Lyubomir (Indekovich) Tyan, in magazines: the Nizhny Novgorod Sun King — a hospitable businessman who accumulated his initial capital in Nizhny Novgorod. The informal leader of the Nizhny Novgorod Korean diaspora in the capitals of our homeland. Since the beginning of the "roaring nineties" he has been known as the founder of the grain company "Lindek"; he became effectively a monopolist, the bread king of the Nizhny Novgorod Region. He then bankrupted the main Nizhny Novgorod enterprises that were part of the holding and moved to Moscow, where he fills advisory posts in various Moscow public associations.
He was repeatedly elected a deputy at all levels, including the State Duma, for the United Russia" Party. Former deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Agrarian Issues.
Married, has a son and a brother, German.
Hobbies: magic tricks, singing, helping the Russian Orthodox Church, distributing photographs of himself wearing orders and medals, holding Korean festivals, bringing up his son.
Biography
Lyubomir Tyan was born in Uzbekistan on 25 May 1959.
He graduated from the Kazan Institute of Civil Engineering and from the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the State University — Higher School of Economics.
After graduating from the institute he worked for three years at the Kostirikha reinforced concrete products plant (The City of Gorky) in positions ranging from foreman to acting director. After a conflict with the plant's Nizhny Novgorod Regional Committee he was dismissed.
He traded at the markets of Gorky.
He worked at a military base in positions ranging from mechanic to chief engineer; was a leaseholder farmer in the Rostov Region, engaged in vegetable growing; headed the company "Soraksan", a wholesale fruit and vegetable trader.
Since 1991 — president of the grain company "LINDEK" (the city of Nizhny Novgorod), which initially traded in grain and later moved into bread production.
In March 1998 he was elected a deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Nizhny Novgorod Region of the second convocation for electoral district No. 14; in March 2002 he was elected a deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Nizhny Novgorod Region of the third convocation, and in April 2002 he was elected deputy chairman of the Legislative Assembly's Committee on Agrarian Issues; he was elected to the State Duma of the Russian Federation for the Kanavino single-mandate electoral district No. 120 of the Nizhny Novgorod Region, was a member of the "United Russia" faction and deputy chairman of the Committee on Agrarian Issues.
Tyan's outlook on the world
|
Lyubomir Tyan has been called both the bread king and the chief jester of Nizhny Novgorod. His flour-milling empire collapsed — business is fickle. But nobody can take away a man's sense of humour. "Right now I am a king with no clothes!" laughs Tyan. Only a strong person can laugh at himself.
Even in childhood he settled on a simple truth for himself: even if you have lost, do not take off the winner's mask. That is what helped Lyubomir Tyan travel the road from circus juggler (? — the editors of N.E.) to deputy of the State Duma. Having reached certain heights in politics, people usually concentrate all their attention on political activity alone. But that is not about Tyan. Lyubomir Indekovich cares about something else. For instance, what more can be done so that Nizhny Novgorod is not merely called the third capital but truly becomes one. He decided to draw attention both to the city and, of course, to himself in a most unusual way. The deputy of the State Duma took up singing. Today our deputy's discs are issued in print runs of many thousands. He honestly admits that he knows his native Korean far worse than Russian and Tatar. And of all cities he loves most of all Kazan, where his student years were spent, and Nizhny Novgorod, which he considers his home city. |
|
Way of life
The magazine "KRASIVYE LYUDI", Katerina Zolina 26 February 2007
Lyubomir Tyan's guest palace
The house of Lyubomir Tyan, the well-known Nizhny Novgorod entrepreneur and State Duma deputy, is not hard to find. Taxi drivers call the place "the doss house", because most of the residents of the mansions in this cottage settlement are not registered at the homes they live in. The settlement's second name is even easier to understand — "the place where Tyan's residence is". The owner himself calls his three-storey mansion a house for guests. And that is understandable... These days the State Duma deputy is rarely even in Nizhny, once a month, when he comes to meet his voters. And even then he drops into his house for some forty minutes, to change clothes and drink tea with beautiful people.
