The rise and fall of Londongrad

WEARING NOTHING but a pair of shorts and a felt cap on his head, the thickset man lifts two bunches of oak, birch and eucalyptus leaves above his head. After wafting a wall of hot air across the 90-degree-Celsius sauna, he rhythmically pounds the prostrate body before him. Sweat and steam bounce upwards with each stroke. After ten minutes of thudding, and a strong sensation that his own skeleton is overheating, the dazed victim is led outside, where a bucket of water is upended over his head. A near-freezing plunge pool is the next destination. Shivering slightly, the recipient is dried and propped up in a stupor against a tree stump. A banya, or Russian bathhouse, is not for the faint-hearted. But there are few better locations in which to contemplate the rise and fall of Londongrad.

Along with Moscow-on-Thames, Londongrad is a well-merited nickname for the British capital, which has been a hub for Russian money since the fall of the Soviet Union. Although London’s East End played host to a few Russian bathhouses in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it is in recent years that swanky versions have proliferated throughout the city. Likewise, London has long played host to Russian dissidents, émigrés and expatriates; Lenin and Trotsky would hang out in the British Museum. But it was only in the 1990s that Londongrad began to emerge, featuring newly minted billionaires and a gaggle of flunkeys to serve them.