James Meek in Moscow
MOST Muscovites, cynical by nature, suspected the giant billboards were a trick to make them buy something they did not want.
Others saw the adverts, featuring a beautiful woman gazing adoringly at all and sundry with the message ‘I love you’, as the latest wheeze by the mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, to bring the feelgood factor to the gloomy winter.
But even Luzhkov does not love Muscovites that much.
Rather, in an extraordinary act of romantic grandeur even by the standards of ‘New Russia’, or possibly ‘in an example of monstrous egotism, the advertising campaign turns out to be strictly a one-to-one affair between a shoe salesman and his wife.
Alexander Sharapov, the 30-year-old boss of the Moscow shoe firm Vena Moda Austria, has spent, advertising executives estimate, tens of thousands of pounds swamping the city with huge images of his wife Svetlana’s face.
He says he did it partly to compensate her for disrupting her modelling career, but mainly out of love.
‘I wanted people to understand that business is business, but that the ‘Russian soul’ is not an empty expression,’ he told Commersant magazine.
Svetlana said: ‘What do I feel now, passing by the posters? A perfect high.’
The country’s nouveaux riches, and their extravagant and ostentatious gestures, are increasingly fascinating ordinary Russians: many are becoming stars of a growing gossip industry in the media.
The presidential election campaign of the parvenu pharmaceutical baron Vladimir Bryntsalov consisted of him and his wife flaunting their luxury lifestyle.
In the latest issue of the business journal Profil, young tycoons boast about their expensive tastes in cigarette lighters.