mikhail prokhorov yacht seized

Here are the superyachts seized from Russian oligarchs

As part of an international pressure campaign on Russia, authorities from around the world have seized more than a half-dozen superyachts belonging to billionaire oligarchs allied with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The yacht seizures since the Feb. 24 invasion are "just the beginning," White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in March, as an international task force worked to identify further assets that can be seized or frozen.

“The Justice Department will be relentless in our efforts to hold accountable those who facilitate the death and destruction we are witnessing in Ukraine,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said of the ongoing efforts in May.

Here are the superyachts government officials have seized since Russia invaded Ukraine last month.

The Justice Department announced May 5 that the Fijian government had seized billionaire oligarch Suleiman Kerimov 's 348-foot yacht Amadea. The vessel, which is valued at more than $300 million , arrived in Fiji last month. Kerimov, who's worth an estimated $14 billion and has ties to the Russian government, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department over alleged money laundering in 2018.

Special features on the sprawling yacht include a helipad, infinity pool, a jacuzzi and multiple bars, according to a report in Boat International . It can accommodate 16 overnight guests in addition to 36 crew members, the report said.

In April, Spanish law-enforcement officials seized a 255-foot yacht called the Tango, which Justice Department says is owned by oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Vekselberg is an aluminum magnate who the Treasury Department says has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Tango is worth an estimated $90 million, prosecutors said , and Vekselberg allegedly purchased it through shell companies. The 11-year-old yacht has seven staterooms and reportedly includes amenities such as a pool, gym and beauty salon .

Authorities in Italy seized a 215-foot superyacht called the Lady M this month. It's owned by Alexei Mordashov, Russia's richest businessman, and it’s estimated to be worth $27 million . The vessel, which requires a crew of 14, has six guest cabins , a pool and a gym.

But it pales in comparison to another of Mordashov's yachts, the $500 million Nord . The 464-foot vessel, which has two helipads and a waterfall and can accommodate 36 guests, was anchored this month in the Seychelles, where the U.S. and European Union sanctions don’t apply.

Italian officials also seized the 132-foot superyacht Lena, owned by the energy magnate Gennady Timchenko. Estimated to be worth $8 million, it has five cabins and can accommodate 10 guests.

SY A — short for Sailing Yacht A — is one of the world's largest superyachts. Valued at over $440 million, the 469-foot vessel, owned by the fertilizer magnate Andrey Melnichenko, has eight decks, multiple elevators, an underwater observation area and the world's tallest masts . It was seized in the Italian port of Trieste.

Authorities in Spain seized Sergei Chemezov's Valerie, a 279-foot superyacht that had been moored in Barcelona. Chemezov , a former KGB officer, heads the state conglomerate Rostec. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez touted the seizure on La Sexta television. “We are talking about a yacht that we estimate is worth $140 million,” Sanchez said.

Officials in France announced this month that they had seized the 289-foot Amore Vero, which was undergoing repairs in a shipyard near Marseille. When they arrived, authorities said, they found the crew preparing for an urgent departure, even though the repair work was scheduled to last through April. The $120 million boat, which has seven cabins , is linked to Igor Sechin, described by the U.S. Treasury Department as a close ally of Putin's.

Dareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.

Alfa Nero: ‘Not everyone can land a blue whale deal’

Northrop & Johnson broker Richard Higgins brought the buyer for Alfa Nero.

“Who dares wins”  is the motto of the British SAS but it could equally apply to the new owner of the seized yacht  Alfa Nero .

The 82m Oceanco with the complicated backstory has finally sold to a European buyer for a $40m after being detained in Antigua for two years.

“Once the government had clean title and the liens and encumbrances were removed from the boat, it came down to a game of numbers,”  says broker Richard Higgins of Northrop & Johnson , who represented the buyer.

“The buyer was fully aware of the risk he was taking on, but he is a businessman and was willing to take the risk if the numbers were right. Luckily, they were .”

READ: Antigua ‘very happy’ with $40m sale of Alfa Nero

Alfa Nero  was seized, and then deemed abandoned, from the sanctioned Russian oligarch Andrey Guryev in March 2022. It has been laid up in Falmouth Harbour ever since as lawyers wrangled over ownership and responsibility for running costs, including crew wages.

The US Department of the Treasury eventually lifted sanctions to allow the yacht to be sold last year and it was nearly snapped up by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt for $67m at auction. However, Guryev’s daughter Yulia Guryeva-Motlokhov then filed a lawsuit claiming it was hers.

Without a clean title, Schmidt withdrew, leaving the government of Antigua and Barbuda still saddled with the hefty costs, reported to be nearly $100,000 a month.

Higgins and his client began circling, not put off by  Alfa Nero’s tainted past. He went out to Antigua three times and was in constant dialogue with the government to ensure a clean title and bill of sale.

“It was a very complex deal, not a standard one you would do on the brokerage market,”  says Higgins.  “It came down to right time, right place but it wasn’t something we’d plucked out of thin air. We’d been planning and working on it for several months.”

READ: ‘I wasn’t a great yacht broker’ – Bob Denison

The 82m Alfa Nero was built by Oceanco in 2007.

Valuing a vessel with  Alfa Nero’s  chequered recent history required Higgins to lean into his 15 years’ experience and to muster the special forces of Northrop & Johnson’s wider network, evaluating variables such as the current brokerage market, what a new-build to the same spec would cost now and what it might sell for in the future.

“It is not just a simple formula, you’ve got to do your research,”  says Higgins.

A skeleton crew had been retained to keep  Alfa Nero  ticking over, including running the air conditioning to preserve the leather and wood interiors.

“All in all, the condition of the vessel wasn’t too bad,”  says Higgins.  “The paint was fine, the teak was still in very good order. It needs some TLC and some investment and we’re fully aware of that. The buyer is going to spend money on it.”

The transaction took 10 days from getting onboard with the buyer to completing the final negotiations and closing the contract, which is  “phenomenal”  for a boat of this size, says Higgins.

“I was working with the client for several months to get him fully engaged in buying a boat like this,”  he adds.  “Everyone had to do their homework and make the boat as good as it could have been to impress the buyer. We had to do budgets and set aside how much it would cost to put her back in the condition she deserves to be in.  After a few visits the client fell in love with it, he knew the potential it could have.”

Proceeds of the sale will go towards Antigua’s national debt, said Prime Minister Gaston Browne. “We’re very happy that we’ve been able to remove ourselves from a major liability, in addition to ridding ourselves of a potential disastrous outcome,” added Darwin Telemaque, CEO, Antigua and Barbuda Ports Authority, speaking to Superyacht Investor. “I would have been happy to have $100m but I’m also aware cost is not just revenue.”

The plan is to put the yacht back in Class, get the right flag status and update some mechanical areas before putting it on the charter market.

“It is such an iconic vessel, you don’t want to see it just left and dilapidated and ruined and in mothballs,”  says Higgins.

READ:  ‘ The word yacht management is completely misunderstood ’

Alfa Nero was seized by the Antigua government in 2022.

