Who is Alexandra Tolstoy husband?

Sergei Pugachev was once dubbed ‘Putin’s banker’. Today he is considered a ‘traitor’ and is exiled in France.

The Countess & The Russian Billionaire, a documentary about Pugachev and his wife Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, was first shown on BBC Two and is now available on Netflix. It gives details on their marriage and fallout.

The 48-year-old Countess Alexandra appeared on ITV’s Lorraine today (March 14), where she called both President of Russia Vladimir Putin and her ex-husband ‘narcissists’, adding that they’re capable of ‘self-destructive things’. But who is Countess Alexandra and what is the documentary The Countess & The Russian Billionaire about?

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Here’s everything you need to know.

Who is Countess Alexandra Tolstoy?

Countess Alexandra is an aristocrat and comes from a long line of Russian nobility. The Countess gets her title from her great-great grandfather, her father's great-grandfather, Pavel Tolstoy-Miloslavsky. He was the chamberlain to the last emperor, Tsar Nicolas II of Russia, shortly after the First World War.

The Countess grew up in Oxfordshire before attending Edinburgh University to study Philosophy. She is the eldest of Anglo-Russian historian and writer Nikolai Tolstoy's four children.

She was married to billionaire financier Pugachev and they share three children together. The pair met while the Countess was teaching English in Moscow.

After the family arrived in the UK in 2011, Pugachev was accused of embezzling a fortune out of his finance house Mezhprombank. State creditors in Moscow pursued him in the British courts. He then fell out with Putin and fled the country to France - from where he was sentenced to two years by a High Court judge in 2016.

Today he remains in France and he has cut off the Countess and their children financially, she says. She claims the family were evicted from Pugachev's £12 million south London family mansion during the height of the pandemic, and the Russian government repossessed the property. The 48-year-old has since moved into another home in London with their children.

What is the Netflix documentary The Countess & The Russian Billionaire about?

According to Netflix ’s official synopsis the documentary follows the love story of Countess Alexandra and oligarch Sergei Pugachev, and the scandal that led to their fallout.

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Alexandra Tolstoy is a broadcaster, author and travel expert whose two houses in England, both designed in collaboration with the team at Sibyl Colefax and John Fowler, have featured in past issues of House & Garden - an utterly charming cottage in the Cotswolds, and an elegant house in Chelsea, and her latest house in London. She is now the subject of a new documentary, The Countess and the Russian Billionaire, set to air on BBC2 this week.

Simon Brown

Alexandra Tolstoy, a distant relative of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, was raised in England, attending Edinburgh University and briefly embarking on a career as a banker. Early in her twenties, however, she left that behind and began a more adventurous life of travel, most notably in 1999 joining a team travelling the entire length - all 5000 miles - of the ancient Silk Road by horse and camel. On this trip she met her husband, the former Uzbek show-jumper Shamil Galimzyanov, whom she married in 2003.

MAY WE SUGGEST: Alexandra Tolstoy's fairytale Oxfordshire cottage

A life of horse-trekking in Central Asia and living in Moscow followed, until in 2009 Alexandra met Sergei Pugachev, a Russian oligarch to whom she had been hired to give English lessons. She left her husband and had three children with Pugachev, Aliosha in 2009, Ivan in 2010 and Maria in 2012, living between Moscow, the south of France, and her house in Chelsea.

MAY WE SUGGEST: Revisiting Alexandra Tolstoy's former home in Chelsea

But in 2015, Pugachev vanished after he ran into trouble with the Kremlin. With his business assets frozen, he retreated to his house in the south of France, with Alexandra staying in London with their children. Her home in Chelsea is now on sale after a London High Court ruling that it should be returned to state creditors in Russia, as it was bought with money judged to be stolen from public funds.

The Countess and the Russian Billionaire airs on Wednesday April 8 at 9pm on BBC2.

Shouting “WTF” at increasing volume and frequency is the only way to make sense of this documentary about an English countess, her oligarch husband, and a fairytale that turned sour

Once upon a time, children, there was a BBC Two documentary called The Countess and the Russian Billionaire. It told the story of Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, who fell in love with an oligarch called Sergei Pugachev who was very good friends with a man called Vladimir Putin until he wasn’t. If you were adults, children, you would know already how this story was likely to go. But you still would hardly believe it as it unfolded before you.

We open in 2015 with the countess – her father is a distant cousin of Leo himself – showing us round her gorgeous Chelsea home. Well, homes. They bought the equally enormous townhouse next door, too, on a whim, and knocked through, and thank goodness they did because now she, her Chanel handbag collection and Sergei have one pad, and their three children can make their mess in the other. “It’s a really fun way to live,” Alexandra explains, without moving her lips. At first I thought she had a special member of staff, on top of the nannies, driver, PA, housekeepers and French teacher to speak for her, but no – she is simply a perfect example of an English aristocrat with a trait you often see imitated and mocked but rarely in the original, whereby all movement above the neck has been bred out.

For the first few minutes, this is the most fascinating thing about the story. But then the programme begins its transformation into a fabulously compelling, soapy drama requiring of the viewer only that he or she settle yet more firmly down on the sofa and prepare to cry: “WTF!” at increasing volume and ever shorter intervals.

Sergei and Alexandra met in 2008. She was married at the time to a penniless Uzbek Cossack, whom she had met while horseriding across – well, Uzbekistan. WTF?

Sergei was a senator who had backed, funded and become a trusted adviser to Putin. The Russian leader was appalled when his ally took up with an Englishwoman, but they got together anyway and had two babies in quick succession before settling down in various homes across the globe in marital bliss. Then the wheels come off. Sergei’s bank – Sergei has a bank – goes under without repaying the Russian government the $1bn it had lent them. WTF?

Sergei flees the country to avoid being jailed and/or murdered in his homeland. The kind of visitors you don’t want to be visited by visit him and request a $350m interim payment in return for not killing him, killing his family or chopping his son’s finger off. WTF? Sergei refuses. WTF?

After that, the WTFs pile up faster than they can be humanly uttered. Sergei, already a survivor of various assassination attempts during his oligarch years, rises to No 3 on the KGB’s hitlist. The Russian state pursues him through the British courts – his passport is seized, his assets frozen worldwide – and has the family followed at all times. Sergei flees illegally to his chateau in France and decides to sue said Russian state for the loss of his business assets. “This is a high-risk strategy”, says the narrator, because narrators cannot just cry “WTF!” from the sofa.

And what do wives do when they suddenly find themselves caught up in nightmarish thriller plots that show no sign of ending tidily after 400 pages? “I’ve had periods of being terribly anxious,” notes Alexandra. You warm to her greatly.

Sergei’s true colours are revealed to us – it is never quite clear how long he has been making Alexandra forcibly aware of them – when she refuses to join him in permanent exile in France and he, she claims, “has one of his explosions” and becomes physically and emotionally abusive. She escapes with the children and never returns. From there, their story becomes that of any acrimonious divorce with issues of violence at its heart, but played out on a larger, more extravagant stage, involving international courts and denunciations on state television rather than screaming rows on the front lawn.

It’s a beautifully made piece of television and a superb demonstration of the basic truth of Ernest Hemingway’s response to F Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that “the rich are different from you and me”. “Yes,” Hemingway supposedly replied. “They’ve got more money.” And occasionally more KGB agents on their trails – but, of course, that’s the money, too.

Sergei is still awaiting the results of his lawsuit against the state. Alexandra has returned to travel agenting and horseback riding across Russia. Her mother says Sergei “brought the whole thing on himself”. And that, children, is how fairytales really end.

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