She attended German school at Dresden, East Germany, while her family lived there in the 1980s. After her family moved to St. Petersburg in the spring of 1991, she attended Peterschule (Russian: «Петершуле»), a German gymnasium in St. Petersburg. Later, during violent gang wars involving the Tambov Gang while it was taking control of St. Petersburg's energy trade, she and her sister Katerina were sent by their father, who feared for their safety, to Germany where their legal guardian was former Stasi Matthias Warnig, who had worked with their father in Dresden as part of a KGB cell and established the Dresdner Bank branch in St Petersburg.[6]