Tea for every taste
Strolling through Lyubomir Tyan's house in the owner's absence is like a private-museum tour laid on for an honoured guest. In the hall with its veranda in the Uzbek national style, with backgammon and mattress-rugs around the tea table, the silent house keeper will assign you a hook for your coat and hand you slippers in your size. An old English mastiff will show you into the formal drawing room in the style of Louis XIV, where it is impossible to concentrate on any one thing — brocade, gold, couches with curlicues, a long white table with 12 chairs from a palace and a mass of assorted little vases, floor-standing jugs, mantelpiece figurines and clocks... Before you have finished running your eyes over the room, tea with Eastern and European sweets is already on the table in front of you. Eat, dear guests! And meanwhile the keeper will restore to the rooms their museum freshness and inviolability. Let us begin the tour with the basement...
A man to punch and a pool with a crocodile
The entire basement floor of the mansion has been given over by the owner to putting the body in order. In the gym there is a table tennis table. The balls on the table are covered by a bat — as though someone had only just stepped away from it. And in the place of honour stands a boxing trainer — a rubber male torso, bare to the waist, with a "stone" face. The muscular beauty is purely for relieving stress. For inspiration there is a female silhouette in a painting in the anteroom, beyond whose doors is everything a modern sauna is supposed to have — a corner of exotic jungle with a stuffed caiman, a heated pool, a wooden bathhouse with a small stove and a rest room with a massage table and a library of glossy magazines. If you are going to relax, do it beautifully. We surface to joyful barking — the owner has arrived!
The night club "One Hundred Tyans"
Five minutes for greetings, and our tour begins again - this time from the top down. We follow the host up a spiral staircase without railings straight to the third floor. The warm attic is at once a study, a billiard room, a costume room, a cinema, and even a chamber philharmonic hall with a stage, concert equipment and a mass of musical instruments in the corners. Lyubomir Indekovich calls the attic a night club for dear guests and numerous relatives.
The host: In my student years I was given the nickname "much ado about nothing". In any company I was always the leader, I made everyone laugh, cheered them up and entertained them. I love my friends very much, I have many of them and I love hosting them all. My house is so grand precisely because it was built for guests and not for ordinary everyday living. This house is 15 years old, and I spent half of that time building it. From the very start I planned a large house so that the whole family could gather at weekends. The thing is, I grew up in a large family.
Mother had nine of us - seven brothers and two sisters. I moved all my close relatives to Nizhny Novgorod. Today the Tyan family clan is the largest in the city, counting all the relatives - husbands, wives and children. There are a hundred Tyans! You can imagine, you cannot gather such a crowd in an apartment. But at my place a hundred people fit comfortably in the attic. We live as one community. And that is the most important tradition! While he was alive, Father gathered us every week to discuss important matters. And now, when we are together, we do not even need to invite performers! Every one of the Tyans is a master of some genre. Father, despite his humble social origins (half-worker, half-peasant), played the violin, the guitar and the mandolin. And he instilled in us children a love of art. I, for instance, am a master of humour...
Still, the guests who gather in Tyan's Night Club are the most varied - Korean relatives never seen in high society and people who are very well known, whose names flash on posters and in political forecasts. Kobzon, Aziza, Boris Nemtsov... All of them are good friends of this house. They come, some openly, some incognito. They rest from the bustle in body and soul. And in the evenings they gather in the attic - they play billiards, talk, drink beer and listen to solo vocal and instrumental concerts performed by the hospitable host. Lyubomir Tyan has something to show for himself - he has performed on professional stages, and the deputy also has joint recordings with well-known artists. But among friends he is more often a comedian.
The host: Do not forget that in my day I was the only artist of the variety genre at the Tatar Philharmonic - a magician, an illusionist, a performer of the spoken genre, all in one person. That is why my main role as a true master of the house is to entertain and indulge my guests.
Collections
The setting of the "night club" is sustained in a multinational style. Along the walls hang robes embroidered with gold and huge woven hats, and the niches are filled with all sorts of helmets, headgear and panama hats from different eras and peoples. The costume collection is the host's hobby. Lyubomir Indekovich has been collecting headdresses for many years. He has Mexican sombreros, tyubeteikas from Uzbekistan, the helmet of an English policeman, an aviator's helmet from the days of Soviet aviation given by Nizhny Novgorod pilots, the military headgear of a Spartan and of an ancient Filipino warrior. The last one is astonishing: it is woven from ordinary straw, yet it withstands the blow of a real blade!
