*Anna's party-girl London flatmate has shown up after (or during) a fit of mental illness, and our Lena has quite a tale to tell.
The story began with a classified advertisement: ‘Young woman, non-smoker, wanted to share a three-room flat in Mayfair. Call Anya.’
With a name like that, thought Lena Savitskaya, the advertiser was probably a fellow Russian speaker. So she phoned the number.
The woman who answered sounded ‘cool’. Lena took the room, in a block across the street from the Brazilian Embassy. Her new flatmate was indeed a Russian, called Anna Chapman (Anya is a diminutive of Anna). It was a meeting, Lena says, that was to ‘ruin’ her life.
This is the story of two very attractive and ambitious young women from the former Soviet Union who shared a home in London’s most expensive district.
For two years they lived and partied together, seeking the company of wealthy and powerful men, some of whom, not insignificantly, were exiled enemies of the Kremlin. Boris Berezovsky — the billionaire and perhaps leading critic of the then Russian President Vladamir Putin — was on their speed dials.
(((Quite of bit of interesting backstory here about Anna, but the toll on Lena is pretty interesting; Lena, apparently, had no state support. Or maybe that demimonde was just a tough life.)))
(...)
What happened to Lena in the months that followed is not totally clear. She herself is hazy, but there seems little doubt that she fell victim to her own fragile mental state.
According to Lena’s family in Belarus (her mother says she hasn’t seen her daughter in three years) Lena suffered a catastrophic decline after she lost her job.
She was for a time supported by a man whom friends and family confirm was a sixtysomething millionaire American lawyer, who visited England only a few days every month. He kept Lena in a flat in Jermyn Street and gave her the equivalent of more than £100,000 a year.
‘I hated the sex with him, but I needed the money,’ she shrugs. Eventually, inevitably, the lawyer tired of Lena and her problems.
First, he moved her to a cheaper flat in Marylebone. Then he dropped her altogether. This coincided with the death from cancer of her father — a musician — and precipitated another mental collapse.
Lena was well known to the staff of the restaurant beneath her flat. The owner recalls how she would come down to eat soup, for which she would sometimes pay with a £50 note.
On occasion, a black Bentley would draw up outside and the chauffeur would wave her in.
‘In the evenings, she would appear beautifully dressed and be picked up by men in big cars. I just assumed she was a hooker,’ he says.
Sometimes Lena would appear in the street in her nightie and bare feet, and wander into cafes and drink leftover wine. She kicked at doors and was arrested for causing a nuisance in front of a nearby pub.
One neighbour this week said: ‘Sometimes you could even see her dancing naked in front of the window. She was a car crash of a human being.’
Police sources say that in January this year she was arrested for assault on a female PC and two community support officers and subsequently sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
Lena told me the incident had happened at Russian New Year and was a ‘drunken misunderstanding’. I don’t believe her.
Neighbours of hers I spoke to in Marylebone described her absconding from a West London psychiatric unit and being re-arrested. More recently, she has been living in council accommodation.
And what of her relationship with the woman who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country after she was arrested by the FBI in June?
Lena says that she last saw Chapman a year ago in London. She says: ‘I got a message from Anna — who was at the time living in Moscow but preparing to move to the States — saying: ‘I am here and looking for you. My life is so good now. I am very happy.’
The two girls met for a drink at a hotel in Knightsbridge. The next time Lena saw Anna, it was on the front page of a newspaper, accused of espionage.
Was Chapman a spy in London? Lena will not or cannot tell, although she says Chapman’s character and behaviour would not preclude it.
