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Ninotchka
Ninotchka was born when Renata Litvinova named two former magazine journalists' practice after a 1939 Garbo film. They spent years hunting untreated antique gemstones, setting them in Damascus steel, petrified wood, and titanium — some engineered by spacecraft builders. No website, no press, no marketing. Then Vivienne Becker found them.
Transformation Arc
When Vivienne Becker — the world’s foremost jewelry historian and the woman who curates GemGenève’s hand-selected designer roster — goes looking for someone, that someone has earned something that cannot be bought or marketed toward. In May 2018, she found Ninotchka (Ниночка): two former magazine journalists working quietly in Moscow, building one-of-a-kind pieces from antique gemstones whose histories stretched back centuries and whose settings no established maison would dare attempt.
What the databases miss
The luxury directories do not list Ninotchka. There is no website, no e-commerce, no retail presence at TSUM or Mercury, no entry on 1stDibs. The Instagram account posts infrequently, without announcement. In the conventional metrics that brand intelligence platforms use to rank and assess jewelry houses, Ninotchka simply does not exist.
This is not an oversight. It is the point.
Evgeny Glagolev and Timur Ibragimov founded Ninotchka in Moscow in 2014, naming it on the suggestion of Renata Litvinova — Russian film star, BoF 500 member, first patron — who borrowed the name from the 1939 Ernst Lubitsch film starring Greta Garbo. They had no marketing plan. They had no website. They had a shared obsession with jewelry history built across years of working at J&W Russia, Russia’s jewelry trade publication, and a conviction that in haute joaillerie, the work either speaks for itself or it does not speak at all.
For four years, they let the silence do the work.
The antique stone methodology
What distinguishes Ninotchka from every other jewelry house operating in Russia — and from most operating anywhere — is the sourcing. Glagolev and Ibragimov hunt untreated, unenhanced antique gemstones across the world’s antique dealers: Siberian amethysts, Ural demantoid garnets, Colombian emeralds, old-cut diamonds. Stones that may be centuries old. Stones that may have been worn by queens, by aristocrats, by merchants, by anyone across the long history of stones before they disappeared into private collections and eventually surfaced in antique shops.
These stones then enter settings that no conventional haute joaillerie house would build: Damascus steel with a moiré finish. Petrified wood. Hand-carved cobalt glass. Titanium — in one documented case, titanium engineered by spacecraft builders who were commissioned specifically because the construction requirements exceeded what goldsmiths could achieve alone.
The Marie Antoinette set became the signature piece of their 2018 GemGenève debut: guillotine earrings in Damascus steel and a choker necklace hung with ruby “blood drops,” inspired by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s portrait of the queen. The Morning Glory cuff bracelet — petrified wood set with diamonds, sapphires, demantoid garnets, gold, silver, and bronze — demonstrated the breadth of the materials palette. A second pair of bracelets contained 400 unheated Russian demantoid garnets alongside portrait diamonds carrying a secret message, constructed with the assistance of engineers whose usual materials traveled beyond the atmosphere.
Validation from the highest authority
In 2018, Vivienne Becker found Ninotchka precisely because they had refused conventional promotion. The work had reached her through the channels they never cultivated — the organic circulation of quality through a community that knows quality. Becker selected them for the inaugural Contemporary Designer Showcase at GemGenève (May 10–13, Palexpo), placing them alongside Emmanuel Tarpin, who would subsequently become one of contemporary jewelry’s most recognized names. She cited their “strong, individualist point of view, well-defined style and sophistication of craftsmanship.”
At GemGenève 2019, the Russian nephrite and Siberian amethyst ring became the most photographed object at the fair among international bloggers. Maria Doulton of The Jewellery Editor and critics from The Eye of Jewelry and gioiellis.com positioned Ninotchka within the Russian decorative arts revival — not as a curiosity but as evidence that Moscow could produce work competitive with any French maison.
Geopolitics closes the window
The February 2022 sanctions regime simultaneously destroyed both international dimensions of Ninotchka’s practice. European antique gemstone sourcing — built over eight years of relationship-cultivation with antique dealers across the continent — was severed overnight by EU luxury goods export restrictions. GemGenève access, where Ninotchka had exhibited in 2018 and 2019, became inaccessible to Russian participants: peer jeweler Zubov Atelier had a PAD London invitation withdrawn in 2022; only one Russian designer, Elena Okutova, maintained GemGenève presence under Vivienne Becker’s direct personal patronage.
How Ninotchka has adapted its sourcing — whether to domestic stone origins including Siberian and Ural deposits, or through alternative international channels — remains undocumented. Glagolev’s dual role as PR director at Gokhran, Russia’s State Depository for Precious Metals, may provide access to domestic stone sources, but no direct connection has been confirmed. What is confirmed: as of November 2024, YaPokupayu.ru included Ninotchka among Russia’s 20 best jewelry brands — a decade after founding, the practice endures.
What remains
The deliberate obscurity that built Ninotchka’s reputation before 2022 may now define its post-sanctions identity. Built entirely on private commissions and word of mouth, the practice is structurally insulated from the platform losses that devastated Russian jewelers whose models depended on Western exposure. The work remains, inside Moscow, available to those who know how to find it.
The stones, whatever their history, continue to carry it.