Director, actor, screenwriter, public figure, but first of all a patriot and warrior of light, tirelessly eradicating liberal darkness in his Besogon program and beyond. Everything that the hand in the rings of the diligent gentleman of all cinema touches Nikita Mikhalkov, turns into money, and considerable. Politics, culture, filmmaking, education. Everything in the house. Including shrines.
The image of the messiah in his case does not preclude ruthlessness. Frames of 1999, in which he is in a big way kicks in the head of a young Limonovian twisted by security guards who threw an egg at him, the Internet was bypassed. He beats dashingly, like his character in “Station for Two”, – he always succeeded in the roles of unpunished charming scoundrels. Limonov’s name is Dmitry Bakhor. Later, the director will say that the attacker had a gun and that nevertheless he, Mikhalkov, “when the story went with the police, did everything so that they would not touch him and let him go.” In fact, Bakhor was tried for the egg attack and sentenced to two and a half years of suspended liberty, but the case on his statement – about the beating by the director – was not initiated.
“I have a rule: do not forgive anything to anyone, otherwise they will forget the fear, they will begin to be forgotten,” whatever you say, but Nikita Sergeevich’s Paratov intonations suit him.
“Besogon” hits backhand, accusing him of Russophobia and calling for the punishment of “Echo of Moscow”, “Novaya Gazeta”, “Yeltsin Center” (Mikhalkov has been criticizing him for many years and even demanded that he be declared a “foreign agent” as a “nest of liberalism”, where they allegedly do ” injections of the destruction of the self-consciousness of children”). “The power of truth comes with fists,” he says in one of the issues, asserting the right to be ruthless. Opponents are accused of conformism, foreign funding, moral uncleanliness… Icons and telephones in the frame are read as a symbol of Besogon’s denunciations, which can be heard at the very top. And here I want to ask: “And who are the judges?”
Mikhalkov can be called an oligarch from culture, it is unlikely that anyone will be able to accurately calculate the state funding received by the organizations he leads.
1993
Since 1993, the director has been the chairman of the presidium of the Russian Cultural Foundation. How reported RBC a representative of the Ministry of Culture, the basic funding of the organization has not changed for several years, and in 2020 the funding remained at the level of the previous year – 54.5 million rubles. At the same time, in the same year, the subsidy of the Ministry of Culture to the fund increased 13 times. The increase was due to the fact that the foundation has become “a center for expertise, an operator and moderator of all creative projects that take place today in culture.” RFK is a co-owner of the Specialized Endowment Fund of the Russian Culture Fund, whose assets for 2021 were estimated at almost 2.5 billion rubles.
1998
Since 1998, Nikita Sergeevich has been the chairman of the Union of Cinematographers. Almost a quarter of a century. Mikhalkov did not just hold on to his place. He won it as a foothold and did not give up, even losing the elections at the 2008 convention. Sued. Announced by the congress, which elected Marlena Khutsieva chairman of the union, illegitimate. Gathered filmmakers in Gostiny Dvor for an “extraordinary congress”, staged by him and arranged on a merchant scale. Take back another throne. The current charter of the organization provides for an indefinite tenure of the chairman in office with the right to appoint secretaries at his discretion.
Soon an open letter from leading filmmakers appeared: German and Sokurov, Ioseliani and Ryazanov, Smirnov and Ibragimbekov, which spoke of the totalitarian style of Mikhalkov’s leadership of the union, the appointment of his own people to elective places, “the manic search for an internal enemy and the expulsion of the recalcitrant, official patriotism and servility “.
The cinematic community has finally split. The collapse intensified with Mikhalkov’s initiative to create the Golden Eagle film award as a counterbalance to the oldest national Nika award. He always disliked her, withdrew his paintings from voting, but most of all he was offended when his Urga did not receive the main prize of Nika. Doesn’t forgive losing. Never.
