Entertaining the bored Russian mega-rich

Sergei Knyazev's promotions company offers cockroach racing, bear-wrestling, a day as a homeless bum, and helicopter firefights - if you've got the money, the time, and the inclination

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By Kirsikka Moring
     
      You wouldn't happen to have 800,000 euros going spare in your wallet, would you? Fancy arranging a party?
      The budget for a really good bash runs in that sort of price-bracket, but for that sort of money there is no limit to what can happen.
      Sergei Knyazev, 43, knows where the Russian nouveau ultra-riche go to play. He is the entertainments officer and fun-fixer for the Russian mega-rich and powerful, the #1player in his chosen field. He runs a company based in Moscow and employing around 30 people. There are around 500 competing firms in the promotions business.
     
Knyazev was in Finland recently, though not to arrange anything like an ostrich-racing meet or an expensive jape, but to hook up with his friend, Finnish film director Arto Halonen. Halonen had made a documentary film about Knyazev's business activities under the title Pavlov's Dogs.
      The movie, soon to have its Finnish première, shows Knyazev running his games and entertainments industry with a no holds barred approach. There is a lot of loose money floating around in Russia, and the smartest are happy to grab a piece of the pie.
      In the documentary, Knyazev gets Madagascan hissing cockroaches to run along a course by blowing gently on their rear end. Anything and everything is possible, if the client pays the going rate.
      His company's clients are oil barons, ministers, members of the Duma, artists in search of a brand for themselves, and even President Vladimir Putin, who has been known to order parties every now and then.
      For example Knyazev's children's parties arrianged in the Kremlin are famous across the nation.
      He also managed to arrange four parties for oil magnate Mihail Khodorkovsky and his family before oligarch and major Yukos shareholder Mihail was bundled off to Siberia, to Camp No. 13 in the Chita Oblast.
      "Err, no, I didn't arrange THAT", says Knyazev, who is just as famous for organising survival adventures and practical jokes for his well-heeled clients.
     
After studying psychology at university in Novosibirsk, Sergei Knyazev moved to Moscow around five years ago and collected his initial stake capital by arranging cockroach races, actually an old and tradtional gambling sport in pre-revolutionary times. The cockroaches gave way to piglets, and the piglets grew stubby wings and became ostriches.
      The crowds lapped it all up, and pretty soon Knyazev was making a nice income.
     
The wealthy and super-wealthy who have seen it all, done it all, and are looking for something to shake off the ennui in their lives are becoming increasingly demanding in their entertainment needs.
      One has constantly to come up with new and jaw-dropping ways of breaking up the everyday routine.
      Knyazev says that bear-wrestling is right now an extremely trendy diversion. He found a retired bear-tamer, formerly from the Moscow Circus, along with his equally elderly bear.
      "I saved the guy from abject poverty, since it's by no means cheap to keep a bear fed and watered."
      Now the venerable bear goes one-on-one and wrestles with Knyazev's clients. And the money rolls in.
     
Also immensely popular are Knyazev's Back in the USSR parties, with a list of artists appearing that includes genuine female gymnasts from the Brezhnev era, dancers in spangled red-star outfits, V.I. Lenin, Karl Marx, and Red Army Choir members.
      Apparently a little role-play thievery or shoplifting also tickles the fancy of those already wallowing in money.
      And then there are pyjama parties organised at a trendy Moscow watering-hole.
      Women, believe it or not, get all excited about driving sports cars to the limit with no regard for traffic regulations, and it is even fashionable these days to take a weekend break at a labour camp barracks built on the shores of the Arctic Ocean on the orders of Josef Stalin.
     
Ministers and Duma members are eager to order from Knyazev the sort of role games in which they go out into the streets with the ordinary hoi polloi. Afterwards they can boast to their friends about how they "met the people".
      "Ministers and civil servants aren't really into dress-up games. They prefer to spend their free-time like they do their working hours, with a tie around their neck. Dancing on tables or singing loudly is about the most outrageous sort of stuff you can generally persuade them to do."
      The very rich find it particularly amusing to dress down and play at being poor.
      Those at the top of the political tree love to get a little "safe" self-abasement  by taking part, for instance, in role games based on a horror novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky that is set in a lunatic asylum.
     
In order to see to all the tailoring, Knyazev employs two large clothing factories that were on the verge of bankruptcy and which now work night and day producing costumes for his games, which can often involve hundreds of participants.
      The subjects and the eras vary from the 17th century France of Alexandre Dumas's Three Musketeers to a gathering of Greek gods and goddesses.
      One popular role-playing game nowadays is to go out and spend a day as a busker or a homeless beggar on the streets.
      When the day is done, the participants gather in a restaurant to celebrate, and the one who has collected the most in notes and coins is declared the winner.
     
