid Brezhnev and Ronald Reagan dined, but also the most important meetings of St. Petersburg gangsters were held), the Grand Palace boutique gallery, the Ladoga furniture factory, and the Lenteplopribor enterprise.

Viktor Patrushev’s youngest son Alexei continued his father’s business. For several years, he was listed as an advisor to Boris Bulochnik, the head and main owner of Moscow’s Master Bank (later, Alexei also became deputy chairman of the bank’s board). This bank, which owned the largest fleet of cash collection vehicles, was well known as a major player in the cash-out market. Despite its bad reputation, the bank was left untouched until 2013, possibly because of Patrushev, or perhaps thanks to the second “lucky charm” in its management: Igor Putin, the president’s cousin. When the bank’s license was finally revoked, its owner was already living abroad, and the authorities had no questions for Patrushev and Putin. Alexei also served as a “lucky charm” for various logging companies in Karelia, his uncle’s “spiritual homeland” – he was on the boards of directors of Segezha Group and Lahdenpoga Logging Company, and had shares in Rauta-Les, Stroylessprodukt and LesStroyProekt × .

Viktor Patrushev’s second son Vladimir was set up for a career in government – he works as a big boss in the Rostec structures. His son Alexander, at the age of 19, got a job at Rosselkhozbank, which was then headed by his uncle Dmitry, the son of Nikolai Patrushev. He later left the bank, not because of an obvious conflict of interest, but rather to become a politician. At the age of 22, Alexander became an MP, and four years later, the head of the village of Sosnovo, where the Patrushev family built their family home from logs provided by the state.

Nikolai Patrushev’s sons immediately chose to serve the state. The younger son Andrei, after serving in the FSB, began working at Rosneft in 2006 and immediately became an advisor to Igor Sechin. In 2011, he moved to Zarubezhneft, and two years later to Gazprom. Since 2019, Andrei, like his relatives, has become a “lucky charm”: he received 10% of the Arkhangelsk Sea Trade Port, shares in Marine Arctic Geological Exploration Expedition and Transtelsoft its key owner is Transmashholding, owned by Andrei Bokarev and Iskander Makhmudov × , which makes money through contracts with Russian Railways.

Nikolai’s eldest son Dmitry is now the main star of the civil service in this illustrious family. He made his career in state banks, heading Rosselkhozbank in 2010 and later joining the cabinet. For several years now, journalists and experts have been naming Patrushev as one of Putin’s likely successors as president. This assumption is partly based on the fact that Dmitry’s government career is on the rise; he is currently the deputy prime minister. The state media sing Dmitry’s praises, calling him a humble and caring manager who is constantly thinking about Russia.

However, there is one inconspicuous person in the large Patrushev family whose sole purpose seems to be to dispel the myth of loyal, selfless security officials. This is Dmitry’s unofficial wife Marina Artemyeva. She did not take her husband’s surname and did not marry him legally — probably so that any property, from houses and apartments to billion-dollar companies, could be registered in her name.

In fact, Dmitry married the young soloist of the folk group Ivan Kupala Elizaveta Garshina more than 20 years ago, and she gave birth to his daughter Sofia. In 2009, the married Dmitry found himself at his friends’ party, where he met 35-year-old Marina this is how Sobesednik described how they met × .

Before their acquaintance and the ensuing romance, Marina was not doing well. She was born into a broken family in Elektrostal, near Moscow, where she spent her entire childhood and youth with her mother and half-sister Yulia Kolyadina. All three women, plus a Rottweiler, shared a 33-square-meter one-room apartment in a Khrushchev-era block.

From the late 1990s, Marina tried her luck in Moscow, taking on minor positions in small companies. Gradually, the family moved to the capital, first settling in a modest apartment block in Strogino and later moving to another one on the Varshavskoye Highway. The sisters, both pretty girls, were very interested in the fashion and entertainment industries and tried their hand at photography, design, and event planning. In 2007, Kolyadina was the first to appear on the World Fashion Channel (WFC), where she was hired as an unpaid correspondent. Soon she brought her sister along as a regular producer. At that time, WFC was part of many cable packages — the wall screens in most sports clubs, shops and restaurants were showing beautiful girls walking down the catwalks.

Meeting Patrushev Jr. changed everything in Marina’s life. First, she became pregnant almost immediately—their first child, a boy named Platon, in honor of his great-grandfather, was born about a year after they met. Then there would be four more children—Yegor in 2014, Ignatii in 2019, and twins Maria and Antonina in 2020.

Second, the young mother received a valuable gift: the Patrushev family presented her with the very fashion TV channel where she had just started working as a junior producer. In 2009, oligarch Igor Kesaev became the actual owner of WFC according to a source familiar with the history of WFC, Kesaev began investing in the channel in 2009 and became an official shareholder in 2011 × – he is the Patrushevs’ “wallet,” from which their various material needs are financed. The then-manager of WFC recalls a telling detail: Kesaev, a fine man in his prime, liked hanging out with young models, so he had a personal interest in the deal. But in the press, he said he bought the channel for his wife Stella Kesaeva, who wanted to try her hand at the fashion industry. This was a bluff: after some time, Kesaev divorced Stella and got together with a young Ukrainian model Olga Klymenko, who hosted a show on her husband’s TV channel with the suggestive title “Yes, Boss!”.

