The founder of one of the largest Russian Wildberries marketplaces is Tatyana Bakalchuk.
Photo: SOCIAL NETWORKS.
The divorce of the founder of the Wildberries online store, Tatyana Bakalchuk, from her husband has already been called by many the divorce of the year. However, the richest woman in Russia (Forbes estimates her fortune at 7.4 billion dollars) announced her separation from her husband after 20 years of marriage, in which they have seven children, and the story itself has already been marked by a series of scandals. The husband, Vladislav Bakalchuk, managed to announce that his wife had left home and “contacted an incomprehensible company that, under the guise of a merger, is squeezing the business.” Tatyana herself did not remain silent either, explaining that this is not “a raider takeover, it is a scam.”
On Saturday, the richest woman in the country gave a long interview on Svetlana Bondarchuk’s Sveta Around the World channel, where she spoke, among other things, about the details of the breakup. Komsomolskaya Pravda publishes the most interesting excerpts from this conversation.
ABOUT CHILDHOOD
– There was bullying in childhood, too. I am, as they say, a nationalist, well, I have such an individual appearance. Now, this really has its benefits. My daughters say: “Mom, how lucky you are, you have such a beautiful eye shape, you are pure Korean. Now there is a trend for dramas, there are even stories where Russian girls give themselves Asian eye shapes. In my childhood it was the other way around; for some reason the Chinese made fun of us…
But I had a good, happy childhood at first. We lived in a village owned by Mostrangaz, my father worked as an engineer, my mother was the director of a kindergarten, then she went to school… I learned to read at the age of 5, I read avidly. Mom says: “go to bed”, but you can’t put the book down, because you wonder what’s next, and you’re with a book under the blanket, with a flashlight!.. I love fantasy, science fiction. . There was a story that every Soviet child had: when you go on vacation and that’s it: Jules Verne, Mine Reed too, and all that adventure literature that you can’t part with… And they played Indians, climbed apple trees. , I remember how I sat in the huts, these “peace tubes”.
We had a normal family, as if there was a vegetable garden and flower beds, cucumbers, potatoes, blackcurrants and cherries. You definitely have to trim this currant bush, pick the cherries and cucumbers in the morning, water the currants, remove the weeds… And then mom got to work, you did everything and went for a walk with your friends to the river.
Tatyana Bakalchuk has four daughters.
Photo: Personal archive.
ABOUT FIRST LOVE
– To be honest, my first love was almost in kindergarten, in my opinion, it was a music teacher… At school we all had a crush on the same boy, until a girl came to our class and said: “Tanya, who is the coolest boy in your class?” I say: “This one”. She: “This one?! Look at his ears!” And then I think: “It’s really impossible to love him, he has such ears!”
ABOUT THE NEW HOME AND THE DAUGHTERS
– This, you might say, is my new home, I recently rented it and moved my mother and children here. We’ve been here for about a week, settling in, there are children’s toys there… The two eldest are studying at the university, another is waiting to be accepted, the youngest is at school. Last week there was a combination of a mini-vacation and a business trip to Belarus, I took them with me… The eldest is rather a tomboy, she is a biologist, Sasha is a physicist, by the way, she passed the Unified State Exam in Physics with 100 points, for the first time in the history of her gymnasium, that’s all. They are proud of her there… The third, I don’t know where she will go yet, she has so much liveliness and fire, her associative series works quickly.
ON THE NUMBER OF CHILDREN
– Of course, in my youth I didn’t think that I would have so many children, maybe two… Since there were three of us in the family, it was considered that the family had many children, and I remember that my mother was worried, because they also looked at them a little askance – to have many children. And then it was still difficult with food, everyone was given cards, we were given more and somehow they didn’t look at us very well, my mother read it well. And I thought that I would never have so many children in my life… But somehow it happened…
I truly believe that with every child comes a lot of energy. They say: God gave you a child and He will give you a child too. I will speak for myself: I am clear that when a child is born you have a huge amount of energy. And I spend this energy both on my child and on my business.
ON THE FATHER’S COMMUNICATION WITH HIS CHILDREN
– Yes, he communicates, I don’t interfere with this at all. I’m not going to tell everything that happened between us, even if there are negative aspects, I’m not going to denigrate him. I can say that before I told him that I wanted to leave, he didn’t take much part in the children’s lives, basically my mother helped, that was the kind of family we had; he could say that all children should play sports, well, that’s okay, I’m also for that. Or: “We don’t eat sugar” – that’s also normal. Or “Summer has come, let’s reduce calories” – well, these were the instructions he gave. For the last 2-3 years he spent a lot of time outside Russia – he liked warm countries more. When the children grew up, I told him: “Let me bring the children.” They lived in Turkey for two months, in Dubai, I flew there.
Now I want to say that he started spending a lot of time with the children, apparently he finally realized that children are still the most important thing in a person’s life. Of course, he loves children because they are his children and he likes to spend time with them. Of course, there was one episode, but I already talked about it on the TG channel. He came to my mother, she and the children were in Turkey, they were already getting ready for bed, he sat them on the carpet and said to the nanny: “Take it off and then put it in the chat.” And then, on some yellow channel, a caption appears: the poor, unfortunate father is forced to take care of seven children, while his wife does not understand what he is doing. To be honest, I was very shocked. I do not want to comment, I do not know why he did it, I just think that a person should always be human and act according to his conscience. Let him later, when the children grow up, tell them why he did it.
