Anatoly Alexandrovich Sobchak

views updated May 23 2018

Anatoly Alexandrovich Sobchak

Anatoly Alexandrovich Sobchak (born 1937), a popular democratic leader of Russia, was elected mayor of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) in 1990.

Anatoly A. Sobchak, the urbane mayor of St. Petersburg (named Leningrad in the Soviet era) often mentioned as a future president of Russia, began his life far from the city in which he became famous. Sobchak was born in Chita, east of Lake Baikal in the Soviet far east, an area with a long revolutionary history. Both his grandfather and his father worked for the railroad and participated in the revolution and consolidation of Soviet power in Siberia. Although his family was a humble one, Sobchak revealed that his Czech grandmother tutored the family in the manners of the intelligentsia, which perhaps contributed to his demeanor and image. Like other families, the Sobchaks experienced the cruel hand of Stalinism when his grandfather was arrested in the late 1930s. His father fought in World War II, while his mother earned a meager salary to support the family.

Young Sobchak was selected to go to Leningrad University, a rare honor for someone from the remote provinces. After the university, he worked at first in the Stavropol region and later attended graduate school in Leningrad. He became a resident of Leningrad, building his career as an attorney and as a professor in the Law Department of Leningrad University. Unlike most prominent figures of the Soviet era, Sobchak was not a long-time member of the Communist party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He joined the party in 1988 during the opening of the ranks (called perestroika) because he believed reforms would have to begin within the CPSU, the most entrenched structure in that society. His public life began as a response to Gorbachev's initiatives in perestroika in the late 1980s and was fueled by a desire to advance the reform movement.

In 1989 Sobchak was nominated and elected to the new parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies. His "I, Too, Have a Dream" speech to secure the nomination was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speech. Sobchak was subsequently elected by the People's Deputies to the smaller, more powerful standing parliament, the Supreme Soviet. In his early political career in the Congress, Sobchak moved slowly and carefully, observing his colleagues, aware of the entrenched power and the fragility of the new democratic movement. He approached the national political arena not as a long-time bureaucrat (apparatchik) but as a critic of the Soviet state structure, theoretically based on the local Soviets or councils that for many years had been rubber stamps for the party. Boris Yeltsin, elected to the new Congress and the Supreme Soviet, also criticized the status quo but had been part of the system for many years before he was removed from the Politburo in 1987.

Sobchak worked with Andrei Sakharov to abolish Article VI, which gave special status to the CPSU, from the Soviet Constitution, continuing the struggle after Sakharov's death. In March 1990 the article was removed despite Gorbachev's continuing opposition. A confrontation between the leaders of reform and the party old guard at the 28th Party Congress in July 1990 resulted in the resignation of numerous reform leaders, including Sobchak.

In 1990 when Sobchak was elected chairman of the Leningrad city council, and shortly afterward mayor of Leningrad, he was already a politician with a national following. After 1992 Sobchak was viewed as an important leader of independent Russia, a significant voice in Russia's democratic movement, and an articulate spokesperson for the new Russia. He was criticized, however, as were other Russian leaders, for sometimes wanting to govern without accountability to anyone. In addition, his reputation as a democrat was clouded by a minor furor over an elaborate tsarist-style ball he and his wife sponsored during a time of general economic hardship. Sobchak, however, remained widely respected by Russia's intelligentsia and was one of numerous academics who made a successful transition into politics during the Gorbachev era.

Sobchak was successful in changing the name of the former Leningrad to St. Petersburg. He achieved significant progress in St. Petersburg despite its serious economic problems. The city's economy was built on the defense industry, which faced cutbacks and conversion. It is in a region with few natural resources and is dependent on other areas for raw materials and food. His goal was to develop the city as a center for free enterprise, emphasizing finance, tourism, and trade. He was able to designate it a free economic zone and to create a municipal bank to handle foreign exchange and regulate other banking activity. He encountered considerable frustration in his efforts to transform the city into a financial center, primarily because of its financial and economic backwardness in respect to Moscow, which widely outdistanced Leningrad in employment, income, banking activity, access to currency, and infrastructural soundness.

By 1991 many people began to perceive the mayor of Leningrad as the most articulate and progressive alternative to Gorbachev. In August 1991 Sobchak was involved in the anti-coup movement against the conservative party and government officials, who had tried to remove Gorbachev and reverse the reforms. He led demonstrations in Leningrad and was in frequent contact with Yeltsin, who led the resistance at the parliament building in Moscow. After the coup had failed, Sobchak tried to prevent the dissolution of the parliament and the union, realizing that rapid disruption of existing structures and the end of the Soviet Union could be more problematic than working within a less than perfect system. In post-Soviet Russia, supporters of reform advocated differing paths, and at times Sobchak disagreed with Yeltsin on the pace and course of reform.

