Mikhail Gorbachev’s granddaughter sells wine for a living, out of a small shop in Berlin. Her grandfather spent his first two years running the Soviet Union trying to do the opposite. In May 1985, six weeks into the job, he ordered vineyards torn out of the ground across four Soviet republics, some of them a century old. The campaign was unpopular enough that people started calling him the mineral secretary, a jab at the mineral water he pushed instead of vodka. He admitted years later, in 2005, that it had been a good idea ruined by bad planning.
She was born Ksenia Virganskaya, on January 21, 1980, in Moscow. These days she goes by a different name, Ksenia Gorbacheva, her grandfather’s surname rather than her father’s. She made the switch in her twenties and has said only that she no longer wanted to carry her father’s name.
Table of Contents
Fast facts
| Born | January 21, 1980, Moscow |
| Grandfather | Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union |
| Mother | Irina Virganskaya, Gorbachev’s only child |
| Sister | Anastasia Virganskaya |
| Education | MGIMO in Moscow, journalism and public relations |
| Career highlight | Editor in chief, Russian edition of L’Officiel, 2013 to 2015 |
| Lives now | Berlin |
| Runs | ViniGrandi, a small wine import business |
Family
Her parents, Irina Virganskaya and vascular surgeon Anatoly Virgansky, divorced in 1993, when she was 13. She and her younger sister, Anastasia, sided with their mother, and neither daughter has stayed in touch with their father since. He still works in Moscow, heading the vascular surgery department at one of the city’s oldest hospitals.
As a child, she also spent ten years training at the ballet school attached to the Bolshoi Theatre. Chronic back and knee injuries ended that path before she finished, and she had to repeat ninth grade to make up the schoolwork ballet had crowded out.
The one job where the name mattered
After her first divorce, Gorbacheva took a freelance writing job at the Russian edition of Grazia, where a close friend ran the masthead, while working full time in public relations at producer Viktor Drobysh’s company. Russian tabloids spent years reporting a romance between the two of them. She has denied it directly, saying a magazine once ran one of Drobysh’s quotes about their working friendship on a cover, cut down until it read like something else.
In February 2013, the Russian edition of L’Officiel relaunched after almost two years off newsstands, and she was named editor in chief. Kommersant and Vedomosti, two of Russia’s more serious business papers, both covered the appointment and both mentioned the same thing, that she was Gorbachev’s granddaughter. It is the one point in her career where that connection was the actual reason she got the job.
She’d already spent years being written up as a Moscow socialite by then. Asked about that reputation once, she pushed back on it directly.
I’m not a lioness. Like all my friends, I’m a workhorse.
She ran the magazine while living mostly in Berlin, commuting back for the job. Asked in 2014 how the editorship fit around raising a young daughter, she did not dress it up.
It gets in the way, a lot. I’ll probably have to change something.
Vedomosti dates Ksenia Sobchak’s takeover to the end of 2014. Other Russian trade coverage puts the handover a few months later, in March 2015. Either way, her run at the magazine lasted under two years.
Two marriages and a daughter
On April 30, 2003, she married a classmate from MGIMO named Kirill Solod. Mikhail Gorbachev walked her down the aisle and told reporters he wanted a normal wedding, nothing extravagant, by Moscow standards. Gorbacheva has said only that the marriage lasted about two years. They came from the same background, went to the same university, had plenty in common on paper. None of it was enough to keep them together, and the two do not speak now.
Her second husband, Dmitry Pyrchenkov, had worked as a concert director for the singer Abraham Russo. Their daughter, Alexandra, was born October 22, 2008, in Bavaria. Gorbacheva has said she chose to give birth there rather than in Russia, and would do it again. She married Pyrchenkov the following year. By 2019, Komsomolskaya Pravda and other Russian outlets were reporting the marriage had ended.
The ballet injuries and the enforced dieting still show up in how she talks about raising her own daughter. The rule she has set for Alexandra is dance and sport strictly for fun, never anything professional.
The wine business now
Gorbacheva runs ViniGrandi, a small wine importer, together with her stepfather, Andrey Trukhachev, a logistics businessman who married her mother in 2006. The shop sits in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district and opened around 2018, built around small producers from Italy and France chosen for quality rather than volume. In 2022, a sommelier from a winemaking family in Tuscany joined as a partner.
In the German business interviews she has given about the shop, her grandfather’s name has never come up. Neither has the order he signed in May 1985. She just sells the wine.
