Shaman. Airplane and helicopter pilot. Polar explorer. Shipowner and sailor. Furniture representative. Entrepreneur. Honorary Russian citizen since 2014, by decree of President Putin, “the first Italian, and among the first Westerners, to have this honor”. With “the obsession” of becoming “the new Rastrelli, the Italian architect who built Petersburg”. The version of Lanfranco Cirillo, in his autobiography with the untruthful title “Putin’s Architect”, just published by Edizioni Piemme, wants the palace in Gelendzhik, on the Black Sea, not to be the property of the Russian President as Aleksei Navalny had denounced at the beginning of 2021 , in the documentary that brings Cirillo unwanted fame in the news. The residence “is owned by a company to which it was sold by the group” which had entrusted the Italian professional with the task “for the interior design” of a “luxurious guesthouse intended to welcome conferences and important guests, including foreign ones”, he explains in an interview with Adnkronos.
Dollars and euros nowhere to be found, rupees and yuan now dominate
Accused in Italy of unfaithful tax returns and self-laundering, with an international arrest warrant against him, he has not left Moscow for a year and a half. A city where, he says, despite the sanctions on the restaurant menus, there continues to be buffalo mozzarella arrived the same day from Campania or sea bass from the Adriatic. Where even after the start of the war against Ukraine most of the companies remained and the big brands continue to sell. “Not even the shop sign or the merchandise has changed. Only the ownership.” Only large companies such as Enel Russia have closed or sold, but “slowly”.
“The goods travel, via Turkey. The trucks continue to leave from Italy, towards Lithuania, as before”. The big change is that now the currencies of non-friendly countries, the dollar and the euro, are nowhere to be found. Transactions take place in rupees, yuan, Iranian rial. More than 90 percent of Italians remained. “Among them there is a great awareness that the world is changing and the feeling that what is being told is not what we experience here”, she explains.
Cirillo was a three thousand dollar an hour architect for the nouveau riche of the post-Soviet era, a class that he saw born, that he followed over the years and that he knew intimately. To follow the projects of their homes he had founded a company, or rather a Masterskaja, a design workshop that had grown “exponentially”, in which dozens of professionals worked (marble workers, engineers, architects, curtain or sanitary ware experts). How did the Russian oligarchs change after the start of the war? “90 percent of them have been hit by sanctions, they can no longer travel” to the West, even if the borders are not sealed and “the world is big”: their new destinations are the Maldives, the Emirates, the Far East, Vietnam. Over the past year, tastes, interests and the economy “have shifted rapidly. Everything has turned 180 degrees, from west to east.”
The ban on travel to the West, however, is “a very important material limitation”, especially considering that “the dream of these billionaires since the beginning of the 2000s was to be accepted by the international community, not as upstarts, but as a European class”. There is no longer “the ostentation of before. Their tastes are much less eccentric, they are more sober, more modern”.
In the heart of Moscow, rents remain at the level of European capitals
And to give an idea of the trend of the economy, Cirillo, also owner of 10 thousand square meters of offices in the Moscow City complex, testifies that “if before the tenants were Westerners, now the Chinese, the Iranians have arrived in their place Rents remain European capitals. The upper floors range from 6-700 dollars per square meter per year, even 800. The latest contracts I am signing are worth ten percent more than in 2022 and the offices are rented 95 percent.”
The architect was responsible for the residences of hundreds of Russians, the house of the president of Lukoil, Vagit Alekperov – who speaks of him as a “shaman” – his dacha and his son’s house, “eight houses in various places of Siberia, a house in Crimea, which at that time was still Ukraine”, of the floor with the president’s offices in the group’s Moscow headquarters. Then, for the president of Novatec, Alfa Bank and Gazprom. His are the marbles and decorations of the church of the Sretensky monastery, in front of the Lubyanka palace, the headquarters of the Soviet and then Russian secret services, where Metropolitan Tikhon reigns, Putin’s confessor and Cyril’s “brotherly friend”. He carried out “some work for the Kremlin” in Moscow, “even if not as the first recipient of the contract, but simply collaborating with a Yugoslav company that had been commissioned” and before Putin’s arrival. “I provided some of the materials for that great work. About thirty years ago. Afterwards I did other small things there,” he admits.
The Italian architect also restored the National Museum of Tamerlane in Tashkent, signed projects for the palace of the Uzbek President. For dozens of dachas in Rublevka, the exclusive residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Moscow: “magnificent, unlikely, unthinkable houses”. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, new housing, or the renovation of old buildings overlooking the Black Sea. Cirillo – “Italian oligarch in Moscow” – worked “for 44 Russian billionaires from the Forbes list. And for the wife of one of them he designed a $1,372,000 bathroom, “all in mother-of-pearl, onyx and retractable furniture lined with marble, a massive tub also carved out of marble, crystals, TV and hidden audio-video systems behind the mirrors.” “It was beautiful, of course. But it made me laugh a lot and I started making fun of myself: “I’m a shitty architect, I said”, he quips.
Just after renovating the “not Putin’s” Black Sea Palace, he purchased 400 hectares of land in the Krasnodar region where he produces 5-600,000 bottles of wine a year, which he now sells in Russia and Central Asian countries. Bottles for high-end supermarkets and more valuable bottles for restaurants. He wasn’t the only one. Many Russians, he testifies, have opened wineries with Italian oenologists and barrel makers, taking advantage of the non-repayable financing provided by the Russian state. And so, the production of Russian wines has increased while that of Italian products has decreased. The same thing goes for wheat. In 2012 the country imported it, and thanks to government funding for agriculture, “Russia is now independent in terms of food”.
The first dacha on which he was called to intervene in Russia, in 1993, not yet graduated – after leaving the University of Venice, annoyed by the climate of protest, he graduated in Moscow in 1995 – was that of veteran KGB general Aleksandr from Afghanistan. And within a short time, nouveau riche after nouveau riche, he brought “up to 15 trucks of goods a week to Moscow”. “Between 1994 and 1995 I managed to earn something like 150 million lire a month just from commissions.” “In the early 2000s I found myself having as many as 20 construction sites open at the same time, from fifty to one hundred workers per construction site, and I never left even one without my direct supervision”, he recalls in the autobiography he wrote together with the journalist Fiammetta Cucurnia .
“In 2005 there were over one hundred architects working in my studio. Over a thousand people worked on my construction sites. We had ten thousand square meters of warehouse and it wasn’t enough, there were 280 mechanical transport vehicles including trucks, cars, buses, excavators , crane”.
His clients? In the nineties “they began to have increasingly larger fortunes which they had accessed through tortuous and often very mysterious paths. So, the more I entered the circles of these New Russians, the more I listened to their stories and the more I realized that they were not monsters, but only people who had found themselves without warning in that in-between world and wanted to change their lives for the better. A bit like me.”
“Maybe all of them, and me too, are collateral damage of this war. The anti-Russian campaign and the rejection of even Russian culture, from ballet to music to literature, have changed the world. We have all become pawns to be used and thrown away,” it is his personal reconstruction of current events, a reconstruction weakened by what he defines as the “alleged poisoning” of Navalny – which was instead certified by several Western governments and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
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