COLUMN ONE : In Russia, New Rich Flaunt It : As the country leaves socialism behind, the fast buck and the high life make their debut. But crime and the scorn of the masses plague the entrepreneurs.

By ELIZABETH SHOGREN

May 25, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Jumping out of his slate-gray BMW, cellular telephone in hand, Boris G. Belotserkovsky is the picture of lavish living. He has arrived at his favorite restaurant for a five-course lunch with friends and his glamorous live-in girlfriend, Vika Gagarina.

The meal costs more than the average monthly salary in this faded capital of the Russian czars. But Belotserkovsky doesn’t flinch. His billfold is fat with dollars, rubles and German marks, and he passes it to Gagarina so as not to bother himself with the chore of counting.

Americans may have grown accustomed to observing such conspicuous consumption, especially in the gilded era of the 1980s. In Russia, however, where more than 70 years of socialism fostered uniform poverty, the nouveaux riches are really something nouveau. A class of the newly wealthy is making its debut.

During the Soviet era, only Communist Party bosses, along with a few entertainment and sports stars, lived in luxury. Their opulent lifestyles were hidden from the masses, concealed from view in private compounds. Riches were privileges of position, and the elite had little money or property of their own.

But as the country leaves socialism behind, Russia is developing some features common to free markets everywhere: the fast buck and the high life.

Just four years ago, the only non-Soviet cars on the roads belonged to diplomats, foreign business executives and journalists. Now, Mercedeses, BMWs, Volvos and the occasional Porsche are filling the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Some of the new rich exercise their purchasing power by shopping at farmers’ markets, where, unlike in the United States, the prices are too steep for all but the wealthy and foreigners. At the markets, tomatoes cost about $1 a pound, a tenth of the average monthly wage here.

Yet the rich have their problems too, mainly crime and the scorn of the masses.

“It’s paradoxical,” said Anatoly Z. Rubinov, a writer for the prestigious Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper who specializes in social commentary. “They want very much to show their wealth, but at the same time are afraid.”

Personal bodyguards have become de rigueur for wealthy businessmen, who are targeted by would-be extortionists, thieves and racketeers (the sort of folks who are also thriving in these topsy-turvy times).

“The people hate the nouveaux riches, “ Rubinov added. “But Russians have always hated rich people. Seventy years under socialism just gave them an official ideology to support that hatred.”

Although their numbers are growing, the newly rich--almost all of them men--still represent a tiny portion of the population. Because many have earned their money illegally and do not pay taxes, there is no way to count them.

But what does it mean to be rich, anyway, in a nation where most people would be considered paupers by American standards?

Leading Russian pollster Boris A. Grushin figures “rich” means earning more than 25,000 rubles a month, about $250 or 20 times the average wage in Moscow. In interviews, some of Russia’s wealthiest said they consider someone rich if his yearly earnings run into the tens of millions of rubles (that being the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars).

Regardless of how affluence is defined, the difference in lifestyle between the new rich and the average wage earner is reminiscent of the gap between nobility and commoners before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Grushin said. The disparity, exacerbated since Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin ended price subsidies on most goods earlier this year, breeds contempt.

Polls by Grushin’s firm, Public Opinion Research-VP, show that Russians are gradually giving up on the idea that everyone should be equal. But they still dislike the new rich, believing most grew wealthy through illegal means.

“When I ask, ‘Is it good that some people are getting rich in an honest way?’ underlining the word honest , 70% answer that it is OK,” said Grushin. “But if I leave out the word honest , only about 40% say it is OK.”

Anger over economic inequities runs deep. A quarter of those polled by Grushin responded positively when asked how they feel about arsonists burning down private businesses. Such acts are seen as restoring social justice.

“Most of the people envy us,” said Belotserkovsky, 37, who earned his fortune by flooding the Russian market with foreign-made slot machines as soon as they became legal. “But they need to understand that until we have really rich people in our city and our country . . . the society will not be able to help the poor.”

Blond, slightly portly and wearing round tortoise-shell glasses, Belotserkovsky doesn’t let the disapproval of fellow citizens prevent him from surrounding himself with luxuries. Besides his BMW, cellular phone and expensive European wardrobe, he has a chic, modern office, uses a sleek lap-top computer and takes many trips abroad yearly. “I’m attracted to the material things of life,” he said matter-of-factly.

Gagarina, 27, met Belotserkovsky while working as a restaurant cashier and has lived with him for three years. She has no job and won’t be getting one any time soon.

“She is decoration for my life,” Belotserkovsky said. “It is typical that, if a man has money, his woman doesn’t work. If Vika worked, she would earn 1,000 rubles (about $10) a month, and this would not make any difference in our income.

“It’s more important that she looks good and takes care of me,” he added, smiling at Gagarina as she sat at his side.