Mikhalkov was involved in the liquidation of the Museum of Cinema, the center of cinematic culture, and contributed a lot to the resignation of its head, Naum Kleiman. The current museum at VDNKh is a rich parody of the former one.
1999
Since 1999 Mikhalkov – President of the Moscow International Film Festival. A bright holiday costs the treasury dearly. In 2021, the Ministry of Culture allocated 125 million rubles for its holding – many times more than all other Russian film screenings receive.
2005
In 2005 brothers Nikita Mikhalkov and Andrey Konchalovsky Together with his cousin Margot Baratova, they establish the Foundation for the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of the artist Pyotr Konchalovsky. With this organization, the Ministry of Culture regularly concludes multi-million dollar contracts to hold exhibitions and conferences (however, in recent years the flow has dried up, and the fund generates losses).
2009
In 2009, the history of the Russian Union of Rightholders begins.
Nikita Mikhalkov is the president of the union, and his son Artyom – Chairman of the Board. The Union receives and distributes income from the “blank tax” – for listening to and viewing audiovisual works for personal purposes.
RSP receives 1% of the cost of devices capable of reproducing them. The list of these devices was approved by government decree No. 829 of October 14, 2010. The list includes voice recorders, tape recorders, cassette players, telephones, laptops, televisions, electronic watches, computers. The net assets of the union for 2021 are one and a half billion.
2015
In 2015, Mikhalkov opens the Academy of Cinematographic and Theater Arts. Among the official partners of the academy is a charitable foundation Elena and Gennady TimchenkoSafmar Foundation Mikhail Gutserieva British brand of Ahmad Tea.
On the academy website the cost of training is 540,000 rubles per year. At the same time, the Charitable Foundation for Social Support and Assistance to the Cultural and Moral Development of the Society “12” pays for the students. This fund was established in 2015 by Nikita Mikhalkov. The co-founders include Yulia Stankunas, who is called the director’s financial advisor. In 2021, the fund’s equity capital amounted to almost half a billion, according to the SPARK database.
2017
Since 2017, Mikhalkov has been the artistic director of the Center for Theater and Cinema on Povarskaya, where the former Film Actor Theater was located. “Of all the arts, real estate is the most important for us,” said the protesting actors, who, left without a roof over their heads, filed a petition with the Prosecutor General’s Office and the State Duma. Three years later, together with the ex-director of the trading empire “Sima-Land” Andrey Simanovsky, Mikhalkov establishes a charitable foundation to support this center. The fund’s assets for 2021 amounted to 131 million rubles. (We note in parentheses: Sima-land is another partner of the Mikhalkov Academy; this trading company, among other things, owns the domain a-patriotwhich hosts the website of the Alfa Patriot Foundation, which is closely associated with veterans of law enforcement agencies.)
At a recent session of the Eurasian Economic Forum in Bishkek, the indefatigably active Mikhalkov proposed the creation of a Eurasian analogue of the Oscar. Diamond butterflies and cash prizes for filmmakers from Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus. Alexander Sokurov expressed There is a general confusion about this:
“He expects that the state will once again personally invest money in him. What dreams? Where do they come from? Is he out of his mind? It’s a lot of government money.”
The first money came: Citadel won a tender for 2 million to develop the design and layout of the Citadel. And in the summer the concept was presented at the economic forum in St. Petersburg. Ibid Governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Region Valery Shantsev and the director of the Mikhalkovsky LLC Alexander Gorokhov signed a cooperation agreement, at the same time it was decided that 20% of the seven billionth project cost would be paid by the regional treasury, the rest by private investors. True, the world has not seen any of them. Shantsev was criticized for wanting to spend almost one and a half billion from the region’s deficit budget on a “movie camp”. At the beginning of 2017, the project was not included in the federal program of Rostourism, after which the activity around it came to naught.