In 2011, Kesaev first appointed Artemyeva as executive producer and then, at the end of the same year, as general director of the TV channel. On November 21, 2014, the day after Artemyeva gave birth to Patrushev’s second son, she was literally given ownership of the television company as a gift for this (Artemyeva continued to own 80% of it until February 2018 × .

In the end, Artemyeva’s fashion business did not work out. “She wanted to hang out at all the parties. However, this world [of fashion and show business] did not accept her,” says one of the key people at the channel at the time. Television broadcasting, which initially covered Europe and Asia, was shut down. Now WFC is essentially a Russian fashion website.

However, failing in the fashion business did not affect Artemyeva’s rapid career as an entrepreneur. Over the next few years, the young woman, who kept tirelessly giving birth to new children, became the owner of a dozen companies. In all cases, she was probably a nominee — either a “lucky charm” or simply a recipient of money in the form of salaries, dividends, and shares from asset deals.

How did it happen that the woman who bore Dmitry Patrushev five children never became his legal spouse? The reason is probably that if Marina had been included in her husband’s official income and asset declaration, the Patrushevs would have become the wealthiest family among Russian officials. Proekt found all of the numerous properties registered in Artemyeva’s name and came to a surprising conclusion: the former resident of a Khrushchev-era apartment building owns real estate worth about 6.5 billion rubles. . We’ve valued her residential property at 6 billion rubles, and her commercial property in Moscow City, the Lotus Business Center, and the Vodny Business Center at half a billion × . However, registering expensive property in their own names is what all the women in the Patrushev family do. Elena, the wife of the former director of the FSB and a retired doctor, owns real estate worth 4 billion rubles she used to be included in Patrushev’s declarations × . Same with Tatiana, Nikolai Patrushev’s second daughter-in-law, a medical manager by trade . In recent years, she worked as a development director at the Mother and Child clinic chain, and until 2021, at Rosgosstrakh × . According to documents, she owns several medical companies, including the specialized magazine Vademecum, but this business can hardly explain the fact that her real estate is worth almost 3 billion rubles. Of course, Tatyana’s assets have never been included in the Patrushevs’ anti-corruption declarations. If we add up the value of all the Patrushevs’ real estate assets that we have identified, we get an astronomical sum of about 14 billion rubles. This seems to be a record among Russian security officials.

The most expensive houses and apartments owned by the Patrushev family include:

To purchase apartments near the Kremlin — clearly the most valuable asset in the Patrushev family collection— Marina Artemyeva was even granted a mortgage loan of approximately $1.5 million. Unsurprisingly, despite the clear conflict of interest, she received this money in 2021 from the state-owned Rosselkhozbank, whose supervisory board was chaired at the time by her secret husband. It is also not surprising that the bank offered this borrower a completely non-market interest rate – it issued 700,000 euros at 2% per annum after the 2014 crisis, Russian banks virtually eliminated foreign currency mortgages, so a loan in euros is unusual in itself. At the same time, the rate on ruble mortgage loans in mid-2021 was about 9% × , and then gave her another 50 million rubles in the form of a consumer loan at 3% per annum the rate on such loans for ordinary borrowers in 2021 was about 15% × .

Russians usually take out consumer loans like the one Artemyeva got in rubles to pay for essentials—household appliances, urgent medical procedures, and sometimes even just food. The Patrushev family, of course, is in a different situation. Every month, they spend considerable sums at Russia’s most fashionable store, Moscow’s TsUM. Marina Artemyeva orders cosmetics and clothing there about once every two to three weeks, spending an average of about 370,000 rubles at a time.

Since 2015, she has spent at least 65 million rubles at TsUM.

Even Elena, the 70-year-old wife of nobleman Nikolai Patrushev, is a regular buyer of fashion brands. She spends about half a million rubles a year at TsUM. The previous episode of our special project includes the rating of the most extravagant women of the Russian elite according to the TsUM customer database, as well as a detailed account of the most interesting careers of women in the top echelons.

In May 2024, Putin dismissed Nikolai Patrushev from his last position of any significance — he was demoted from secretary of the Security Council to presidential aide specializing in shipbuilding. There was a certain irony in this with family undertones: Patrushev had once graduated from a shipbuilding university, but had hardly worked in the field – he went straight from the lecture hall to the KGB. His father Platon Ignatyevich, however, was a naval officer who served as a commissar on ships of the Baltic and Northern Fleets during the war, escorting convoys with foreign aid. Nikolai built a church dedicated to Plato the Studite, his father’s patron saint, in the village of Podomo near Arkhangelsk, the homeland of the Patrushevs. The construction was paid for by Igor Kesaev, the Patrushevs’ personal oligarch.

When leaving his post on the Security Council, Patrushev was unable to part with his large office on Staraya Square. His successor Sergei Shoigu, a member of another prominent family in the Russian elite, had to at least temporarily × settle for his old office, which, despite the Security Council’s top-secret status, is not even located in the Kremlin. The obsession with real estate truly runs in the Patrushev family.