Such unabashed chauvinism contradicts the egalitarian attitude toward women that socialism was supposed to nurture. “But it is quite common among the nouveaux riches, “ Rubinov said. “Wives are not supposed to work. They’re supposed to dress well and be good hostesses.”

Western-style health clubs have opened here so wives of businessmen can trim their figures with the trendiest of aerobics classes. Thanks to solaria, they can stay tan all year long--even in St. Petersburg. (The men, however, have little time for workouts because, they say, they are so busy earning money.)

Clothes buying is primarily a foreign affair--for both women and men. Gagarina, for instance, goes on shopping sprees in places like Paris and Beijing (a hot spot for silk goods). “I don’t buy any of my clothes in Russia,” said Gagarina, dressed in an expensive leather coat and stylish black jersey dress while sporting diamond earrings and rings. “I pick them up when I’m abroad.”

Traveling abroad has become the hallmark of the new rich because most Russians cannot even hope to afford international tourism. The wealthy bring back luxury goods that cannot be found in Russia’s fledgling consumer market.

Vitaly N. Lukyanchenko, 50, a ballet dancer-cum-bartender-cum-shoe manufacturing mogul who looks a lot like Fred Astaire, is another of St. Petersburg’s newly wealthy. During his last trip to America, he spent $1,700 on a dress for his wife.

“She liked it,” Lukyanchenko said nonchalantly as his bodyguard, a former European boxing champion, looked on.

Other new Russian millionaires prefer adventures in their own country. The king of this type of holiday is Anatoly F. Yemets. His company, Shoubiznes, organizes cultural events and owns stores that sell foreign goods at exorbitant prices.

Yemets and his wife greeted 1992 at Zelionaya Roshcha, the famous Black Sea resort home of the late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. “People with lots of money gathered there for New Year,” said the 45-year-old. “It was really chic--it was like paradise.”

On other escapes from the office, Yemets has lived with religious fundamentalists, the “Old Believers,” in their Siberian village. He took a boat to the 1,000-year-old Ostrov Valaam Monastery, where he dressed in a tunic and ate with his hands like the monks. Now he hopes to arrange similar unconventional vacations--at a steep price--for wealthy Americans.

“It is so exotic,” he said. “The sights, smells and tastes are all authentic. Other people like to spend their money on vacations to Germany or France--that bores me.”

Yemets and his wife live in a spacious apartment not far from his office, own two other apartments in the city and are building a new house in the suburbs. “I want it to be big enough that my dog can have one room to sleep in and another to use as a play room,” he said.

“I have enough money now that I don’t ever have to think about how much something costs,” he added. “If I want it or need it, I buy it--whether it’s a gold ring or a mansion. This is a very foreign-sounding philosophy for Russians who were raised on socialism.”

Yemets, who collects icons and wears distinctive gold articles made by former Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev’s jeweler, says his style of spending has changed over the last few years.

“When I first started earning money, I liked to touch it,” Yemets said rubbing his fingers together for emphasis. “I threw it around as much as I could. But being wealthy is something different. Being wealthy is an idea--a philosophy of life.”

While failing to attract the love of their countrymen, the new rich are successfully propagating free-market ideology, Russian experts say. “They’re doing very well in spreading their propaganda that without rich entrepreneurs--like themselves--the country will go nowhere,” Rubinov said.

The new rich also have put their mark on government policy by lobbying local and national lawmakers. The most powerful executives in Moscow have special hot-line telephones that enable them to quickly reach officials like Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov.

But the deep-seated antipathy toward these wealthy businessmen is still evident at the highest levels of government. “Many nouveaux riches have appeared,” Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, chairman of the Russian legislature, said in an interview late last year. “They know nothing about business, but they do know how to line their pockets.”

Grushin, the pollster, agrees that most new businessmen are “swindlers,” but he believes that only with such wheeler-dealers is the successful rebirth of capitalism in Russia possible.

Many of the new rich are trying to gain respectability. Some, like Yemets and Lukyanchenko, do so with splashy gestures of benevolence. Yemets bought all the tickets at the city zoo for a year, so now admission is free. He and Lukyanchenko also sponsor athletic events, which no longer get state funding since the breakdown of the Soviet sports machine.

Andrei V. Rogochev, 28, one of St. Petersburg’s new millionaires and a man who earned most of his money in the last nine months, is part of a group of the city’s most powerful entrepreneurs who are trying to create a different, more elite image for the rich. They opened their own branch of the Rotary Club and meet weekly at an elegant, canal-side, private restaurant to share tips on business prospects.

Meantime, Rogochev--general manager of a company that is trying, among other things, to introduce credit cards to Russia--said his off-the-rack suit and Opel car will soon be unsuitable for him.

“In a couple years, I will only be able to wear good Italian suits,” said Rogochev, an intense, determined man. “By then, I will have to think about maintaining the image of my class. We don’t have to worry about this much now because our class is just forming.”