Alfa Nero  is the second largest yacht Higgins has sold after the 95m Blohm & Voss  Palladium,  purportedly owned by non-sanctioned Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, in 2022.

“It was a very complex deal, but we sold it within three months to an American owner,”  he says.  “It was a really good milestone for my career and set me off on the larger vessels, so I was very happy.”

Closing deals on showpiece yachts such as  Alfa Nero  and  Palladium  needs a certain gravity and is key for a broker’s resume.

“It’s a pinnacle for sure,”  he says.  “ Not everyone can land a blue whale deal. It takes a lot of time, a lot of experience and a bit of luck.  It also makes a huge difference working for a very well-known yacht brokerage firm. That does help give you a lot of pedigree.”

READ:   ‘ I thought I’d been absolutely brilliant ’  – Goldsworthy

Higgins discovered yacht broking through his wife who was working as an assistant to a broker at Camper & Nicholsons in London. Intrigued, he left his job with a firm organising events for the military to work as a junior broker with Camper & Nicholsons in 2010 before moving with his wife to Monaco.

“I was always advised it will probably take 10 years to get a very good grasp of the industry and how all transactions happen,”  he says.  “Every client, buyer or seller, is different and has different motives.”

Some, it seems, are willing to take risks to land whales.

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Russian billionaire and former owner of the Brooklyn Nets has sold his 312 feet long superyacht to an anonymous billionaire for $150 million. The vessel comes with a wave generating swimming pool, a dance floor with lasers and cabins with self washing windows.

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Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez are back on their $500 million sailing yacht – This time, the newly engaged couple arrived on a helicopter with Sanchez’s three kids to enjoy a yacht vacation in Portofino, Italy.

After being hunted and raided by the FBI, Russian billionaire Andrey Guryev’s seized $120 million superyacht will now be auctioned to the highest bidder. Inspired by the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein, the gorgeous 279 foot long vessel is nothing short of a modern floating palace.

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PALLADIUM Yacht – Impressive $200M Superyacht

PALLADIUM yacht is a multi-award-winning 95.1m/312′ motor yacht built by The Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany.

Her luxurious interior and elegant exterior were both penned by the renowned Michael Leach Design and she was delivered to her new owner in September 2010. 

PALLADIUM yacht interior

PALLADIUM was designed by Michael Leach, an award-winning superyacht designer with a combined 60 years of experience and has worked with the best shipyards in the world such as Feadship , Blohm & Voss, Amels, Damen Yachting , and Pendennis , just to name a few.

She can comfortably accommodate up to 24 guests in 12 cabins and a total of 34 crew in 16 cabins to provide guests with a relaxing luxury yacht experience.

She is equipped with a beauty salon, an elevator, a gym, and air conditioning among her many amenities.

This superyacht boasts a teak deck, a steel hull, and an aluminum superstructure that is constructed to last a lifetime.

Her aft deck has a big swimming pool, which is one of her most notable features. She also features a private theater, a jacuzzi jet pool, and custom-built yacht tenders. 

Specifications

PALLADIUM yacht has a steel hull, an aluminum superstructure, teak decks, and powerful twin MTU (16V 959 TE70L) 16-cylinder 4,600hp diesel engines operating at 1750rpm.

Her cruising speed is at 16 knots and she can achieve a top speed of 19 knots, providing a range of up to 5,000 nautical miles from her 480,000-liter fuel tanks at 16 knots.

Her freshwater tanks have a capacity of around 102,000 liters and she was constructed in accordance with the Lloyds Register classification society rules. 

This beauty is a 96.0-meter motor yacht with a total of 4440.0 GT of gross tonnage and a 16-meter beam.

She was built in Germany by Blohm & Voss, who is renowned for quality and reliability, delivering projects worldwide on time and on budget. 

PALLADIUM is ranked in the top 5% by LOA in the world and when compared to similarly-sized motor yachts, her cruise speed is 0.59 km faster than the average.

In addition to this, her peak speed is 0.87 km faster than the average, and her volume is 1421.62 GT faster than the average, just to name a few statistics.

PALLADIUM Yacht was reportedly bought for US$ 200 million by a Russian oligarch, a Russian businessman who wielded his wealth in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse by buying shares in formerly state-run corporations.

The yacht has an estimated annual running cost of US $10-20 million. 

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Keith Gessen: Meet Mikhail Prokhorov

Being a Russian oligarch these days isn’t easy. The best and brightest of them are in exile or in jail; others, after feasting on leverage during the commodities boom, now have tummies full of debt. Of those still in the game, Mikhail Prokhorov is the richest, with an estimated net worth, according to Forbes , of $9.5 billion. At six-foot-seven, he is also the tallest, though this alone cannot explain the complicated process whereby he appears ready to buy the New Jersey Nets and build a stadium for them in Brooklyn.

Prokhorov is a new name to SportsCenter viewers, but in Russia he is well known as the last of the freewheeling, yacht-riding, model-escorting oligarchs. (Prokhorov is single.) He made his fortune when he and a partner, Vladimir Potanin, won control of Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest producer of nickel and palladium, in one of the infamous “loans-for-shares” auctions of 1995. (They were infamous because they were rigged.) Prokhorov, however, managed to keep himself out of the news until early 2007, when local authorities arrested him at his favorite French ski resort on charges of procurement of prostitutes. He spent four days in jail before being released without charge, but the repercussions in Russia were serious. Potanin apparently used the opportunity to try to push Prokhorov out of Norilsk Nickel. After a year of increasingly hostile negotiations, Prokhorov sold his share in Norilsk to a third oligarch for a stake in an aluminum giant and about $7 billion in cash. This buyout seemed like the end of Prokhorov’s days as a serious player, until world equity and commodity prices crashed a few months later and he woke up as the richest man in Russia.

But what to do with $9.5 billion? He would be wise to spend it all inside Russia; other oligarchs who have not invested in the motherland have incurred the wrath of the Kremlin. So Prokhorov has funded two expensively produced magazines ( one of them is edited by my sister, Masha Gessen); has continued to support the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund , perhaps Russia’s most innovative cultural foundation (run by his sister, Irina); and has thrown a party in St. Petersburg, aboard the old battleship Aurora, at which, as the English-language edition of Pravda put it, “strong beverages made the guests lose control over themselves. Some of them decided to jump overboard to swim in the Neva River.” Moscow has a popular coffee chain that serves a ten-dollar cappuccino—but even a big man like Prokhorov cannot drink nine hundred and fifty million cappuccinos. So he has begun to look abroad.

This week’s news about Prokhorov and the Nets began circulating as a rumor in Russia in July. How he managed to clear the proposed deal with Putin is unknown. The Moscow-based business journalist John Helmer has somewhat ingeniously speculated that an earlier rumor from the summer, about Prokhorov buying the Italian soccer team Roma, is connected to this: that Silvio Berlusconi asked his friend Putin to find someone to bail out Roma, and that Prokhorov is in fact buying Roma as a condition for being allowed to buy the Nets. Helmer counts up the damage :

$330 million in cash down and pledged money—more than twice what a reasonable man would pay for a football club in a faraway place—in exchange for a permit to spend $700 million on a loss-making basketball team in another faraway place.