Vladislav Bakalchuk. Photo: kadyrov_95/t.me
ABOUT THE REASONS FOR SEPARATION
– This, of course, did not happen in a second. Although my relatives, my mother and sisters always said that you cannot build the life of your loved ones around one person. We had it to such an extent that it was banal, perhaps, a holiday, and if he did not like something, all the guests got up and left. There were many moments that are now called “emotional swings”, “abusive behavior”, but I loved him, after all, he was the father of the children, I was really an ideal wife. My sister recently said: “You revolved around him and dragged everyone with you, everyone revolved around one person.” It is good when you give to a person and receive in return, and any correct relationship should be based on this. But when you give, give, give, and you get nothing in return, and after a while they start hitting you emotionally with a truncheon, you begin to understand that something is probably wrong… The last two years, perhaps, affected by the fact that he began to spend a lot of time away from home. He had no other relationships, he just felt uncomfortable. There were many things that were not quite right in his actions, there were many things that a good man should not allow himself to do in relation to his wife, or to his children, or to his wife’s mother…
The point of no return came last fall. There was a not-so-pleasant scene at home, terrible words were thrown in my face, and I realized that I had found myself in the wrong place, that I would not tolerate such an attitude towards myself. At that moment, I realized that if a similar situation were to happen again, I would most likely say that I could not take it anymore. I remember sitting and listening to how they threw mud at me and my mother for nothing, for nothing, and I realized that that was it, I would not tolerate it anymore.
Not a day or a week went by without him telling me: if you behave badly I will divorce you, every other day he said those things. In winter everything got even worse and in April I moved out because I simply couldn’t take it anymore. Of course, for him it was out of the blue, because everything was fine for him. He didn’t plan on getting divorced, it was a very emotional blow that he used on me.
I think that after this, no self-respecting woman would stay in such a family. I realized that if I continue to treat myself this way, my daughters will not be proper people and I will suffer from the fact that they have unhappy marriages. I would not want my children to behave in such an unpleasant way towards their loved ones. I realized that it was my duty to try to fix something.
On the one hand, it’s good that it happened like this: he started coming to school, to his son’s graduation. Somehow he realized that people are not just given to you and you will always have the love of children, of someone else, but that you have to earn it, you have to participate in the lives of children, he realized that there is more than one center of the universe.
His way of communicating with employees is also unacceptable. He is as much in the family with people as he is at work. He was not like that 20 years ago. I thought that this was the perfect person, very kind. There are psychological experiments when they divide a group: some are like jailers, others like prisoners. And no matter how good a person you are, if you play a role that involves violence towards another, people change. I think this is partly my fault, because the fact that I jumped on my hind legs all my life corrupted the man. He felt that he was really God, that he could do whatever he wanted, that I would always come, save everything, both at work and everywhere with my breasts in the embrasure, and that in general I was a great woman who could do anything, could do anything, and a galloping horse, and in a burning hut, and raise seven children, and run a house, and a business, and wander around the country…
Of course, when he first tried to get into an abusive relationship, I should have said, “I’m sorry, honey, I don’t agree.” But I didn’t say anything, and then I didn’t say anything again, and somehow this became normal for us.
The divorce of the founder of the Wildberries online store, Tatyana Bakalchuk, from her husband has already been called by many the divorce of the year.
Photo: Personal archive.
ABOUT EXTERNAL INTERVENTION
– It was a big surprise for me to learn that he has been friends with him (Ramzan Kadyrov) for 10 years, but for God’s sake, let him talk about his relationship with Ramzan Akhmatovich himself.
I don’t know what I need to be saved from, everything is fine with me and I am not a bedside table or a piece of furniture that needs to be put back somewhere. I think that family relations are a matter for these two people, children and relatives, but not for people at the country level. Well, now let the whole country consider whether I should return to my family or not. Maybe he has some kind of secret life, which I didn’t know about, that he is friends with Timati and Prigozhin, maybe with someone else.
Getting divorced is my conscious decision. Nobody stole my family from me, nobody forced me to do anything.
ABOUT NEW RELATIONSHIPS
– Psychologists do not recommend starting a new relationship right away. How can I say: “Yes, I want to get married”? No, I don’t plan to and don’t intend to do it yet. I am quite comfortable living the way I live. I will probably meet someone, I am still a living person, but I am not dating anyone yet. I officially declare: I am not in any relationship with anyone. If someone suddenly wonders whether I am sleeping there with someone or not, I don’t. A woman, I think, does not leave for someone (it is a man who leaves for someone), but leaves someone. If a woman leaves the family, it means that she is fed up to such an extent that she simply cannot stay there anymore.
Tatyana Bakalchuk (second from left) loves active recreation. Next to her are her sisters and her brother’s wife. Photo: Personal archive of Tatiana Bakalchuk.
ABOUT FAMILY HISTORY
– To my shame, I don’t know the family history, but I know that my grandparents were deported along with other Koreans from the Far East. My mother’s parents ended up in Uzbekistan, where she was born, and my father’s in Kazakhstan. At that time, my mother’s mother died very early and they were left alone because her father married for the second time, in fact he left the family and they grew up alone, so they have a very strong and friendly family. They said that there were times when grass had to be mixed into the food, life was hard… My grandmother on my father’s side made an agreement with someone there, then my father came and met my mother. According to her story: he came to visit, she saw him in person for the first time, we talked and he asked her: “Will you marry me?” Mom said: “Okay, I will.” After that they got married.
My mother’s family lived in Grozny and my grandmother is buried there, they lived there. Dad studied in Leningrad, then came, they got married, then he was assigned to the Moscow region and when I was 1 year old we moved to Moscow.
ABOUT THE MOST EXPENSIVE PURCHASE
– Probably the most expensive purchase I ever made was a violin, which I gave to my daughter. In my opinion, it was in the middle of the 19th century: a teacher once said that it is no longer necessary to buy a student violin, but a real one. It cost about 400 thousand rubles.
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