russia For Russia, No Love

So much talk, so little action.

That’s my view of the golf business in Russia, which has managed to build only 10 golf courses since way back in the 1970s, when Armand Hammer told Leonid Brezhnev that he needed to commit to golf if he wanted to woo Western money. The Russian Golf Association will tell you that it has a grand plan to build 500 golf facilities by 2018, but few developers have as yet stepped up to build them, and the nation’s highest-profile projects -– new courses in suburban Moscow designed by Nick Faldo and Jack Nicklaus –- were started but not completed and now seem to be going nowhere fast.

But Moscow, a bustling, crowded metropolis that Forbes says is home to more billionaires than any other city in the world, is still full of development potential. And that’s why RGI International, Ltd. has teamed up with a landowner who wants to build a to-be-named golf community on 650 acres roughly 40 miles west of the city. The community will include houses, a tennis center, and a golf course.

RGI, a publicly traded company, was among the first developers to build modern, Western-style houses and retail space in Moscow. It’s led by Boris and Emanuel Kuzinez (sometimes spelled Kuzinetz), who serve as CEO and managing director.

The company's funding comes, in part, from Morgan Stanley, which has a 15 percent stake in RGI.