Evgeny Chichvarkin — business (hedonism wines) with roots in the USSR
Evgeny Chichvarkin co-founded Euroset — Russia's largest mobile phone retail chain with over 5,000 stores — and built it into a billion-dollar business before fleeing to London in 2008 after criminal charges he claimed were politically motivated. In London he opened the acclaimed wine merchant Hedonism Wines.
Tracing the roots — Leningrad
Born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1974, Chichvarkin built his fortune in the chaotic post-Soviet market before the system that created him turned against him. His exile in London and reinvention as a wine merchant and anti-Putin activist is a vivid emblem of Russia's business class refugees of the 2000s.
Leningrad. At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
"Russia is a country where you can build something great. And then they take it away."