For me, lockdown has perhaps been the best time of my whole life. I felt good and it was meaningful. Timur and I (Natalia’s husband is the director Timur Bekmambetov – ed.) had the best wedding anniversary. It was an absolutely bizarre evening. Eighty people in eleven cities and seven countries celebrated with us during a pandemic. What’s more, we managed to send everyone matching things for their tables: wine, snacks and even tablecloths made out of the same fabric, which we sourced separately in every city that people were joining us from. Two hours before it started, our puppies chewed through the cable of the lamp that was supposed to create a flattering light. Timur showed incredible DIY skills by fastening the cable together with duct tape. It was amazingly good fun; it was very weird, and at the same time everyone had missed seeing each other so much that it was very emotional. It was a wonderful pandemic experience.

I don’t know whether I’m proud of myself or not, but I’m proud of the projects I’m able to carry out and I’m proud of my team. Today we live in a world where so much is done for effect. If you look at my social media, I’ve made about twenty posts in the last year. I think that the volume of people’s communications is inversely proportional to how happy they are with their lives. I’m actually more interested in being proud of Timur than I am of myself. This isn’t because we’ve got a very traditional marriage or because I’ve got issues with gender roles. It’s just because I’m genuinely more interested in the person by my side.

I didn’t feel that I needed to play with dolls or study literature. I focused on maths and physics. Thanks to the October Revolution the question of emancipation wasn’t that acute: we were the first country to give women full voting rights. But that’s not the issue. I’ve got a lot of young women in my team who are often much more fearless than men, and incredibly diligent and uncompromising. Maybe it’s the times we live in; I don’t know. I’ve definitely never felt held back; my gender has never hindered me. In fact, I think it’s even protected me, because if I’d been a man I’d have been punched in the face a long time ago, but somehow I’m still in one piece!

When I’m absolutely sure of the end goal, compromise doesn’t suit me. Not giving in and not being afraid of open confrontation are very important qualities. You can slither like a snake, or you can push like a tank.

Because of their origin, many generations of my forebears weren’t able to achieve their potential. My grandfather, Isaac Solomonovich Fishman was the chief engineer at an airfield equipment factory. There were seven different directors while he was there. He effectively managed the factory, but he wasn’t able to do so formally because of discrimination. In just the same way, my father wasn’t able to go to Moscow State University or the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and my mother — well, and so on. I think that so much energy has built up in me from those individuals that it needs to go somewhere.

I was incredibly lucky with my parents. I was also lucky with my teachers in Samara: they were wonderful and helped me believe in myself — even though I was absolutely horrible! I was the head girl and I was skinny, shaggy, and bad-tempered; I used to carry the register and I wouldn’t let anyone change their bad marks. By rights, I should have just been beaten up by my classmates, but I was lucky.

I think my life began when I left Samara and went to МGIMO (the Moscow State Institute of International Relations). Then I was lucky enough to end up at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. I was very lucky to get to know Ilya Tsentsiper; he taught me a lot. I was also incredibly lucky to meet Sergei Kapkov. Everything that’s good and bad about me as a manager is from Kapkov. Sometimes, when my staff start moaning, I say, “Well, you haven’t worked with Kapkov.”

Apart from my husband of course, the person I’ve been luckiest to meet in my life is Rustam Minnikhanov, the President of Tatarstan. The greatest luck you can have is when people believe in you and you don’t even know how to justify their trust. Knowing that people have placed their trust in you when you’ve done nothing to deserve it spurs you to move any mountain and achieve any result.

I think that people who hate you are just to be pitied. The most important thing I’ve learned — or rather that I’ve worked out — is that when people want to hurt me, they always ultimately end up doing me good. True, I only deal with people who trust me. Why have anything to do with the rest? You can only show people that it’s worth trusting you through your work and the results you get: there’s no other way — it’s completely different from trying to get ahead by being sycophantic.

In my opinion, responsibility and gratitude are key qualities. I’m genuinely convinced that the ability to be grateful is one of the greatest gifts, which is useful in anything you do.

My mission is to fight against injustice, but since I’m not bold enough to simply fight, it’s very important to me to create something. I’ve been lucky enough to find myself somewhere where there’s a demand for creating. The more areas and spaces I can create where people feel happier, feel a part of something bigger and believe that the world is a really good place, the better.

I’m not formally an official or a civil servant, but of course I am someone who’s in government. This is mainly based on how I see my priorities.

When you leave Moscow and go beyond the Garden Ring or the Boulevard Ring, when you start to travel round villages and see cowsheds and so on and understand how people’s lives really work, how social mechanisms and social mobility work, you very much change your ideas about how Russia should be and how it should be re-modelled, and you wonder whether you have any right at all to have an opinion on the subject.

Officials, ordinary people, teachers, doctors and artists all need to share a feeling for the place where they live. For most people in our country, that feeling has been erased for many decades — I don’t know whether or not that was deliberate. It’s an important feeling for everyone to have. Some call it identity; I’ll just call it love. When different people share that love they’re able to find common ground. That’s when you forget the language of protocol and start to speak like human beings. I’ve been lucky enough to work in Tatarstan with people who speak in the same language, like human beings, and really want to make things better for people.

It means everything to me. Here’s how I’d describe it: there’s a place in Russia where Muslims live, but just as many Russians live there too, and everyone gets on fantastically together. It’s a very beautiful place, which everyone who lives there loves. It’s a place where mosques and churches co-exist wonderfully, with azans from the minaret and the ringing of church bells. Every Sunday I invite everyone to the Kazan Kremlin at midday so they can listen to a bell ringing in one ear and hear the call to prayer in the other. It’s honestly amazing; they both sound very beautiful and together, they encapsulate Tatarstan.

It’s a place where new people are accepted if they come with good intentions. All of our bohemian life inside the Boulevard Ring is absolutely unthinkable here because everyone slaves away from six in the morning until midnight. If you slept until midday you'd have nothing in common with people here. It’s a very driven place. People respect hard work and craftsmanship here.

It’s a place where it’s very important to accept and build on tradition and that’s a process that’s happening all the time. People here are fighting to preserve their heritage but at the same time, they know how to respect others.

I’ve been living in Tatarstan for five years, and the places that I love most are little villages right on the edge of civilization, where people love the place where they live, which can’t be compared to anything in a city. My favourite village is Muslyumovo, which is 370 kilometres from Kazan. It’s my very favourite place in Tatarstan, and perhaps in the world. It has a population of nine thousand people, but when I arrived in Tatarstan there were only eight thousand. The United Nations’ forecasts have assumed that virtually all of the world’s population would be urban by 2050. It looks like they were wrong. When people stop being focused on the unfounded fetish of city life, that’s a very healthy development. What’s more, I think that among other things, living in small and pleasant places, which are on a scale you can comprehend and which have their own character and history, is far better for mental health.