Rihanna performs for Roman Abramovich

This year in a new spirit of austerity and cutbacks, RusAl head Oleg Deripaska treated his colleagues and friends not to a Tanzanian goat apiece, but to the nearest thing for an oligarch: a New Year concert whose star, Rihanna, only charged $500,000. George Michael, who sang for Vladimir Potanin last year for a reported $3.3 million, wouldn’t even get out of a Ritz-Carlton featherbed for that. Still, she’ll learn. As Komsomolskaya Pravda put it, “she’s a young singer, so she charges practically nothing.”

The best coverage of the party last week was in Tvoi Den, which headlined its article “Deripaska Gave Abramovich a Black Woman for $500,000.” There’s a real craft to writing headlines like that, which pack so many offensive implications into so little space. Still, the article wasn’t so bad, even giving Rihanna the privilege of a name at the end of the second paragraph. The Abramovich reference is due to the fact that Roman turned up to the party, with his girlfriend Darya Zhukova. But tabloids differed on whether the designer-stubbled one tapped his toe to “Umbrella” or broke into a full-blooded boogie.

A blurry photograph in Tvoi Den shows Abramovich looking bored, and a reporter wrote that he “observed the young people having fun with his famous half-smile, quietly dancing on the spot.” However, Komsomolskaya Pravda said he “danced away all night to Rihanna’s catchy hits.” Which admittedly would have been difficult, given that her performance only lasted 40 minutes.

Rihanna insisted on the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton for her six-hour stay, Tvoi Den wrote. It comes with an “oversized dressing room” and a security room with an “autonomous energy supply system,” the hotel’s web site boasts. But there were no wardrobe malfunctions, debauched afterparties or late-night fallings out of night clubs, so frankly she didn’t provide the paparazzi with value for money.

Sadly, Rihanna’s concert has been the most bling New Year’s party reported in the tabloids, which is painful to write of an event that also included a performance by local pop sensation Tokio. And there seems to be little prospect of celebrity shenanigans in the city over New Year’s, given that all the beautiful people are heading for warmer or snowier climes.

In Star Hit magazine, television host and celebrity editor Andrei Malakhov drew a handy map of the Russian elite’s vacation destinations. And if he’s right, it looks as if Courchevel is so January 2007. I don’t know whether the arrest of billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov earlier this year had an effect on bookings, but Malakhov writes that the French ski resort will be a forlorn ghost town this holiday. Its only visitors will be former Miss World Oksana Fyodorova and teenage designer Kira Plastinina, who will probably sulk in her young executive suite.

Instead, the people who matter will be sipping gl?hwein over the border in Switzerland’s St. Moritz. Among them are Abramovich, Zhukova, restaurateur Arkady Novikov, Dima Bilan’s producer Yana Rudkovskaya and film director Fyodor Bondarchuk. And Swiss hoteliers are probably adding zeroes to the price of fondue as we speak.

Another destination likely to be offering overpriced Sovietskoye Shampanskoye this New Year’s is Miami, where many Russian pop stars have second or third homes. We’re talking blond crooner Nikolai Baskov, permed superstar Valery Leontyev and the local version of Posh and Becks, popster Natasha Korolyova and her stripper husband Tarzan.

But one beach destination stands out as the ultimate no-no. Ashen-faced vacationers will be canceling their bookings and sticking to the safety of Khimki as they read that Jamaica is due to be invaded by rapper Timati — who, no doubt, will be affecting the local patois within hours of landing. And troubles never come alone. He will be accompanied by celebrity It Girl Ksenia Sobchak.
Source: The Moscow Times

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