Modern feminists, take note. A woman can achieve anything in Russia, but it helps to be standing next to a big man. That at least seems to be the lesson from two recent rankings of the country’s leading ladies.
Topping the list at the influential business mag ‘Finans’ is Elena Baturina, owner of the Inteko conglomerate and 45th on the Forbes Russian billionaire rankings. But her surname conceals the fact that she is married to one of the most powerful men in Russia: Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Coincidentally, Inteko’s profits started to go through the roof ever since her husband’s mayoral election, due to some lucrative municipal construction contracts.
Runner up Olga Belyavtseva appears to be self made, having cashed in on Pepsi’s $1.4 billion acquisition of Russia’s biggest juice manufacturer in which she held shares, but what of Number 3?
That accolade went to Natalya Fileva, head of Russia’s leading domestic airline S7. What the list failed to mention however is that the company used to be run by her husband Vladislav Filev.
The second index, prepared by Russia’s Institute of Politics and Business, dealt more with political than financial clout.And topping that was Svetlana Medvedeva, whose main political achievement seems to have been… marrying the Russian president. 
She was joined on the podium by two other cronies: the St Petersburg governor and arch-Putinite Valentina Matvyenko, and the rector of Putin-Medvedev alma mater St Petersburg State University Lyudmila Verbitskaya, who also happened to head Medvedev’s campaign team.
Ironically enough, Matvienko may have got on the list thanks precisely to curbing, rather than pursuing, her political ambitions: on the ‘advice’ of Putin, she cancelled a 2000 presidential bid (in which she would have been a strong female opponent of Putin) and was duly rewarded with the St Petersburg governorship in 2003.
In the immortal words of Richard Williamson, the Holocaust-denying Bishop, “a woman can do a good imitation of handling ideas, but then she will not be thinking properly as a woman. Did this lawyeress check her hairdo before coming into court? If she did, she is a distracted lawyer. If she did not, she is one distorted woman.”
But it’s not as if Mother Russia lacks genuine women leaders. Some true innovators, like computer whiz Olga Uskova, did manage to break into the list (number 5). Armed with both a cybernetics PhD and an MBA, she has been as influential in developing Russia’s IT sector as in tearing down the ‘silicone ceiling’ for women in the high tech industry.
Of course, such trifles are dwarfed by the achievements of the First Lady, “a stylish blonde who often appears in the Russian versions of celebrity magazines “Hello” and “OK”, hailing Russian art or featuring on their “best dressed” lists. Her friends include many Russian celebrities”.
As Stalin once said, “The Pope? How many celebrity friends has HE got?”