There is a wedding procession near the old building at 16 Volkhonka, in the very center of Moscow, opposite the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The bride and groom in the company of smart friends and relatives celebrate painting. Soon they leave – the place is popular, the ceremonies in the mansion go one after another. The rent is paid by the Vernadsky registry office of Moscow. The premises of the Pushkin State Museum, a restaurant, a graphic design school and an investor training center are rented in the mansion.
What is known about the mansion on Volkhonka, 16
In 1775, the Russian Empress Catherine the Great arrived in Moscow to celebrate the conclusion of a favorable peace with the Turks. During the visit, she liked the city estate of the princes Dolgoruky. The crowned lady bought the princely house and presented it to the hero of the Russian-Turkish war – Count Peter Rumyantsev-Zadunaisky.
There was a men’s gymnasium, various Soviet state institutions: the Forestry Institute, the Communist University of the Workers of China, the Higher School of Marxism-Leninism and the Ministry of Forest Industry.
How the ex-minister’s family got a building in the center of Moscow
In the eighties, the building went to the Ministry for the production of mineral fertilizers, which was then headed by Nikolai Olshansky. In the nineties, the Agrokhiminvest concern settled inside, where Olshansky was also in charge. By the beginning of the 2000s, the masterpiece of architecture was worn out and was included in the list of cultural heritage sites to be restored for budget money.
In 2010, the patched-up “nest” of Dolgorukih-Rumyantsev passed into private hands – this was reported on the website of the capital’s mayor’s office. The new owner was not named. Life found out that now the estate is managed and earns hundreds of millions of rubles by the joint-stock company Logika. Its headmistress, Yelena Olshanskaya, is the widowed daughter-in-law of the former Soviet “Minister of Fertilizers” Nikolai Olshansky. The formal owner is a native of Belarus, Igor Nester, her brother.
Elena Olshanskaya rarely became the hero of the news. Previously, she held an exhibition at the Museum of Architecture, where she presented her project for the development of Volkhonka. In 2019, journalists found out that she bought an apartment of 268 square meters (the price is about 200 million rubles) in Shamshin’s apartment building on Znamenka Street – this is just five hundred meters from the prince’s mansion on Volkhonka.
It seems very likely that Olshanskaya and her eldest son support Ukraine. Their social media profiles are marked with the Independent flag. Perhaps they have US citizenship. At one time, Elena Olshanskaya applied for a residence permit for three sons and a daughter in this country. Grown up children settled in New York and Miami and do business there. Perhaps, thanks to the elderly father-in-law Nikolai Olshansky, the family has had ties with the Americans since Soviet times. As a minister and later as a businessman, he oversaw the export of fertilizers to America.
How much money does the building on Volkhonka bring to its owners
Business center “Mansion on Volkhonka” – this is how the historical house of Dolgoruky is now called. Opposite is the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, two steps away is the Kremlin. The area of the building is over 6000 square meters. Renting a square costs 44,000 rubles a year. But not all meters are rented out for offices. In the main hall (225 sq.m.) weddings, banquets and conferences are arranged – the price is negotiable.
– And on the third and fourth floors, the Pushkin Museum rents premises from us. Under the offices for senior management, the employees admitted.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts leases space from Elena Olshanskaya JSC Logika through the public procurement portal. In total, in 2014-2023, ten government contracts were concluded between the two organizations with a total value of almost half a billion rubles.
The Pushkin Museum is not the only state institution that concludes state contracts with Logika. There is also the Moscow Civil Registry Office, which spent 20.5 million rubles on renting the main hall of the mansion in 2019-2020.
According to Life’s calculations, the Osobnyak on Volkhonka business center can bring owners up to 300 million rubles annually. But Logika’s official income is much more modest – less than 25 million rubles a year.
Throughout the tenth years, the Moscow authorities persuaded the owner of the Dolgoruky mansion to accept security obligations and develop a project for a large-scale restoration of the monument. In 2018, officials announced that construction work was about to begin at the site. Haven’t started. It is known that a year ago the State Expertise approved the restoration project. Now the estate is filled with change houses, the workers are not visible, it is impossible to get to the main entrance.
How the family of the oligarch Olshansky is connected with the USA
84-year-old Nikolai Olshansky was born in the Cherkassy village of Drabovo, he received his education at the Lviv Polytechnic University. He is a political heavyweight. Under the USSR, he was secretary of the Sumy regional party committee, adviser from the CPSU in Afghanistan, deputy head of the chemical industry department, minister for the production of mineral fertilizers and deputy of the Supreme Council. After perestroika, he retrained as a businessman. Olshansky presided over the Rosagrokhim concern, headed the Minudobreniya plant, his wife still owns a large Voronezh agricultural holding. At the pre-retirement age, he returned to politics. He was a State Duma deputy and a senator of the Federation Council in 1999-2013.
Judging by the positions, Nikolai Olshansky controlled the export of mineral fertilizers from the USSR-Russia to the West until 1997. During this time, he was not accused of anything. There are many negative things about him in the memoirs of Grigory Luchansky, who in the nineties was one of the largest exporters of petroleum products.
The closest business partner and friend of Nikolai Olshansky was Oleksandr Rovt, a scandalous Ukrainian-American billionaire. They jointly owned the Minudobreniya plant until 2011, and then sold this asset for $1.3–1.5 billion to the oligarch Arkady Rotenberg.
Nikolai Olshansky was repeatedly called a ruble billionaire and was included in various Forbes ratings. Now his fortune is estimated at $ 750 million.
According to the SPARK database, not a single business is currently listed on the patriarch. On the other hand, his 83-year-old wife Raisa Vasilievna registered a dozen companies related to crop and livestock production in the Voronezh region. Their total income is over four billion rubles a year.
The general director of the business center “Osobnyak on Volkhonka” Elena Olshanskaya at one time married the son of Nikolai and Raisa Olshansky, Igor, who was born in Ukrainian Sumy. The latter did not become famous in Russia, except that he acted as a co-founder of the Sumy community in Moscow. Igor Nikolayevich is better known in Ukraine, where he led the Severodonetsk chemical production “Azot”. He is even more famous in the Florida city of Tampa, where he lived and worked as a top manager at Nitram Ink, a company that has been importing fertilizers to America since 1964. In 2005, Igor Olshansky crashed in a helicopter while returning from hunting in Voronezh. He was 47 years old.
Elena Olshanskaya has three sons. All studied at the Moscow Anglo-American School, which is supervised by a specialized division of the US State Department. 33-year-old Nikolai Olshansky lives, according to American directories, in a residential complex near New York’s Central Park. The rent of his four-room apartment costs $10,000 a month. Vladimir Olshansky, 29, recently set up Towermill Inc in Miami at his residence, a $1 million apartment in a state-of-the-art skyscraper on the Atlantic coast. 21-year-old Igor Olshansky is probably a student at some American university. Only the 19-year-old daughter, Polina Olshanskaya, is more often in Russia, where she studies to be a ballerina.