The host: When I had the chance to travel, and I have been almost all over the world. So that a memory would remain, I decided to bring back national headdresses from every country I visited. In my view, nothing marks belonging to a nationality as clearly as a headdress. Besides, as a souvenir it is inexpensive and original.
Another of Lyubomir Tyan's collections is weapons - a purely masculine passion. In the gun room you can find every type of combat firearm permitted in our country. And a huge collection of edged weapons - knives, blades, sabres, yataghans, a sword-pistol - Yet Tyan is not a hunter, and claims he could not kill even a mouse. Although something of the hunter does flicker in the collector's gaze...
Bugrov. Incomplete parallels
However, the walls of the study part of the hall are hung not only with straw hats and fezzes. There are portraits of political leaders, major businessmen, famous performers. An antique table with green baize and a chiming clock - things which, according to Tyan, once belonged to the well-known Nizhny Novgorod merchant Bugrov.
The host: I dug them up, repaired them and preserved them because I once noticed that my destiny and that of this great man run, as it were, in parallel. Look, Bugrov, like me, was in the grain business, he too was a philanthropist and a patron of the arts, he obtained the right to supply bread to the whole army under the Tsar-Father, and I obtained similar rights from the President. The only difference between us is that for every girl Bugrov seduced he bought a house. In that respect I lag behind him (laughs)... I have only one house. And I stopped drawing parallels once I read Bugrov biography to the end. It turns out he was a very unhappy man - his wives died for no reason, and he himself died alone, without heirs. Now that is truly frightening! I too now live alone in this house... And that is not right!
A pink bedroom for the "Little Prince"
We agree, it is not right! All the more so since the "lonely" host's house has four luxurious bedrooms, each made with love and attention. When he was building the house, Lyubomir Tyan planned that his family would have two children - a boy and a girl. Hence the first two bedrooms for the children, and two more for his parents and for himself and his wife. Three bedrooms are now guest rooms, frozen in full dress in expectation of a visitor. But one, the brightest and most cheerful, the pink one, keeps the heartbeat going in the big house. It is the host's bedroom. The enormous bed with a coverlet the colour of dawn, the wardrobe with carved little roses and the dressing table, styled after Baroque boudoirs, arouse amazement and unrestrained delight in every single female visitor. Meanwhile the owner of this palatial boudoir explains its origin in an entirely logical way...
The host: The bed in my bedroom had to be big... I grew up in a poor, large family. And in our house none of the children knew where he would sleep that night. Most often I had to sleep with my younger brother on an iron cot. He would lie next to the wall, and I on the edge. When he kicked in the night, I fell to the floor and woke up in fright. Because of that I was sometimes even afraid to fall asleep... That was when I decided that when I grew up I would certainly buy myself an enormous bed. It was the dream of a prince's life in a man who had grown up on the edge of poverty and destitution. Yes, I dreamed of my own palace... And I built it. Myself.
The eclecticism of a man of the world
A construction engineer by profession, Lyubomir Tyan both planned and decorated his house himself. The palatial chandeliers of multicoloured crystal, the carved furniture, the black marble fireplace, the moulded ceilings, the gilding on every projecting detail of the interior, the curtain fabrics - the entire decoration of the house down to the smallest detail is the work of his own taste. All the items were commissioned from private craftsmen. The furniture was ordered from Spanish and Italian factories and brought in through the Arab Emirates.
The floor vases and silk Lyubomir Tyan brought from China, the dolls from Spain, the carnival masks from the Czech Republic. All of this now adorns the rooms of the "Nizhny Novgorod Sun King".
And this eclecticism of the palatial style conveys the spirit of the host himself. After all, his name is LYUBOMIR. The world has no borders for him! Different world cultures, religions and traditions have come together in this man: by nationality he is Korean (Koreans have historically professed Buddhism), he was born in Uzbekistan, grew up in Kazakhstan, and was educated in Tatarstan (all these lands profess Islam). At the same time he lives, as he puts it himself, "in Russia-stan" and speaks only Russian. And besides, Vladimir Dahl used to say that a person belongs to the nationality of the language in which he speaks, sleeps, works and thinks.