Well, perhaps. The ordinarily hyper-sarcastic Russian press, for its part, has been unnervingly straitlaced about the news.

As for Prohkorov, he recently took to his blog to explain the situation to his online fans (and perhaps to some, in higher places, who are not his fans). Earlier this month, the embattled oligarch Oleg Deripaska (who bought Prokhorov out of Norilsk Nickel, and used to be Russia’s richest man), was asked to explain why, as the owner of a failing Russian automaker (GAZ), he was buying a failing German automaker (Opel) from a failing American automaker (G.M.). He suggested in his own defense that GAZ would be able to learn Opel’s engineering secrets. Similarly, Prokhorov argued that, by taking over an N.B.A. franchise, he would be able to help Russian coaches and players study the N.B.A. and bring their knowledge back home, and rejuvenate Russian basketball! Pay no attention, Prokhorov concluded, to the carping of the “pseudo-patriots.”

Prokhorov’s ordinarily docile commenters (“Great post, Mikhail Dmitrovich! Incidentally, I have a business plan I’d like to run by you…”) weren’t buying it.

Why what do you mean, Mikhail, what pseudo-patriots, why pay attention to the opinion of your fellow citizens, who cares, just keep going. You’re a strong, smart person, later on you’ll be able to tell your children or your foreign friends that there was once a country, it was called Russia.

We’ll see. In Norilsk—a city constructed by labor camp prisoners and now so polluted that no vegetation grows within twenty miles of the city center—Prokhorov and his partner had first to remove a stubborn sitting factory director, Anatoly Filatov, before taking over the plant. This took a long time. In the downtown Brooklyn area known as Atlantic Yards, a neighborhood almost equally devoid of vegetation due to the “development projects” of current Nets owner Bruce Ratner, Prokhorov will have to get past the no less stubborn Daniel Goldstein, the man who almost single-handedly has been holding up the construction of the stadium for the past five years . The obvious joke here would be that Prokhorov will make Goldstein an offer he can’t refuse, but, in fact, according to one government official I spoke to recently, back in the mid-nineteen-nineties Prokhorov and his partner couldn’t figure out how to remove Filatov and had to appeal to the government for help. This is unlikely to impress Goldstein. On the other hand, a gift to Brooklyn of the world’s largest trampoline, plus Malevich’s “ Black Square ,” would go a long way.

Update: According to ESPN, it’s a deal .

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Courtney Weaver

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Sceptics of Mikhail Prokhorov and his sudden decision to run for president can now take comfort in one thing: the six-foot-eight Russian oligarch makes for exceptionally good television.

Appearing on the talk show NTVshniki last night , Prokhorov did little to allay concerns that he was a Kremlin project, intended to distract middle class voters from the recent protests. But he did give a glimpse of how entertaining it will be to watch a 46-year-old billionaire bachelor on the Russian campaign trail.

Though most presidential candidates would be forced to spend their one of their first TV appearances laying out their foreign policy strategy and attitude towards domestic issues like healthcare, Prokhorov was faced with grilling of a different sort.

Would he continue to throw his raucous parties inside the Kremlin? Whom would he pick as first lady?

While coy on his reluctance to criticise his opponent Vladimir Putin, the tycoon answered the personal questions gamely.

Just like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Prokhorov said he would keep his current residence and turn the Kremlin into a 24-hour museum open to the public. His famous parties, which grace yachts and feature arrays of beautiful (young) girls, would be no longer.

“If I become president, there will be only official parties. A president is not allowed the same things that businessmen are,” the candidate said.

The candidate has said he would marry if it pleases the electorate. Yet through all the winks and jokes, it remains dubious whether Prokhorov’s campaign will actually succeed in attracting the disgruntled middle class voters he is supposed to be wooing.

Asked why he skipped out on the December 10 protest that saw an estimated 50,000 Muscovites demonstrate, Prokhorov said he had not wanted to ruin the surprise of his presidential candidacy, announced two days later.  Asked whether he would wear one of the demonstrators’ symbolic white ribbons ( equated by Putin to condoms ), Prokhorov replied: “I have my own clothes. I’ll go in that.”

In perhaps one of the biggest detriments to his candidacy, Prokhorov appeared unwilling to take on Putin, saying only 10 per cent of his campaign would be critical of the current leadership, and that this part would only begin after he was registered to run.

Ksenia Sobchak , the Russian socialite and a guest on the show, took this opportunity to point out that Prokhorov appeared to be using the registration question as an excuse for being soft, betting him $1m that the Kremlin would, of course, allow his candidacy.

(To this Prokhorov replied: “I want to ask Ksenia Anotolevna’s forgiveness again for the fact that in 2007 she offered me her heart and hand and I at that time refused.” He added: “I don’t bet with girls.”)

So will the owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team, stakes in Polyus Gold and Rusal, and the media holding RBK group be able to charm Russia’s voters?

According to polling agency Vtsiom, the oligarch is seen has having less than 1 per cent of the country’s vote.

NTVshniki’s studio audience on Sunday was a bit kinder: 41 per cent of the audience said Prokhorov could become president; 15 per cent said he would not; and 44 per cent said he could one day – just not in 2012.

Related reading: NTVshniki: Mikhail Prokhorov , NTV A pretender’s bid for power , FT Prokhorov: deal or no deal , beyondbrics Russian oligarch to challenge Putin , FT

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Klub Prokhorov

The Russian Samovar, a recent evening, 10 p.m. Green-shaded lamps throw unappetizing light on platefuls of chicken Kiev; the theater across the street has just disgorged the Jersey Boys crowd. The first of the restaurant’s two floors is hosting a “writers’ cabaret” sponsored by a Moscow-based magazine called Snob. At the white grand piano gifted by Mikhail Baryshnikov, writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is belting out a Russian rendition of “Blue Canary.” Venture capitalist Alex Fridlyand, novelist Lara Vapnyar, and software mogul Stepan Pachikov look on between bites. On the second floor, in an unrelated celebration, half the masthead of Moscow’s anti-Putin newspaper Novaya Gazeta (in town for an award) is getting soused with the daughter of the late émigré novelist Sergei Dovlatov. At the upstairs bar, Moscow publisher Andrew Paulson is schmoozing with PR man Ilya Merenzon. A few feet away, n+1 editor Kostya Gessen—you may know him as Keith—and his girlfriend, Emily Gould, are chatting with Very Short List editor Alex Abramovich. Samovar’s owner, Roman Kaplan, bisects the crowd with a carafe of cranberry vodka. By the end of the night he will have drunk a dozen shots of it himself.

The total conflicts of interest I have counted in the above scene: nine. I have worked for three of these people, tried to curry promotional favor with two, publicly feuded with three more, and competed for a woman with one, and that’s not counting all the free vodka from Roman. Such is the very essence of the Russian experience in New York: high-end striving mixed with Appalachian incest.

