Yevgeny Chichvarkin

Yevgeny Chichvarkin: From Flea Market to Mayfair Exile

He left Russia, by his own account, lying face down in the back of a car. Behind him was Yevroset, a chain of more than five thousand mobile phone shops across twelve countries that he had built from nothing in eleven years and had just sold at what he considered a knock-down price. Ahead was London, a criminal case he insists was fabricated, and eventually a wine shop in Mayfair with a 1774 bottle of Jura on the shelf at £72,553.80. Few business lives compress quite so much into so short a span.

Trading Off a Table

Chichvarkin was born on 10 September 1974 in Leningrad. His father Aleksandr, from Moscow, was a pilot; his mother Lyudmila, of Tatar descent, was an economist for the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade. He studied at the State University of Management from 1991 to 1996 — precisely the years in which the Soviet economy dissolved — and financed himself by trading on Moscow's flea markets while he did it. He started a PhD and abandoned it in 1998.

The flea market is the relevant education. Everything Chichvarkin later did at scale was learned selling goods off a table to people who could walk away: price aggressively, move volume, make noise.

Yevroset

In 1997 he and his friend Timur Artemev started selling mobile phones. The growth curve that followed is close to unbelievable. By 2002 Yevroset was among Moscow's top three retailers with 92 outlets. Then it opened 100 new outlets in 2002, 117 in 2003, 800 in 2004 and 1,934 in 2005. By 2007 there were 5,156 Yevroset shops in twelve countries across Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

The model was low margin and high volume — sell handsets cheap, make the money on turnover and network commissions — executed in a country where retail infrastructure barely existed and where the mobile phone was going from luxury to necessity in the space of a few years. Chichvarkin marketed it with a deliberate vulgarity that made Yevroset impossible to ignore, and he made himself the brand: the Dalí moustache, the gold tooth earring, the clothes. In 2005 Ernst & Young named him Entrepreneur of the Year, and Yevroset took both Superbrand-2005 and Brand of the Year / EFFIE 2005. He became one of Russia's youngest billionaires.

The Case

What happened next is contested, and what follows is what the sources state. From 2005 Chichvarkin's business drew a sequence of official actions. In August 2005 he was accused over the illegal import of a $100 million shipment of mobile phones; the accusation was later dropped. In March 2006 authorities seized a Motorola shipment, citing microwave radiation. In 2007 employees' apartments were searched in connection with the Dmitry Sidorov tax case.

The decisive episode came in 2008. Yevroset's headquarters were searched over an employee, Andrey Vlaskin, alleged to have stolen mobile phones worth around 20 million rubles — roughly a million dollars — in 2003. The company was then accused of kidnapping, illegal imprisonment and extortion in its handling of him. Chichvarkin has consistently denied the allegations and described them as fabricated.

On 21 September 2008 he sold Yevroset to Alexander Mamut for approximately $400 million; Time reports the sale was at a cut price. In January 2009 he moved to the United Kingdom and was placed on a Russian federal search list. He resisted extradition.

The case then collapsed. On 17 November 2010 a jury found all the defendants in the Vlaskin case not guilty. On 20 January 2011 the Supreme Court rejected the prosecution's appeal, charges were withdrawn shortly afterwards, and on 25 January 2011 Interpol discontinued the international search. Chichvarkin also alleges state involvement in the death of his mother in Moscow in 2010, while acknowledging that the official verdict was a heart attack; the Kremlin denies any involvement.

Hedonism

In August 2012 he opened Hedonism Wines on Davies Street in Mayfair — a shop built on the same instinct that drove Yevroset, inverted. Where Yevroset was cheap and loud, Hedonism is the deepest fine-wine inventory in London, stocked with bottles most merchants would never dare hold. The trade agreed: Wine Merchant of the Year at the Decanter World Wine Awards in 2013, followed by a run of Retail Week and Mayfair Awards through 2018. Time called it the world's best wineshop.

Alongside it he became a visible figure in London — playing polo with Princes William and Harry, according to Time — and a persistent political irritant to Moscow. He has protested over the dangers of doing business in Russia, invoking Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Sergei Magnitsky, and has donated more than $100,000 to Alexei Navalny's opposition movement since 2010. In 2014 he warned of multiple wars if Putin's Russia were not stopped by the Western world; in 2019 he accused Putin of steering Russia into a war with non-existent enemies. After the invasion of Ukraine he argued for NATO troops and no-fly zones rather than sanctions, dismissing the seizure of yachts as ineffective and calling broad sanctions on wealthy Russians "discrimination" — measures should target Putin, his family and the military, he said. "Russians are not Putin." Asked how Russia becomes free, his answer was bleak: "Everybody's waiting for Putin to die," though "Ukraine winning the war would help."

Why Yevgeny Is Called a Genius

The case is commercial and it is about speed. Opening 1,934 retail outlets in a single year, across countries with no reliable logistics, no established retail property market and no consumer credit, is an operational feat that very few retailers anywhere have matched. Chichvarkin saw before almost anyone that Russia's mobile phone market would go from nothing to universal in under a decade, and he built the distribution to capture it while the incumbents were still deliberating. Attached to that was a marketing intelligence of a specific and unusual kind: he understood that in a market with no brand loyalty, attention was the scarce good, and he manufactured it by being deliberately outrageous — making himself, moustache and all, the memorable thing. Ernst & Young's 2005 award and the brand prizes were the industry acknowledging that this was skill rather than luck.

The counter-case is real and worth stating. This was distribution, not invention: Chichvarkin sold other people's handsets, and the underlying technology, the networks and the demand were all created by others. His timing was superb, but he was in the right country at the right moment in a way no one can claim credit for. And the second act, however elegant, is a shop. Hedonism is a triumph of taste and nerve, but a Mayfair wine merchant is not a billion-dollar retail network, and Chichvarkin himself has been candid that what happened to him in Russia — whatever its cause — ended the career that mattered. The word that fits him better than genius is operator: someone who could move faster than everyone else in the room.

Legacy

Chichvarkin is one of the clearest illustrations of what Russia's private sector could produce in its brief open period, and of how abruptly it could be closed down. He built a company that reached five thousand shops and twelve countries; he lost it at thirty-four; a jury cleared him and his colleagues two years later, by which time he was living in another country and could not go back. In London he became something Moscow did not intend: a wealthy, articulate, permanently visible critic of the government that drove him out, funding its opponents from a shop on Davies Street.

Achievements

• Educated at State University of Management