The host: The stylistic play on words of my house comes from my own personal play on words: with a Korean face, a Russian soul, a Muslim mentality and an Asian filling. All of this is dear to me, I love each of these things separately, and all of them live with me in one house. Yes, I am unconventional and contradictory for many people. But the world and I understand each other completely!
A festival of the harvest and Korean traditions
The festival, organised by the Korean National Autonomy of the Nizhny Novgorod Region, was held in the "Jupiter" concert hall.
In Korean the festival is called "Chuseok", which in translation means "the joy of abundance". Its tradition goes back to deep antiquity - people who have gathered the harvest must give thanks to the generous earth, the kind sky and the gentle sun that granted life. What is life without a harvest?
Every people has a tradition of celebrating the gathering of the harvest, which is easy to explain by the universal human significance of this event. It is no accident that our Nizhny Novgorod "Chuseok" went beyond the bounds of a narrowly national celebration, for about 100 nationalities live in Nizhny Novgorod, each with its own history and culture.
With many of them the cultural centre of the Korean National Autonomy does not merely cooperate but has long been friends. And what is a festival without friends? Invited to celebrate the harvest together were representatives of the Tatar community, of the Jewish cultural centre "Tzvi Hirsh" and of the "Hesed Sarah" charitable foundation, representatives of the Armenian diaspora and, of course, Russian musical performing ensembles.
In addition, welcome guests and participants in the festival were activists of the public self-government councils of the Nizhegorodsky District.
In the foyer of the concert hall an exhibition was arranged of the gifts of autumn, gathered in the forest and grown on their own garden plots by residents of the "Usilovsky" neighbourhood. The originally arranged fruits and vegetables immediately drew the attention of everyone who came to the festival. Exclusive exhibits were prepared for the display by the women's council of the Nizhegorodsky District. Unusual sculptures of tasty rich dough were baked in honour of the festival by bakers and confectioners from Bor and Buturlino, and Jewish and Tatar craftswomen treated everyone who wished to national sweets.
It was especially crowded near their stands and counters: everyone wanted to taste baklava, chak-chak, teiglach and the traditional treat of this time of year - an apple with honey (in September Jews mark the New Year, a custom closely connected with the harvest festival). Before the festive concert began one could hear a performance by an ensemble of Russian folk song, get acquainted with the applied arts of the Koreans, and ask the hosts of the festival any questions. They answered willingly.
For example, many were interested in Korean national dress. At the "Chuseok" festival red predominated in the national costumes. Each people has its own colour symbolism. For Koreans red is the symbol of life. White is the colour of purity of thought, of kindness and honesty.
Larisa Tyan, the chairwoman of the Korean cultural centre, wore a white dress. As the hostess of the evening she greeted the guests and received flowers and congratulations.
The culmination of the festival was the concert - for many of those invited it was their first encounter with Asian culture. Though it must be said that some residents of Nizhny Novgorod have already become admirers of traditional Korean musical art: fan dances, Korean drummers, performances by masters of the national wrestling.
Nevertheless, those seeing the spectacle for the first time applauded the loudest. A pleasant surprise for many guests was the solo performance by Lyubomir Tyan. And the highlight of the festive concert was that, besides Korean performing ensembles, guests took part in it - an Armenian ensemble and a Jewish vocal duo.
The audience gave a warm reception to all the performers and saw each of them off with applause, which confirmed once again that such shared festivals are interesting and needed by the people of Nizhny Novgorod, regardless of their age and nationality.
Vera Kostrova, Gorod i Gorozhane No38 (1173)
Interesting facts
- While studying, Lyubomir Tyan worked as a variety artist, performing as an illusionist at the Kazan Philharmonic.
- He gives considerable support to the Russian Orthodox Church. Accordingly, he has been awarded numerous church orders. For elections he invariably issues campaign calendars on church themes.
- In the mid-2000s he released a compact disc of his own songs for yet another election campaign. The cover claimed that Lyubomir Tyan was one of the first people in The City of Gorky to start performing songs with a guitar in the streets.