Then again, it all pales before the main, unspoken bias permeating both floors of the restaurant. Almost everyone at the Samovar tonight owes a little something—from a steady salary to a bite of the chicken to something more abstract—to a man who isn’t here. He is the one footing the night’s bill through Snob —a relatively new entity, set to launch its first New York marketing campaign this fall, that is both a private club uniting some of New York’s most ambitious Russian arrivistes and, in its magazine iteration, one of the world’s most lavishly funded editorial projects. He’s bought us all, to some extent, and a chunk of New York to go with us. At this point, I suspect, you even know his name.

When Mikhail Prokhorov—gangly, boyish, 45, and a billionaire seventeen times over—announced his purchase of the New Jersey Nets and a majority stake of their yet-unbuilt arena at the Atlantic Yards, he leaped into the city’s collective consciousness with a speed unusual for any foreigner, let alone a Russian. The Nets are not a trophy skyscraper, whose ownership ultimately matters only to the kind of people who keep track of trophy skyscrapers. They are a ticket to instant popular-culture importance. By becoming the first foreign owner of an NBA team, Prokhorov simultaneously established himself as a major figure in one of the world’s most glamorous businesses (in the world capital of the sport, no less) and a central player in New York’s biggest real-estate drama after ground zero. The scale of his trick didn’t really hit home until a May 19 breakfast photo op with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Jay-Z: a perfectly orchestrated tableau of New York relevance. The only other Russian I can think of who has managed to slip into the city’s cast of notable characters as effortlessly is Mikhail Baryshnikov. But that’s where the comparison ends. Prokhorov is the face of an altogether new kind of Russian—newer, even, than the so-called New Russians of the late nineties—that’s recently been proliferating in town. Through Snob, he’s also the group’s chief benefactor and facilitator, both a member of the tribe and, in a critical sense, its creator.

The Russian community in New York used to come in four distinct varieties, arrangeable, like single malts, by casking date. There were heirs of exiled Czarist-era blue bloods, paper-skinned, cradling their titles; you’ve probably met one if you ever took a ballet class. Next up were Soviet immigrants of the seventies, the generation of Joseph Brodsky that would never let you forget their plight. Then came the “sausage immigration” of the nineties, mostly Jewish, mostly provincial, seduced less by freedom than by comfort yet squeaking in on political-refugee papers: More than 60,000 came to the U.S. in 1992 alone. Finally, there were the latest arrivals, treating New York as a prize for having made it in Moscow: the cocky, scowling post-Soviet oligarchs and Fifth Avenue shoppers with their endlessly mockable excesses.

The Global Russians, as Snob calls the group, are crystallized from all of the above. Broadly speaking, the term indicates a combination of Russian culture and language with Western education, a well-stamped passport, and liberal Western views. The category is big enough to encompass a second-generation novelist, a fashion designer who arrived here at the age of 5, a businessman swinging by for a conference, and an NBA team owner. They’re not interested in the Russian ghetto of Brighton Beach or the Russian assimilated culture in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. They’re dismissive of the nouveau riche shoppers and clubbers. They think they’re better than those others are. They’re consumed by cosmopolitanism and all it entails. They strive, they snub; they are, by any definition, snobs. By the way, I am kidding no one with this “they” business. I’ve been here since 1998, English is my second language, and simple honesty prevents me from pretending I don’t want some small version of the same.

The Global Russian influence is all over contemporary New York, in motley variations. In real estate, diamond mogul Lev Leviev, a reputed friend of Putin’s, owns the lion’s share of the old New York Times Building, the citadel-like Apthorp apartment complex, and the MetLife clock tower. Vassily Anisimov leased dormitories to NYU. Tamir Sapir, who was born Temur Sepiashvili in Georgia and made his first fortune in New York selling VCRs and other electronics (and also securing oil contracts from former Soviet diplomats), has $2 billion in active development projects; his hard-partying son, Alex Sapir, and daughter, Zina Sapir-Rosen, have bankrolled a few of Donald Trump’s latest ventures, including the Trump SoHo condo-hotel. Hotels seem to be especially appealing: The Gansevoort and 60 Thompson, as well as some of André Balazs’s properties, are rumored to have Russian backing. Muscovites have made their homes or pieds-à-terre at the Plaza, the Time Warner Center, and 15 Central Park West. Edward Mermelstein, a Ukrainian-born real-estate lawyer specializing in massive deals for Eastern European clientele, handled about 120 Russian closings in New York over the last three years. Before the financial crisis, the average price was between $7 million and $10 million, with the top end in the stratospheric $30 million to $40 million range. Then, of course, there’s airport mogul Valery Kogan, whose ultimately aborted attempt to build one of the largest mansions in Greenwich (complete with 26 toilets) fueled the Connecticut enclave’s gossip mill for years. As for the Russian contributions to Wall Street, they tend to be low-profile: There’s an enormous number of people with Soviet math educations who work on the analytical side at places like Goldman Sachs. Some, like Ruvim Breydo, parlay their skills into hedge-fund fortunes. Others toil anonymously, and when we do hear about them—like computer programmer Sergey Aleynikov, who allegedly swiped Goldman’s proprietary trading software—it’s rarely good news.

In the world of art, the main seat of Russian influence is the Guggenheim. Moscow-based oligarch Vladimir Potanin sits on its board of trustees. So did socialite and developer Janna Bullock, until recently. Phillips de Pury, the world’s third-largest contemporary-art auction house, is now owned by the Russian luxury retailer Mercury Group. It is currently getting ready to move into a 25,500-square-foot space at 450 Park Avenue, to compete more directly with Sotheby’s and Christie’s—both of which have dedicated Russian-art divisions. So does Larry Gagosian’s empire, which has recently added a sophisticated operation devoted to Russian outreach.

‘Snob’ is “a multistep strategic game by Prokhorov, who wants to feed and domesticate a certain kind of Establishment to lean on it for support later.”

With the exception of the modernist Ilya Kabakov, the Russians in the gallery game tend to crowd on the buyers’ side; in the performing arts, however, they’re the product. The American Ballet Theatre company is 25 percent Russian (four out of sixteen). Russian names dot the program notes at the New York Philharmonic, where conductor Valery Gergiev has been a regular presence. In pop, there are Regina Spektor and Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz, of the Bronx and the Lower East Side respectively, both plying very different but very Russian good-girl and bad-boy personas.

The literary scene is a fiefdom ruled by novelist Gary Shteyngart, 37, probably the most successful New York novelist in the under-40 bracket. (His main rival for that title, Jonathan Safran Foer, can be seen as an interesting case of a wannabe Russian, an Updike to his Roth.) Shteyngart came to Queens from what was then Leningrad at the age of 7 and, by his own recollection, lost the last trace of his accent by 14. He could have easily disappeared into the American workforce, he says, and nearly did. “Once we figure out the dress code, we look like everyone else,” he tells me over a vodka-and-tonic, the ultimate Russian-American drink if you think about it. “Plus most of us are Jewish anyway.” He parlayed this identity tension into two best-selling novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan. His upcoming third, the futuristic satire Super Sad True Love Story, marks a tentative step away from the Russianness (although the protagonist’s name still ends in -ov).

