The Oligarch, His Ex-Wife, Her Mother, and Rupert Murdoch

Russia has little trouble making headlines, and March was no exception. First, tens of thousands of Russians turned out to mourn opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony last month. Then, many Russians lined up to vote against Vladimir Putin in the recent presidential election in a coordinated protest, so that no one could mistake for the truth the Kremlin’s inevitable declaration that Putin had won his fifth six-year term in a landslide. Finally, a horrifying terrorist attack on a concert venue outside of Moscow – attributed to the ISIS-K branch of the Islamic State – killed 143 people and wounded more than 300.

Were it not for so many tragedies, another kind of Russia-related story might have received far more attention. The 93-year-old media mogul Rupert Murdoch – who owns Fox News, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal in the United States, and The Times in the United Kingdom – is engaged to a Soviet-born molecular biologist 25 years his junior, Elena Zhukova.

Murdoch apparently met his bride-to-be through one of her four predecessors, his third wife Wendi Deng, who is a friend of Zhukova’s daughter, Dasha. Deng was born in China, prompting a New York Times journalist to quip to me, «The tycoon is just moving from one authoritarian-born wife to another». He was suggesting that Murdoch may well have a type: «people who think we should all just make money (and sleep together) and not let things like democracy or equality get in the way».

Of course, not all of Murdoch’s wives have been born in authoritarian states. Murdoch’s fourth wife was American model and actress Jerry Hall. He ended that six-year marriage by e-mail in June 2022, and by March 2023, he was proposing to another American, conservative radio host Ann Lesley Smith, who he insisted would be his last wife. Less than three weeks later, however, the engagement was called off, apparently because Murdoch could not accept Smith’s evangelical views.

As much as Murdoch profits from Fox News hosts bloviating about Christian values, he does not live by religious – or perhaps any – values. Instead, he apparently fancies himself a ladies’ man who, even at his advanced age, can trade in women like used cars. But maybe his marriage to Zhukova will be different. In any case, she could help to whet further the public’s voracious appetite for scandalous details of Murdoch’s life – the life that inspired Succession, HBO’s hit drama about a media tycoon and his emotionally crippled, backstabbing brood.

So, who is the next Mrs. Murdoch? A member of the Soviet intelligentsia, Zhukova worked at the state-run Hematology and Blood Transfusion Institute and then continued her research in molecular biology in California after the USSR’s collapse. Like many women moving from the former Soviet Union to the US at the time, she might have hoped for some «Pretty Woman» luck, with a wealthy man showing up to deliver the kind of opulent lifestyle that former Soviet citizens associated with the West. That is what the Czech-born Ivana and the Slovenia-born Melania found in Donald Trump.

But Zhukova is not exactly new to the billionaire lifestyle. Her first husband was the Russian businessman Alexander Zhukov – one of those early-1990s talents who made money by hook or by crook in the post-Soviet «Wild East». This lent her a certain Russian-oligarch glamour, even as she moved on to her second marriage, to a fellow immigrant biologist.

Zhukova is also a former mother-in-law of another Russian billionaire-oligarch, Roman Abramovich, who gained notoriety in the West during his nearly 20 years as owner of London’s Chelsea Football Club. A Kremlin insider, Abramovich has often served as Putin’s backchannel to the West, most prominently as an envoy in peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in the weeks after the full-scale invasion of February 2022. It was because of his links to Putin that the British government forced him to sell Chelsea that year.

Despite her father’s wealth, Dasha entered the public eye only during her ten-year marriage to Abramovich. Eager to be considered more than a socialite, Dasha worked to establish herself as a gallerist and art collector, and became known as a key force behind a posh Moscow art project and exhibition space, the Garage. I was introduced to her there, though when I reached out to shake her hand, she offered me the sleeve of her white silk dress to touch instead.

Dasha’s union with Abramovich ended in 2017, but she did not remain without an oligarch for long. She married Stavros Niarchos, the grandson of a Greek shipping tycoon, in 2020, at a star-studded ceremony in Switzerland. With her impending nuptials to Murdoch, Dasha’s mother will undoubtedly contribute yet another chapter to her family’s story of wealth, power, and tabloid glamor.

As for Murdoch, it seems appropriate that America’s premier purveyor of conspiracy theories would become engaged in his twilight years to an ex-Soviet scientist whose daughter was long part of Putin’s orbit. Succession couldn’t have staged a better dénouement.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024. www.project-syndicate.org

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