Naming assets after your own films is a director’s tradition. In addition to the fund “12” already mentioned above, for example, the publishing house “Siberian barber” was registered in his name. The publishing house published books by Mikhalkov himself, as well as a monthly supplement to the Kultura newspaper called Svoi. On its front pages, you can find, for example, an advertisement for a Mikhalkov performance, and on the last pages, a recipe for pork ham in a honey marinade.
Five years ago The media reported as if Mikhalkov opens a barbershop – of course, under the same name. An ad appeared on RuTube video clip, and on the project website there was a countdown of days until the opening. Soon the director called it a joke, an experiment to immerse the viewer in a fictional world. “Just as it is easy to immerse the reader in the fictional world of my “numerous” businesses, which do not exist in reality,” Mikhalkov emphasized.
One of the director’s oldest companies is registered in Shchepachikha – the Nizhny Novgorod regional public organization of hunters Tyomino, a micro-enterprise with a profit of 12 thousand rubles a year, which is part of the Vologda regional public organization of hunters Tyomino-Severnoye. It leases 37,000 hectares in the Mezhdurechensky district of the region. There is a similar office in the Crimea – “Tyomino-Yuzhnoye”. Nikita Mikhalkov has shares in all three.
In 2008, the Vologda parliament approved the construction of a road to hunting estate Mikhalkov for 12 million rubles.
“Tyomino-Lesnoye” has been registered in Moscow since 2009, its address (Leningradsky Prospekt, 16, building 1) coincides with the address of the Church of the Life-Giving Trinity at the former Cherkasy almshouse. In the state, according to the SPARK database, one person works; obviously, this is the director Vadim Pavlushkov, the former head of the forestry near the Nizhny Novgorod city of Pavlovo. Right there, not far from Shchepachikha, Tyomino-Lesnoye leases 30 thousand hectares in the Stepankovsky and Tumbotinsky forest areas of the Tumbotinsky nature reserve (the territory is comparable to a third of Nizhny Novgorod). Timber production is the main activity of the company; over the current year, 19 transactions for the sale of timber were found in open sources, of which five were with another Mikhalkov company, Tyomino-Pavlovskoye (the latter produces plywood and furniture). The company operates under a simplified taxation system and, with almost 13 million rubles of annual income, showed a net loss of 148,000 rubles in 2021.
A few years ago, a video appeared on the Web in which Nizhny Novgorod Patrol activists accused the company of cutting down trees without planting new ones. According to Mikhalkov, the police filed a libel case, the results are unknown. No violations in the company’s activities were found by supervisory authorities, and access to the video is currently limited. The footage cited by Besogon really shows a certain area that has been completely cleared of the forest – in such a way that the same “Siberian barber” would envy. In the same issue, a document of the regional forestry department was shown, which refutes information about alleged clear-cutting in the reserve and states that “the information in the video is not true.”
In 2020, Tyomino-Lesnoye achieved a reduction in the payment for leased forests from 4 million to 366 thousand rubles a year. With an annual felling of 39,000 cubic meters (according to the State System for Accounting for Timber and Transactions with it), a cubic meter of timber costs 277 rubles. The company pays another 4,000 rubles a year for hunting.
Lesnoy’s counterparty, Tyomino-Pavlovskoye LLC, owned by Nikita Mikhalkov, which concluded 24 timber transactions in a year, declares a little more than 2 million rubles as profit.
The sphere of interests of the full cavalier of the Order “For Merit to the Fatherland” is as wide as his native country. These are more than a dozen operating companies where he is the owner or shareholder; in addition, there is a significant number of businesses in which Mikhalkov took part in the past. He served on the board of directors bank “Vozrozhdenie” and Nikos group (produces caustic soda, PVC and various acids). Love for chemistry was short-lived, but mutual: the managers of Nikos during this period went into the management of the Cultural Foundation and the Union of Cinematographers.
In 2010 he bought 10% of Chelprom-Diamond. Another 20% was bought by the director’s son-in-law Albert Bakov. At that time, the company was one of the ten largest diamond-cutting enterprises in the Russian Federation and the only one on the Russian market that produced small-cut diamonds.