Shteyngart’s ascent opened the floodgates for Russian-identified New York writers of every possible pedigree, age, and talent level. In a literary climate that puts a premium on authentic immigrant experience, they had the best of both worlds. They were sufficiently exotic but easily relatable. Russia gave them mystery, New York (and Jewishness) gave them a place on the Roth-Malamud-Lethem continuum. The flood of Russian names recently released into American letters includes Gessen and his sister Masha, Vapnyar, Olga Grushin, Anya Ulinich, Irina Reyn, Mark Budman, Sana Krasikov, Sofka Zinovieff, Elena Gorokhova, Ilana Ozernoy, Alina Simone—and the book deals keep coming. At the same time, Russian-born writers began popping up on the other side of the equation, as book reporters and reviewers (Alexander Nazaryan, Leon Neyfakh, this magazine’s Boris Kachka), lit-mag publishers (Keith Gessen again), and agents (Jim Rutman of Sterling Lord). It’s as if there were a whole colony of Russian writers biding their time until the industry deemed them worthy. I’m going to switch from “them” to “us” once again, because I am myself a beneficiary of this development. I published a novel last year. It was blurbed—like Ulinich’s and Vapnyar’s—by Shteyngart.

Each of these groups has found its own watering hole. The art collectors roost at Sant Ambroeus on Madison. The finance crowd took a liking to Mari Vanna on 20th, near Park (the only restaurant in New York that’s actually a franchise of a Russian eatery). The barely-of-drinking-age set descends on Keith McNally’s Pravda, the only Russian-themed spot in town they deem unembarrassing (the nearby KGB Bar and the theater district’s FireBird are inexplicably regarded as “fake”). And assorted oligarchs have discovered the Waverly Inn: On a recent evening, former mining magnate Oleg Baibakov (with a young date) and Alexander Lebedev, the Aeroflot mogul who owns London’s Evening Standard and the Independent, were seen there independent of each other. (Ten years ago, this would have been a clear sign that the spot is toxic. It’s a testament to the Global Russians’ status that it’s not.) Online, groups of Global Russians are forever forming semi-secret societies. A few recent attempts included Nash Krug (Our Circle); CluMBA, catering to Russian banker types (its name means “flower bed” but also puns on both club and MBA); and Baby v Zakone, a female-lawyer group with a name roughly translatable as “Broads in Law.” The Samovar is as close to a clubhouse as this disparate, roving band has, but lately the role of the virtual clubhouse is being assumed by Snob. All sorts of people named in the last several paragraphs either belong to the club, contribute to the magazine, or have been profiled by it.

It was the girls, in a way, that made Mikhail Prokhorov into Russia’s second- richest man. Back home, his reputation as a playboy had been sealed in the mid-aughts. He was known for descending on Moscow’s wildest nightclubs with Gosha Kutsenko, a bald-headed, mildly freakish Russian film star he had befriended, with packs of coltish young things in tow. “It used to be that you go to certain clubs,” recalls one Muscovite, “and if at some moment about fifteen barely legal girls show up all at once, you could tell that Prokhorov is about to stop by.”

In January 2007, partying in Courchevel, he was briefly detained by the French police on suspicion of having flown in a planeful of alleged prostitutes for the party’s guests. Prokhorov was cleared of any wrongdoing, but the incident apparently upset Vladimir Potanin, Prokhorov’s longtime partner in his primary cash cow, Norilsk Nickel. In April 2008, the now-former friends split, and Prokhorov sold his Norilsk shares to another oligarch, Oleg Deripaska. His timing was downright charmed. Less than three months later, the financial crisis hit Russia. When the dust cleared, Norilsk’s stock had dropped 80 percent, Deripaska was $24.6 billion poorer, and Potanin lost a fortune, too. Prokhorov, meanwhile, was sitting on billions in uninvested cash—the best kind of investment in the chaos of late 2008.

Since then, Prokhorov’s interests have varied wildly. He has invested in low-cost hybrid cars, nanotechnology, and banks. He seemingly flirted with the governorship of a far-flung Russian province (Russian governors are appointed by the Kremlin, not elected), establishing tax residence in a tiny Siberian village. In 2009, Russia’s then-richest man paid his income tax—16 billion rubles, or roughly $550 million—out of snowy Yeruda, population 2,300.

Prokhorov’s interest in the Nets appears sincere enough. His father was a Soviet sports official, and Prokhorov is the head of the Russian Biathlon Union (he attended the Vancouver Olympics in that capacity). He played basketball himself in high school—because he was six-eight, it was practically an imperative—and invested in Moscow’s CSKA professional team before turning his attention westward. Prokhorov has already floated a $12 million to $15 million offer to Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, openly plans to court LeBron James and other top free agents, and during his recent visit to the city promised to bring the team a “championship in five years.” He also hopes to raise the sport’s profile back in Russia and perhaps groom future stars there.

And yet buying the Nets and their arena was clearly a real-estate play as well. Prokhorov had already established himself as a major figure in the New York property market before the Atlantic Yards deal. In 2008, after developer Harry Macklowe defaulted on a $513 million loan from Deutsche Bank AG, the super-liquid Prokhorov swooped in and offered to buy the Park Avenue site in question for $250 million. “Guys like Prokhorov,” says a source who’s seen the bid, “are always looking to get in at opportunistic prices. They make extremely low offers that also happen to be all cash, which locals don’t do.” By the time Prokhorov turned his attention to Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards, the project was in almost as much trouble as Macklowe’s. Only the infusion of Russian cash raised it from a coma.

Not all of Prokhorov’s investments can be explained by rational self-interest. Another set of projects invariably bears the hallmark of his older sister, Irina, a patron of arts and literature. In private life, Mikhail and Irina form an unusual, closed-off unit. Until recently, they lived together in a relatively small Moscow apartment, well after Mikhail had become a billionaire. “He’s got one overriding complex,” says a person familiar with both. “He’s not as smart as his sister, and he wants her approval.” Most likely at Irina’s urging, Mikhail has endowed a lavish literary award, a publishing house, an arts festival, and, finally, Snob. “WHAT CAN RUSSIANS do for the rest of the world?”

Gregory Kegeles, Snob ’s director of U.S. business development, wearing wire-rim glasses and a brown corduroy blazer, sips chamomile tea and lets the phrase sink in. We’re at Think Coffee on Mercer, his favorite place in his favorite city.

