Ashkenazi was born Gaukhar Berkalieva in Kazakhstan in 1980 but grew up in an apartment building for senior communist officials in Moscow. Her father was an engineer who sat in the Soviet party’s Central Committee under Mikhail Gorbachev. “To be completely honest with you, yes, I lived in privilege.” Aged eight, she packed off her red bicycle as a gift for the poor American children she learnt about at school. She was 11 when the Soviet Union dissolved. However, her parents, like most senior communist officials, didn’t exactly plunge into poverty. Aged 13, she joined the first generation of post-Soviet children to go to British boarding school. Despite being suspended for kissing a boy in her room, she got into Oxford to study modern history and economics. At university she spent so much time socialising in London that she left with a third-class degree. “I’m probably more British than anything else – though obviously not,” she muses. She may have in mind reports that she was recently stopped at the border trying to enter the UK on a Panamanian travel document, which she said involved an administrative error.