However, two years later, the FSB opened a case into the sale of diamonds by the company to a non-resident of Russia, the Gibraltar company Dundela Limited. The contract was concluded for 10 million dollars, then this amount decreased by almost 10 times. The Federal Law “On Precious Metals and Precious Stones” prohibits the sale of diamonds to foreign companies that do not have a representative office in the Russian Federation. The case was initiated under Part 2 of Art. 191 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (illegal circulation of natural precious stones by a group of persons by prior agreement). In January 2014, 11,703 diamonds were seized during a search at the office of Chelprom-Diamond LLC.
Mikhalkov’s press service stated that the director was only a minority investor and did not know about any decisions of the company’s management. He won several lawsuits against the media, who called him the owner of the company. Currently, the LLC has been declared bankrupt, bankruptcy proceedings are underway. According to an extract from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, Mikhalkov and Bakov retained their shares in the company.
In addition to timber and diamonds, Mikhalkov and his brother have a vending business (LLC KMvending, its third co-owner is Yulia Stankunas known to us) and a restaurant business (LLC Eat Like Doma). The latest venture became known after the brothers asked the president to allocate a billion to create a Russian fast food chain, but did not receive direct support from the budget.
On the website of the winery you can buy
- Urga wine (cabernet sauvignon/sangiovese 2016, 26.5 euros per bottle)
- or merlot 2016 Oci Ciornie – for 44 euros.
- “Slave of Love” – Schiava d’amore – will cost inexpensively: 13.5 euros for a bottle of pink from the Chilegiolo / Sangiovese varieties;
- “Sunstroke” – Сolpo di sole – more expensive: 25 euros for a 2018 sauvignon blanc.
Mikhalkovskoye wine is also available in Russia, chain wine markets offer the same set, from 3 to 9 thousand rubles per bottle. From 2014 to 2019, according to Baza, the winery supplied 132 tons of wine to Russia in the amount of 398 thousand euros.
From the extract from the Italian registry we received, we learn that the company that owns the vineyard, La madonna societa’ agricola a responsabilita’ limitata, is de jure registered with Konstantin Tuvykin and the Impuls enterprise in the city of Pavlovo, Nizhny Novgorod Region. And this enterprise is registered in the name of Tuvykin Jr. – Stepan. The office building where Impulse is located does not look very presentable for the company that controls the winery, whose products were treated to Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi (the latter personally thanked Mikhalkov with a postcard for the received box of wine).
Konstantin Tuvykin is a neighbor of the director on the estate, as a witness he was involved in the investigation of a criminal case on the possible sale of low-quality brake pads to Mosgortrans by the SpetsAvtoZapchast company, owned by him by 85%. When they came to the businessman’s house with a search, he wrote a complaint to Bastrykin, which Mikhalkov, as a member of the public council under the RF IC, handed over to the addressee with a cover letter. The latter got into the media, and the director himself confirmed its authenticity in the special issue of Besogon. In this amazing document, on a letterhead with a family coat of arms, it is suggested that the case in which the “winemaking partner and neighbor” is involved is custom-made and directed against Mikhalkov himself because of his Besogon TV copyright programs: “Fearing to attack me directly, they are doing It’s through people close to me.”
The director never disputed his participation in the wine business, he also stated that he intended to engage in winemaking in the Crimea, but there is no information about such a project in open sources. But in the Spanish registry there is information about the company Propestate Sl, registered in the city of San Roque for a certain Tatyana Mikhalkova (the name of the director’s wife is also the same). The address of the company is villa of 1337 m2.
AT declarations Mikhalkov, which he published in 2018 as the artistic director of the State Center for Theater and Cinema on Povarskaya, only Russian real estate is indicated:
86 plots of land,
flat,
country house,
18 buildings,
helicopter…
After the media noise caused by the director’s more than half a billion annual income, Mikhalkov’s declarations ceased to appear in the public domain.