The pithy question is Kegeles’s idea for the centerpiece of Snob ’s New York marketing campaign, set to hit the city in September. In London, the only place outside Russia where Snob has attempted such a promotional effort, the push was a bit of a disaster. Snob simply bought up billboards in the Underground and elsewhere and slapped Russian-language ads on them, perplexing Brits and embarrassing local Russians. It looked exactly like something a dizzy nouveau riche would do. For New York, Kegeles imagines something that New Yorkers could actually use, something that speaks to Snob’ s globalist brand, and something that shows that the Russians actually understand contemporary New York (and in English this time). A giant video chat, set up right on the street, that lets New Yorkers, Londoners, and Muscovites speak to one another? Sponsoring some benches in the High Line park? Free Nets tickets?

Even by the pre-crash standards of magazine publishing, Snob is an extravagantly well-funded undertaking. Prokhorov financed its launch with $150 million. By comparison, Condé Nast’s Portfolio, the splashiest magazine launch of the last decade, had about $120 million to play with. Snob employs about 120 people and keeps offices in Moscow and London as well as a so-far more modest New York outpost, in a “green” rent-an-office building in Dumbo. The magazine itself might as well be printed on dollar bills: The stock is luscious, the photo stories ripped from the walls of the prestigious Yossi Milo and Yancey Richardson galleries, the editorial purse big enough for pre-U.S.-publication exclusives like a chunk of Nabokov’s The Original of Laura or of Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, for that matter. Each issue has three covers and comes locked inside a cardboard shell readers are supposed to rip off in a process the magazine’s staff calls “defloration.” U.S. club members get it hand-delivered by DHL.

When Snob ’s creation was announced in 2008, the world assumed it would be a glossy paean to the world’s longest yachts or something, a Slavic striver’s version of the Robb Report with the barest hint of self-awareness in the title. In reality, it was more of a Monocle : a thoughtful, moderately smug house organ of the Global Russian community. snob was actually an acronym of sostoyavshiisya, nezavisimyi, obrazovannyi, blagopoluchnyi (accomplished, independent, educated, thriving). Only the last word of the four hinted at wealth. Lately, under deputy editor Masha Gessen, the project even made a turn toward social activism, battling, for instance, the Putin administration’s revisionist sugarcoating of Joseph Stalin.

The Global Russian “aggressively adopts traits of other cultures without betraying his own. He cooks like a Frenchman, entertains like an American, and forms friendships like a Russian.”

The magazine’s idea was not Prokhorov’s. To hammer it out, he tapped Vladimir Yakovlev, the legendary former editor of the business daily Kommersant and, back in the early nineties, the coiner of the term New Russians, which, Yakovlev tells me, was meant as a compliment, before it came to signify a boor in a burgundy club jacket demanding colder vodka in St. Barts. Yakovlev was fresh off a multiyear stint seeking enlightenment in various exotic locations. His travels seem to have helped him come up with the idea to target the worldwide Russian diaspora as a sophisticated, interconnected demographic. The Global Russian is “a particular breed shaped over the last fifteen years,” says Masha Gessen, from a treadmill, in flawless English (she is the author of four American nonfiction books). “It used to be that when you left Russia, you left forever—to become a proper American, a proper Englishman, etc. The Global Russian aggressively adopts traits of other cultures without betraying his own. Two years ago, when I was writing up a portrait of our imaginary ideal audience member, I wrote that he ‘cooks like a Frenchman, entertains like an American, and forms friendships like a Russian.’ ”

The masterstroke of the original concept was that Snob would simply create this audience as it went along, by pumping money into club members’ own projects: exhibits, films, even mild political activism. Among Russians, even those connected with the project, this largesse bred instant suspicion. Stepan Pachikov, creator of the popular idea- and photo-archiving app Evernote and a member of the club’s New York chapter, sums up the prevailing conspiracy theories: “It’s either a Kremlin initiative designed to get all the liberal opposition types in one place and have them let off steam in controlled conditions, or else it is a multistep strategic game by Prokhorov, who wants to feed and domesticate a certain kind of Establishment to lean on it for support later.”

It’s unclear whether Prokhorov wants to be a media mogul per se; he’s emphatically not interested in competing with any of his Western counterparts or entering the English-language publishing fray. If he wanted to, he’d probably do what Lebedev, the owner of the London Evening Standard and The Independent, did. There are certainly enough distressed media properties to choose from.

But turning a profit—something Snob isn’t likely to do anytime soon—seems far from Prokhorov’s mind (the money expended on Snob, as one New York club member acidly points out, is “just a rounding error” for him). But profit isn’t everything. Prokhorov’s endgame is to buy himself cultural and intellectual credibility on a massive scale and to will into existence, and lead, a group of the globalized world’s Russian-speaking elites.

My own involvement with Snob began in the summer of 2008. The phone rang at an ungodly hour, as it always seems to when Moscow is on the line. “We’re starting a club for distinguished Russians around the world,” said a chipper young woman, “and we immediately thought of contacting you.”

“Oh, wow,” I said, taken aback. “I am really flattered. Wow. No, really.”

The woman held a pause. “Because you seem to know a lot of them,” she concluded. “So we thought you’d make a good New York scout.”

I said something horribly snooty and hung up. Only this seems to have intrigued someone, not put them off, because two months later I was offered membership in the club. In another year, my wife was on the magazine’s staff. By then, Snob had become an inescapable conversation topic in my world. They seemed to have contacted everyone around me at once. Photographers, reporters, fashion designers, advertising people, poets. The weird thing was that they knew everyone. For the first time in who knows how long, Russian New York felt like a legitimate outpost of Moscow, not some sort of fun-house mirror of it. Before long, I had a column on snob.ru , waxing New York–y about things like the High Line and Woody Allen’s latest.

Have I sold out to Prokhorov? Sure I have. And not just by joining his club or working for his magazine. Simply by writing these lines, I’m helping him accomplish his trick by promoting the group he’s so bent on creating. But then I think of that picture of Prokhorov with Mayor Bloomberg and Jay-Z, and it brings to mind a similar photo, one that I apparently committed to memory. It’s a seventies shot of Baryshnikov lolling on a Studio 54 couch, sandwiched between Steve Rubell and Mick Jagger. In most respects, Prokhorov and Baryshnikov couldn’t be more different. But seeing the two Russians flanked by such iconic New York figures had the same effect on me. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit—maybe even a little snobby. But both pictures helped make me feel like I belong in New York, like my life, and those of my countrymen, is bigger somehow than it was back home. Isn’t that why we all seem to end up here?

See Also: A Selective Survey of Russians in New York

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Novosibirsk city, Russia

The capital city of Novosibirsk oblast .

Novosibirsk - Overview

Novosibirsk is the third most populous city in Russia, the administrative center of the Siberian Federal District and Novosibirsk Oblast. It is the largest business, cultural, transport, educational, and scientific center of Siberia. Novosibirsk is often called the “Capital of Siberia”.

The population of Novosibirsk is about 1,621,000 (2022), the area - 503 sq. km.

The phone code - +7 383, the postal codes - 630000-630901.

Novosibirsk city flag

Novosibirsk city coat of arms.

Novosibirsk city map, Russia

Novosibirsk city latest news and posts from our blog:.

