People of the Revolution and the USSR

Russian Federation state institutions Socialist-bloc reform leader 1937–2000 ○ Heart attack

Constitutional Assembly chairman and first elected mayor of Saint Petersburg

"Volodya, just don't turn to bronze" — last words to Putin, February 2000

Anatoly Sobchak was a legal scholar and democratic reformer who became the first democratically elected mayor of Saint Petersburg (1991–1996) and co-authored the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation as chairman of the Constitutional Assembly. A popular Leningrad State University law professor whose students included Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, he was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 and co-chaired the Inter-Regional Deputies Group alongside Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin. During the August 1991 coup he organized resistance in Leningrad, negotiating with the military commander to keep troops off the streets and rallying 200,000 citizens on Palace Square. Corruption allegations forced him into exile in Paris from 1997 until Putin, then prime minister, secured his return in 1999.

Socialist-bloc reform leader 1941–2019 ○ Illness

The law professor who surrendered his Supreme Soviet seat to Yeltsin in a moment that captivated the nation

Years later Kazannik recalled his decision: "Five and a half million people voted for Yeltsin in Moscow, 1.7 million for me. I had not the slightest doubt that by any measure Yeltsin deserved the first seat in the Supreme Soviet."

Born into a large Ukrainian peasant family, Kazannik worked as a carpenter in Kazakhstan and served in the Soviet engineering corps before earning his law degree from Irkutsk State University; from 1975 he taught environmental and state law at Omsk State University. Elected a People's Deputy of the USSR in 1989, he became famous overnight on May 29 when, after Yeltsin failed to win a Supreme Soviet seat, Kazannik rose at the First Congress and surrendered his own seat to him. Appointed Prosecutor General of Russia by Yeltsin in October 1993, he resigned in February 1994 after refusing the president's demand to block the Duma's amnesty for the 1991 putschists and the October 1993 rebels, defending the constitution against the Kremlin. He later served as deputy governor of Omsk Oblast (1996–2003) and returned to teaching law until his death in 2019.