The people’s artist’s comments on the 2018 declaration are widely known: he spoke about income from master classes abroad, profitable investments, paintings by Surikov and Konchalovsky in hereditary property, as well as the profitable work of Nikita Mikhalkov’s TRITE Studio. The director emphasized that he pays taxes and does not transfer his property to relatives. However, in 2019 it became known that the property acquired by Nikita Mikhalkov passed into the possession of his children – Nadezhda and Artyom. Each of the two apartments in the residential complex “At the Patriarchs” was estimated at 260 million rubles. The address of the residential complex (Maly Kozikhinsky, 11) is the same address where TRITE together with BEL Development was going to build a multi-storey hotel with a two-level underground car park. This caused protests from residents of neighboring houses, who feared that the construction would lead to their destruction. Nevertheless, the seven-story building was put into operation in 2012, it houses the premises of the TRITE Studio, as well as 25 apartments, the price of which per square meter now reaches 1,179,900 rubles. The site for the sale of luxury housing calls the residential complex one of the most prestigious offers on the premium real estate market in Moscow. By the way, the releases of Besogon are also recorded there.
In 2012 and 2018, he was Putin’s confidant in the elections. “I love this man, he is my comrade,” this is about Putin, for whose next anniversary in 2007 he released documentary speech “55”. In honor of the leader of the nation and the outstanding results that he achieved in his post. At the end, the author, with a tear in his voice, delivers a monologue:
“The president is leaving in four months. This is a settled issue, and there is no point in evaluating it or discussing it. But what seems to me the most important thing: whoever our president is and whatever he does next, wherever his fate throws him, whatever situations he finds himself in, whoever he has to communicate with and on what occasion in any capacity of his existence, I want to believe – and I think this belief is shared by the majority of people living in our country – he will do all this with the dignity inherent in a man and an officer.
At the recent awarding of the Hero of Labor star, love for historical parallels led to a risky discovery: Nikita Sergeevich turned out to be more noble than Vladimir Vladimirovich.
The director told Putin that his ancestor Konstantin Mikhalkov in 1615 was the keeper of the seal of Mikhail Romanov. Putin immediately replied that his ancestors “were simple peasants, and then simple workers,” which is documented by church records.
The last remark is important: according to the previous replicated version, the same ancestor of the director was the royal bed-keeper and had nothing to do with the sovereign press. Nikita Sergeevich himself, generous with state-level advice, on his 65th birthday released a 63-page Manifesto of Enlightened Conservatism about the arrangement of Russia, which should be revived by strengthening the vertical of power, a regulated market economy, “loyalty to power, the ability to adequately obey authoritative power” and “reverence for rank”.
It is difficult to say whether this is hypocrisy or sincerity, because Mikhalkov is a top-notch actor and, therefore, believes in the “proposed circumstances.” Either he convinces that if a real wave of popular protest happens, it will sweep away those who raised it, then he declares that the true hero (we are talking about “12”) is the one who is the first to go against everyone. And to the question whether a person can extinguish the spark of God in himself, he answers: “Yes, if he decides that this is his property.”
Has the smashing “Besogon” become compensation for the lost love of the people, an attempt to establish a direct connection with those who are less and less coming to cinemas to see Mikhalkov’s paintings? Issues of the program rarely diverge into quotes, remaining in the field of friendly Malofeevsky “Tsargrad” Yes, such odious resources. And it is unlikely that their audience will replace those who sympathized with the heroine of Five Evenings, who repeated like a spell: “If only there was no war!” Or he cried with happiness, watching how little Ilyusha Oblomov runs across the endless field, not knowing either the heavy tread of the state, or the fear of inner emptiness.
* Russian journalist Yuri Dud is included in the register of foreign agents in the Russian Federation.
** Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon is included in the Russian list of extremists and terrorists