29 November, 2020 / Novosibirsk Akademgorodok - the scientific center of Siberia .

25 December, 2018 / Chuya Highway - the Most Picturesque Road in Russia .

18 September, 2018 / Novosibirsk - the view from above .

10 December, 2014 / The night views of Novosibirsk .

17 July, 2014 / Novosibirsk hit by a heavy hailstorm .

More posts..

History of Novosibirsk

Foundation of novosibirsk.

Novosibirsk is a city with a very interesting history. Unlike many other cities in Russia, it does not have a specific founder. Since the 18th century, on the left bank of the Ob, one of the largest rivers in the world, there was the village of Krivoshchekovo, where migrants from the European provinces of the Russian Empire lived. However, it did not become the basis of Novosibirsk. The city was born on the other, right, bank of the Ob, when the Trans-Siberian Railway approached it in 1893.

Originally it was just a village for the builders of a railway bridge across the Ob. It could turn out to be temporary and disappear after the completion of construction, if not for the combination of several factors that contributed to the development of trade - a large river, a railway, a flat relief convenient for building. At first, the village was named Alexandrovsky, in honor of Emperor Alexander III. For the third anniversary, it received a new name and became Novonikolaevsky, in honor of the Emperor Nicholas II.

In 1897, the first trains went across the bridge. The settlement was quickly growing. By 1898, there were already 7.8 thousand people in the village. In 1903, when the village acquired the status of a town with the name Novonikolaevsk, its population was 26 thousand people. In the 1910s, Novonikolaevsk experienced a construction boom. By 1913, the population of the city was 86 thousand people.

Novonikolaevsk, was the center of the major lines of communication, in which the navigable Ob River crossed with the Great Siberian Way and the Altai Railway. The First World War turned the city into the largest center for training troops beyond the Urals.

More Historical Facts…

Novosibirsk - the Siberian Chicago

In 1921, Novonikolaevsk received the status of the administrative center of the Novonikolaevsk Governorate. In 1925, it became the administrative center of the huge Siberian Krai - practically all the regions of Trans-Ural Russia.

The capital of the new huge region needed a new name. Here are just some of the proposed names: Krasnograd, Sibleninsk, Krasnoobsk, Sibkraisk, Sibkraigrad, Leningrad-on-Ob. On February 12, 1926, Novonikolaevsk (“a new city of Nicholas”) was renamed Novosibirsk (“a new city in Siberia”. In 1926, at the Regional Scientific Congress, it was decided to turn Novosibirsk into a “promsad” (“industrial garden”) or “city-garden”. About 120 thousand people lived in the city at that time. The city got the nickname “Siberian Chicago”.

The main elements of the renovated Siberian capital were supposed to be “social towns” - complex residential areas at factories and plants. New cadres were needed to build a new society. Novosibirsk quickly became a city of students. In the 1930s, 8 universities and 10 technical schools were opened here. The city became the Trans-Ural capital of such an architectural style as constructivism.

On July 30, 1930, due to the division of the Siberian Krai, Novosibirsk became the center of the West Siberian Krai. In 1934, a new railway bridge was built across the Ob River and the population grew to 294 thousand people. By 1939, it increased up to 406 thousand people. On September 28, 1937, the West Siberian Krai was divided into Novosibirsk Oblast with the capital in Novosibirsk and Altai Krai.

During the Second World War, the enlistment offices of Novosibirsk Oblast sent more than half a million soldiers to the front. There were 115 evacuation hospitals in the region. Almost 27% of all shells fired by the Red Army during the war were produced in Novosibirsk. Despite the fact that not a single bomb fell on the territory of Novosibirsk, the pre-war city disappeared forever. Instead of the planned residential areas/parks, industrial zones of evacuated factories appeared, a lot of buildings changed their civilian purpose to military-industrial (some of them - forever).

The evacuation radically changed the demography of Novosibirsk - people evacuated from Moscow and Leningrad brought with them a new way of life, new artistic tastes. A lot of them stayed in Novosibirsk after the war. During the war years, Novosibirsk also became the center of the musical culture of Siberia. The Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater, one of the main attractions of Novosibirsk, was opened on May 12, 1945.

Novosibirsk after the Second World War

The demographic inertia of the evacuation turned the pre-war Novosibirsk into a metropolis. By 1956, its population increased to 750 thousand people. On September 2, 1962, a millionth resident of the city was born. It took Novosibirsk only 70 years to achieve this status from the moment of its foundation, which made it the youngest of all million cities.

In 1950, the construction of the Novosibirsk hydroelectric power station began; a large reservoir was created, the so-called Ob Sea. The idea of creating a Siberian branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk was implemented in 1957. About 20 kilometers south of the center of Novosibirsk, in the middle of the forest, Akademgorodok was built - a town of scientists. In 1959, Novosibirsk State University was opened.

In 1979, construction of the metro began in Novosibirsk. Opened in 1985, it became the first one in the Trans-Ural part of Russia. Today, the Novosibirsk metro has 13 stations and annually carries about 70 million passengers.

In 1990, the bridge that had given rise to the city was reconstructed. To preserve the memory of the first builders, one of its span structures was installed on the embankment of the Ob in the park “Gorodskoye Nachalo”.

The transition to a market economy led to a sharp drop in production. High-tech industries, such as radioelectronics, microelectronics, instrument making, and aircraft construction suffered especially heavy losses. In 1991-1998, industrial production in Novosibirsk decreased by more than 3 times.

In the 1990s, the economic structure of the Novosibirsk region and Novosibirsk underwent fundamental changes. The main structural change was that the production of services in the city began to exceed the production of goods, the role of industry decreased, the share of transport, trade, communications, agriculture, and a lot of branches of market services increased.

Thus, the potential points of growth of Novosibirsk reproduced on a new historical, technological, and institutional basis the initial system of its development priorities: a large transport hub in the system of transnational transport corridors, a trade, intermediary, and financial center - the center of Siberia, a large business, scientific, educational, and cultural center.

In the 21st century, Novosibirsk became the first Russian city (after Moscow and St. Petersburg) to exceed the population of 1.5 million.

Architecture of Novosibirsk

The building of the West-Siberian Railway in Novosibirsk

Author: Vytautas Podlesaitis

Old building in Novosibirsk

Author: Andrey Osokin

On the street in Novosibirsk

Author: Serge Klimenko

Novosibirsk - Features

Novosibirsk is the most populous city in the Asian part of Russia. It is located in the southeastern part of the West Siberian Plain on both banks of the Ob River next to the Novosibirsk reservoir. The width of the Ob River within the city is 750-850 meters. The City Day of Novosibirsk is celebrated on the last Sunday of June.

The city is located in the continental climatic zone. The flatness of the territory allows both cold waves from the north and heat waves from the southwest to freely spread. That’s why both severe frosts and short-term thaws can be observed in winter. The duration of winter is 120-130 days, summer - about 90 days. The average air temperature in January is minus 16.5 degrees Celsius, in July - plus 19.4 degrees Celsius.

