News
Meet Alexandra Tolstoy, the travelling countess, for The Sunday Times
She married an Uzbek horseman and rode the length of the Silk Road; lived the oligarch lifestyle with ‘Putin’s banker’; and now leads intrepid group tours of the Stans Riding the length of the Silk Road in 1999, from the ruins of Merv, in Turkmenistan, to Xi’an, in China, set off this whole apocalyptic adventure — or perhaps I should say misadventure. It was my friend’s dream to do it and I hooked onto it. She changed my life. It was on that trip that I met my former husband, Shamil Galimzyanov, an Uzbek horseman. We became addicted...
Alexandra Tolstoy on her couture-clad life with a Russian oligarch – and rediscovering herself without him, for The Telegraph
Wardrobes full of couture, endless priceless jewels and never-ending shopping trips. It’s the kind of fashion scenario dreams are made of, isn’t it? For Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, the fantasy became reality when she met billionaire Russian banker Sergei Pugachev in 2008 and left her then-husband, an impoverished Uzbek horseman called Shamil Galimzyanov, for a life of unimaginable luxury. ‘I went into this whole other world. I remember the first time I arrived in Paris in jeans and a pair of Ugg boots. I went to the Plaza Athenee hotel and I thought, “oh my gosh I don’t fit in,”’ she...
Alexandra Tolstoy on life with Sergei Pugachev, Putin’s billionaire banker, for Saturaday Times Magazine
Alexandra Tolstoy’s life has been many things, but she can never complain that it’s been dull. Take her romantic CV. Her first marriage was to a penniless, alcoholic Cossack horseman, whom she met on the Silk Road. Her next relationship was with a billionaire Russian oligarch, Sergei Pugachev, a Russian senator known as Putin’s banker. They travelled the world and had three children, but it did not end well, as anyone who saw The Countess and the Russian Billionaire, a recent fly-on-the-wall documentary filmed over five years, knows. “As we went along, everything went completely pear-shaped,” she says, sitting on...
Alexandra’s weekly column for Zima Magazine
The travels that changed my life ‘Alexandra, you have to pull your finger out and start working really hard or leave!’ This brusque ultimatum was delivered to me by my ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ style boss, Martin, behind a floor to ceiling glass wall, with an entire trading floor watching as I broke down into humiliated tears. I had been working at Credit Suisse First Boston, the investment bank, as a broker of Eastern European equities for nine months, but it clearly was not the job for me. After training in New York and managing to pass the Series 7...