AFP - Russia, explained Alexander Lebedev, is not one country but two. There is the plutocratic elite of around one million people who rule this sprawling land from within an isolated bubble of luxury infused with state money, expensive cars, designer homes, exotic travel and utter privilege.

"Then there's the other part of the people with this (low quality) health care, with infrastructure built 50 years ago, in houses built under Khrushchev, earning a few hundred US dollars a month, using these roads, losing 30,000 lives a year on these roads," he said.

"I don't frankly think that they overlap," said Lebedev, acknowledging that he is more part of the first group than the second.

Speaking to AFP in an interview at his Moscow office on Thursday just hours before it was announced that he had acquired two more British newspapers, the former KGB intelligence officer said however that he aimed to narrow the gap between the two.

"We don't have any small- and medium-sized businesses. We just have state businesses. I don't believe in state business because it is confusion over principle. Either you're a regulator or you make money."

Lebedev, who made his fortune in banking in the 1990s and whose holdings range from airlines and hotels to media and Europe's largest potato farm, said one of his new projects is building affordable housing for Russians.

"At the moment, most of the people in this country, say 95 percent, are not able to purchase either an apartment or a house. Unable completely. So my whole purpose is to bring down the price and the cost."

His National Reserve Corporation plans this spring to begin building single-family homes in the Moscow region at a rate of 15,000-20,000 per year that would be sold at "prices affordable to the population," he told the newspaper RBK Daily recently.

Lebedev's media interests include part ownership with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev of the opposition daily Novaya Gazeta, a paper that has earned a reputation as a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, Lebedev's former KGB colleague and Russia's powerful prime minister.

But he said he feels obliged to bring corruption in his own business under control instead of criticising Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev for failing to stamp out corruption in the government.

"I was astonished by the level of corruption I have discovered inside my own group of companies," Lebedev said.

"I thought: Oh, if I couldn't deal with it -- it is going to take me years -- what about them? They have a much bigger burden on their shoulders."

Just after Lebedev explained he would try to keep his criticism of Russia's authorities in check, he launched into a diatribe on how, he says, he was forced to drop his run for mayor of the Black Sea resort city of Sochi.

He said he had no choice but to quit when he was denied access to state television, printed media and outdoor advertising for his campaign to become mayor of Sochi, which is set to host the Winter Olympics in 2014.

"I just want sometimes to comment on things in the country... it is just my humble citizen's right to say 'Look, this is not an election, this Sochi is not an election'!"

As for his relationship with Putin -- who, like Lebedev, exited KGB service with the rank of lieutenant colonel -- Lebedev says he met him for the first time in 1998 after Putin became head of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency.

"I actually applied for an official meeting" with Putin, Lebedev said, explaining that he was seeking help in a dispute with prosecutors.

"So yes, I know him," Lebedev said of Putin. "But I'm not a member of any circle, inner or outer" in Putin's entourage.

Lebedev, by all accounts one of Russia's wealthiest businessmen, said he is not certain of his own net worth -- but dismissed Forbes magazine's 2009 estimate of 600 million dollars at the time as "absurd."

"It could be anything from one to three billion" dollars, he said, adding that calculation of the value of his assets depended heavily on the accounting methods used and other factors.

Lebedev said he has lost virtually all his money on two separate occasions since going into business in the early 1990s, and argued that business needed far more transparency, not just in Russia but Europe and the United States.

"In Switzerland, for example, when it comes to banking secrecy the whole world is suffering from it.... Why do we need that?"

It was announced Thursday in London that Lebedev, who earlier this year bought the daily Evening Standard, had acquired the daily Independent and its sister paper, Independent on Sunday.

Though many have speculated on his motives in acquiring media outlets in Russia and Britain, and although Lebedev declined to discuss the Independent deal specifically, he insisted he wants to support "quality journalism" and uncover corruption and is not in it for the money.

"There are big risks, from a business point of view. But I do not treat newspapers as business. I treat them as my responsibility."

For all the challenges that Russia and his businesses face, Lebedev described himself as "quite optimistic" about the future.

Lebedev said he loves travelling to remote, rugged locations and spoke with animation about road trips through Mongolia and recent travels in Syria, Namibia and Botswana.

Exotic travel, he said, "is like watching 'Avatar' but from the inside, participating in it."