On the coat of arms of Novosibirsk you can see a schematic image of the Ob River and the bridge across it, part of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which gave rise to the city.

The economy of Novosibirsk is based on industry, trade, transport, science, and scientific services. The city is successfully developing in the absence of large resource-extracting enterprises in the region, which distinguishes it from most large cities in Siberia.

The main activities of industrial production are: production of food, computers, electronic and optical products, chemicals, vehicles and equipment, metallurgy, beverage production. Novosibirsk is one of the leading suppliers of nuclear fuel for nuclear power plants and research reactors in Russia and abroad.

Novosibirsk is the largest scientific center in the Asian part of Russia. More than 100 organizations carry out research and development in this city. There are about three dozen higher educational institutions here.

It is the largest transport hub in Siberia connecting Siberia, the Far East, Central Asia with the European regions of Russia. Novosibirsk is also a river port. The city is served by Tolmachevo International Airport, the largest in terms of passenger traffic in the Asian part of Russia. The airport is located at the intersection of a large number of flights from Southeast Asia to Europe and from North America to India and Asia.

Novosibirsk was the only city in Russia located in two time zones. Since its foundation, it was growing in two parts along different banks of the Ob. And since the meridian of the hour passed right along the Ob River, there were two time zones in one city. On the left bank, the difference with Moscow was 3 hours, and on the right bank - 4 hours. At first, this did not cause much inconvenience as each half lived quite apart. In 1955, when the first road bridge across the Ob was built, the city became more connected. In 1958, Novosibirsk switched to a single time zone.

Despite its young age, Novosibirsk has 145 monuments of architecture, history, monumental art and archeology taken under state protection. 47 monuments of wooden architecture of the late 19th - early 20th centuries are of particular value. There are also over a dozen different museums in Novosibirsk.

Main Attractions of Novosibirsk

Novosibirsk Zoo - one of the largest and best zoos in Russia, where about 11,000 animals, birds, and reptiles of 770 species are kept on an area of 63 hectares in a pristine pine forest. More than 350 species are listed in the International Red Book. This zoo is visited by about one million people every year. It also hosts ecological events and festivals. Timiryazeva Street, 71/1.

Novosibirsk Theater of Opera and Ballet . Founded in 1945, it is one of the leading theaters in Russia. It occupies the largest theater building in Russia constructed in the constructivist style in 1931-1941. This unique architectural complex has the status of a cultural heritage of the Russian Federation. It is one of the symbols of Novosibirsk and probably its most recognizable building.

The main feature of the building is its huge dome with a diameter of 60 meters and a height of 35 meters. The large hall of the theater can accommodate 1,449 spectators. The theater is located on Lenin Square - the main square of Novosibirsk, where you can also find a number of interesting monuments. This theater is also known as the “Siberian Colosseum”. Krasnyy Prospekt, 36.

Novosibirsk Museum of Local Lore - one of the main museums in Novosibirsk. The historical department of the museum is located in a picturesque building of the former City Trade House (a monument of history and architecture of federal significance built in 1910).

This museum has a number of unique exhibits: a complete mammoth skeleton, collections of household and religious items of Siberian peoples collected by expeditions in the 1920s-1930s. There are also collections of numismatics, woodwork, glass, porcelain and faience, an archaeological collection, etc. Krasnyy Prospekt, 23.

Novosibirsk Art Museum . The permanent exhibition presents the following sections: icons (old Russian art), foreign art (works of Italian, French, Flemish, Dutch, Belgian, German masters), Russian art of the 18th-19th centuries (works by I. Shishkin, A. Kuindzhi, I. Repin , V. Surikov, and others), Russian art of the early 20th century, art of the Soviet period, Russian art of the late 20th century. There is a separate section devoted to the works of N. Roerich. Krasnyy Prospekt, 5.

Novosibirsk Museum of Railway Technology . This museum has a large collection of steam, diesel, and electric locomotives, carriages, which mainly operated on the railways of Western Siberia. In addition, you can see such Soviet cars as GAZ, Moskvich, ZAZ of different years of production, as well as several trucks, tractors, and all-terrain vehicles. The total length of the exhibition grounds is about 3 kilometers. It is the largest museum of this subject beyond the Urals with over 100 exhibits. Razyezdnaya Street, 54/1.

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (1897-1899). Built of red brick in the neo-Byzantine style, this is one of the first stone buildings on the territory of Novosibirsk and the most beautiful church in the city. Krasnyy Prospekt, 1A.

Monument to the Laboratory Mouse . This unusual monument is located in a public garden near the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the territory of Akademgorodok. The mouse with glasses holds the knitting needles in its paws and knits a double helix of DNA.

The monument symbolizes gratitude to this animal for the fact that mankind has the opportunity to use mice to study animal genes, molecular and physical mechanisms of diseases, and the development of new drugs. Akademika Lavrent’yeva Prospekt, 10/2.

Zaeltsovsky Park - one of the oldest parks in Novosibirsk that celebrated its 85th anniversary in 2017. The park has all the conditions for a comfortable and cultural pastime: walking paved paths, rides, summer verandas and gazebos, a paintball club, an ice rink, a rope park, etc.

For history buffs, the ethnopark “Territory of Siberia” has been created, where everyone can get acquainted in detail with the culture of the indigenous peoples who lived in these places several hundred years ago. In winter, it is a great place to go skiing. There is also a children’s railway with a length of 5.3 km here. At the terminal station, you will be offered to go to the Novosibirsk Zoo, which is located nearby.

Novosibirsk Central Park - a large park in the center of Novosibirsk and the oldest park in the city. On an area of 10.5 hectares, there are summer cafes and ice cream kiosks, dozens of rides and sports equipment rental points. There is an open-air skating rink in winter. The park often hosts festivals, concerts, and tournaments. The Novosibirsk Theater of Musical Comedy is also located here. Michurina Street, 8.

The Ob River and “the Ob Sea” . The Ob is one of the world’s largest rivers, its length is more than 3,600 km. This river flows through a lot of Siberian cities. Within Novosibirsk, the river is transformed into a large reservoir, which bears the unofficial name “the Ob Sea”. The main purpose of the water reservoir is to generate electricity. Also, the shores of the “sea” are a popular recreation area for locals and city visitors.

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Pre-revolutionary building in Novosibirsk

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Novosibirsk

Novosibirsk tourist information and tourism, (novosibirsk, siberia, russia), novosibirsk tourist information and tourism: top sights, more novosibirsk information / fast facts and orientation.

• Country: Russia (Russian Federation)
• Location: Novosibirsk Oblast region / Southern Siberia
• Status: city / capital of Siberia
• Area: approximately 193 square miles / 500 square kilometres
• Population: approximately 1.5 million
• Language: Russian
• Currency: Russian Ruble (RUR)
• Time zone: UTC / GMT +3
• Country dialing code: +7
• Telephone area code: 383
• Average daily Novosibirsk January temperature: -14°C / 7°F
• Average daily Novosibirsk July temperature: 25°C / 77°F

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