A tall, handsome man, Sobchak had a commanding presence and good speaking skills that were assets in Russia's expanded use of television in politics and elections. In the parliamentary elections of December 1993, he was a leader of one of several competing reform parties and was perceived as a possible future presidential candidate. He was also well respected abroad, where he made numerous appearances as mayor of Leningrad

Sobchak had difficulty in dealing with a cumbersome city council apparatus. He was criticized for an intransigent administrative style. In The Struggle for Russia (1995), Yeltsin wrote that "Sobchak had to change in his job as St Petersburg's town governor' from his old image as a liberal, from a well-respected politician and law professor to a harsh, authoritarian administrator." Sobchak's image as a haughty national leader in-waiting did not enhance his local popularity as mayor. In a period of economic decline and hardship, he also suffered, with others, from a general public disillusionment with the fathers of liberal economic reforms. He was perceived by many Russians as cold and detatched. He alienated many with his strong anti-communist positions and was accused of spending more time away from the city than in it.

Sobchak was unexpectedly defeated in the second round of the 1996 mayoral elections by Vladimir Yakovlev, an economist specializing in municipal affairs and Sobchak's Deputy Mayor responsible for housing. The campaign was recriminatory, with accusations by Sobchak and his wife, Lyudmila Narusova, a deputy to the state Duma from St. Petersburg, that Yakovlev, who spent far more than the 125-million-ruble limit on his campaign, had exerted pressure on the local media to provide favorable coverage for Yakovlev. Yakovlev and media employees retorted that Sobchak, who as mayor had a weekly call-in television show with a huge regular audience, and Narusova had regularly attempted to dictate coverage during his term of office.

Narusova, an influential woman like Raisa Gorbacheva, was both admired and resented by others in political life. She and Sobchak had two daughters. Although successful in his own political career, Sobchak had reservations about politicians and political life. He functioned both as a political actor and as an observer of the very process in which he participated. His ambivalence can be summarized in a passage from his book, For a New Russia: "If we overcome the system's resistance and build a market economy, powerful democratic forces capable of preventing any relapse into the past will appear. Then we … will feel free to go back to our private lives. We are mere recruits, and most of us dream of completing the work that was suspended in spring 1989 until better times. I dream of my books, my research, and the joys of life within a Russian intellectual's compass."

Sobchak, Anatoly Alexandrovich

views updated May 23 2018

SOBCHAK, ANATOLY ALEXANDROVICH

(1937–2000), law professor; mayor of St. Petersburg.

Anatoly Sobchak was one of the leading liberal politicians of the perestroika era. Born in Chita, he completed a law degree at Leningrad State University in 1959. He settled permanently in Leningrad in 1962 and joined the faculty of Leningrad State University in 1973, heading the economic law institute and rising to be dean. Unusually for so senior an academic, Sobchak was for many years not a member of the Communist Party. He only joined during the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, becoming a candidate member in May 1987, and a full member in June 1988. The next year he was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies, where he became a leader of the Inter-Regional Deputies group and chaired the committee investigating the massacre of demonstrators by Soviet troops in Tiflis in April 1989.

A loyal supporter of Boris Yeltsin, Sobchak was elected mayor of Leningrad in June 1991, the same day that a referendum approved changing the city's name to St. Petersburg. He opposed the August 1991 coup attempt and persuaded the army not to deploy troops in the city. Sobchak presided over the liberalization of the city's economy, whose many defense plants had suffered greatly from the Soviet

economic collapse. On the recommendation of the rector of Leningrad State University, Stanislav Merkouriev, Sobchak hired a young ex-KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, to handle relations with foreign investors. Putin had been a student in one of Sobchak's classes but they were not personally acquainted. Putin became Sobchak's deputy in 1993 and ran his re-election campaign in July 1996. Sobchak, surprisingly, lost to a challenge from his former deputy, Vladimir Yakovlev.

The next year Yakovlev (known as governor rather than mayor) filed a libel suit against Sobchak after the latter accused him of ties to organized crime in a newspaper interview. In October 1997 Sobchak suffered a heart attack while being questioned by police about corruption allegations, mainly pertaining to the distribution of city-owned apartments. Sobchak went to France for medical treatment and remained there in voluntary exile—beyond the reach of investigators.

The rise of Putin (who became head of the Federal Security Service in July 1998) and the dismissal of Procurator Yuri Skuratov in April 1999 enabled Sobchak to return to Russia in July 1999. The charges against him were dropped, but his public image was tarnished, and he failed to win a seat in the State Duma in the December 1999 elections. Sobchak died of a heart attack in February 2000 while on a trip to Kaliningrad as Putin's envoy. An emotional Putin attended his funeral and pledged revenge on his enemies, blaming them for his death. Observers took this as referring to Vladimir Yakovlev, but Putin failed to prevent Yakovlev's reelection as St. Petersburg governor in May 2000.

Sobchak's career, in which he evolved from a principled liberal to a defender of Russian capitalism and backer of Vladimir Putin, reflected the broader hopes and disappointments of the Russian transition from communism. Sobchak himself was aware of the contradictions, commenting just before his death that "We have not achieved a democratic, but rather a police state over the past ten years."

See also: perestroika; putin, vladimir vladimirovich; st. petersburg; yakovlev, alexander nikolayevich; yeltsin, boris nikolayevich