“All the genius businessmen managed to appear in the right time in the right place,” says Nikolay Bogachev, an entrepreneur who sold Yamal LNG, a company that controls a natural gas deposit, to Usmanov in 2006. “Gazprom became such a place for Usmanov.”

Usmanov says he is on good terms with the Kremlin insofar as he shares the same values as Putin and Medvedev: “In this regard, I can be called a man close to the country’s authorities.” He says Putin is taking Russia’s economy in the right direction.

Post-Privatization

Usmanov also says he established his fortune without favors from the government. “I am proud that I managed to build a multibillion-dollar business by myself,” he says. “We were buying our assets third or fourth hand, after they had been privatized.”

Kirill Rogov, a senior research fellow at the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy in Moscow, says that this is an important distinction between Usmanov and most of the tycoons who emerged from the Yeltsin era as billionaires. “He didn’t buy his assets in privatizations,” Rogov says.

Usmanov was born in the small town of Chust, Uzbekistan, the eldest of four siblings. His father, Burkhan, was a prosecutor in Tashkent, the capital of what was then a Soviet republic, and his mother, Dilbar, taught Russian. His private jet, which is an Airbus A340, is named for his father, and his yacht is the Dilbar.

Diplomat’s Training

In 1976, Usmanov graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, a prestigious school connected to the foreign ministry. The institute trains diplomats, but Usmanov didn’t become one.

He returned to Uzbekistan and worked for Komsomol, the communist party youth organization. By 1980, a conviction for fraud and embezzlement sent him to prison for six years, even though the case was later overturned and expunged from his record. He says the allegations were fake, made up to hurt the father of a friend. Uzbekistan’s highest court in 2000 ruled there had been no crime, according to a description of the matter in the prospectus for last year’s IPO of MegaFon OAO, the Moscow-based phone company Usmanov controls.

By the time Usmanov picked up his career in the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev was in the Kremlin and the state’s grip on the economy was loosening in the Soviet Union’s final years. Working with partners, he founded a venture called Agroplast, which manufactured plastic bags. Then he expanded into the importing of cheap American cigarettes. In 1997, Usmanov completed another degree, at the Russian government’s Finance Academy, where the alumni include some of the country’s most prominent businessmen, such as Mikhail Prokhorov.