"Sometimes for these people in search of ‘the exotic' it is enough simply to experience the everyday life of ordinary people. I have arranged survival tours on the Moscow Metro. The sort of people who take part in these are the ones who have spent the last ten years in the back seat of a stretched Mercedes", explains Knyazev.
      "A trip in a crowded rush-hour Metro train provides them with a refreshing shock. They have enough difficulty squeezing themselves into the carriages, let alone fighting their way out again at the right stop."
     
Duels at dawn in misty forest settings, in the style of Alexander Pushkin, are another strong seller.
      The milieu and conditions are authetic, but the ammunition in the guns is appreciably softer than the real thing.
      Various war games are also high on the list of favourite stunts.
      "It's trendy to play World War II, or as they still put it back in Russia "The Great Patriotic War", with the teams divided into German troops and Russian Red Army soldiers", explains Knyazev.
      And the sewing machines rattle into action once again.
     
Games aimed at couples tend instead to require the services of a professional make-up artist, since the most popular jape is to appear as a prostitute and her pimp. "We need to bribe the militiya officers a bit to make sure that they step in and break things up when the women actually start to get sold off to punters."
      Slipping money to the police in cases like this is by no means the only occasion when Knyazev has to dip into his pocket for some kind of back-hander. The militiya, department store detectives and security staff, even chauffeurs and drivers., all have to be looked after. The clients must naturally be kept alive, even if the whole idea of the games is to play on the edge.
     
Knyazev himself had to wear a Kevlar vest for a while, after a sniper's bullet landed a couple of centimetres away.
      He had dreamed up such a good election campaign for one of his customers that the man's political rival got badly bent out of shape.
      "Since then I've not designed any election campaigns. On the other hand, we do build useful brands to boost the careers of both businessmen and artists."
     
Up near the top end of the price-scale are helicopter -borne firefights.
      In order to arrange these, the promotions company rents a couple of those choppers familiar from Hollywood movies, in which the side doors can be opened. The fighting clients then take off and take pot-shots at one another through the open doorway, wielding guns that are used in paintball battles.
      Still, even a helicopter or two is small beer when set against the sort of craft that some of Knyazev's clients hire for birthday parties. It is by no means unheard of for someone to want an entire 747 jumbo jet to collect his friends from all over Russia and fly them down to the French Riviera.
      There the fun might get under way for instance with a huge snowball fight, with the white stuff provided courtesy of snow-making machines from film studios.
      Fireworks are a must, of course, and these are supplied by the top European professionals, and money is no expense.
     
"Once I had this guy who had come from a dirt-poor village in the country. He had made a lot of money, and he went and bought all of the wooden gates in his old village, and had them flown down to Nice. On every gateway, on the arch at the top, was written some humiliation or setback that he'd had to deal with in his life so far."
      "Then, when he'd got the gates down there in France, he set light to them, one by one, and symbolically burned away his wretched past."
     
So who are these people, and where does all the money come from?
      Knyazev says that these days nearly ten percent of the Russian population can be described as rich or fairly rich.
      The ultra-rich are naturally fewer in number, and they live in Moscow, in Yekaterinburg, in Norilsk in Siberia, and in the oil-boom cities of Khanty-Mansiysk and Tyumen.
      This does not mean oil is the only source of fabulous wealth. "People often forget those who have made their money out of the metallurgical industry."
      You mean uranium producers?
      "Yes, you could say that. Them, too. But among the very rich these days are the people who head up companies specialising in the treatment of spent fuel and nuclear waste", explains Knyazev.
     
The current is carrying the japes and practical jokes arranged by promoters such as Knyazev towards more hardcore adult games, but he says he will not agree to anything "pervy".
      All the same, one new product in the works is "extreme parties", at which body art is featured extensively, in the form of piercings and tattoos.
     
And now it is time to go home. Knyazev can hardly wait.
      Curiously enough, though he provides wild and woolly adventures for his customers, in civilian life Sergei Knyazev is a very ordinary husband and father; a big softie who is moved almost to tears when talking about his pride and joy, 10-month-old baby Wanda.
     
Arto Halonen's documentary Pavlov's Dogs (70') will open in Finnish cinemas on February 24th. It can be seen in Helsinki at the Forum multiplex cinema. The title of the documentary and the nod to the famous conditioned-reflex experiment refers to a comment by Knyazev himself, to the effect that "People taking part in one of our events will book us too, out of reflex."


Links:
  Hey, happy birthday Ivan, we´re not going to shoot you! (Times Online)
  Paying Big Bucks to Play Elaborate Pranks (Rusnet )
  Weird Games of the Rich (Pravda)
  Pavlov´s Dogs
  International Documentary Festival Amsterdam IDFA

KIRSIKKA MORING / Helsingin Sanomat
kirsikka.moring@hs.fi