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.
Career Timeline
- 1989–1990USSR People's Deputy
- 1989–1990Co-chair, Inter-Regional Deputies Group (with Sakharov & Yeltsin)
- 1990–1991Chairman, Leningrad City Council
- 1991–1996Mayor of Saint Petersburg
- 1993Chairman, Constitutional Assembly (co-drafted Russian Constitution)
- 1997–1999Exile in Paris
Related historical events
- 1985–1991Perestroika and GlasnostChair of the Tbilisi massacre investigation commission, star orator of the CongressAt the First Congress, he chaired the commission investigating the April 1989 Tbilisi massacre and exposed the military's excessive force; his live-televised oratory made him a national figure.
- 1988–1990The Nineteenth Party Conference and the First Contested ElectionsThe law professor who became a star at the Congress rostrum.
1989: the law professor becomes the star of the Congress
Anatoly Sobchak, born in Chita in 1937, was a jurist out of the Leningrad State University law faculty. A quiet professor of economic law, his life turned at fifty-two when he won a seat in the spring 1989 elections, the Soviet Union's first contested ones. From the televised rostrum of the Congress he cross-examined power in a lawyer's precise language and became a national figure overnight.
What made him a politician was the Tbilisi commission. As chairman of the inquiry into the army's bloody dispersal of the Georgian independence rally of 9 April 1989, he pushed through the obstruction of army and party, traced the chain of command, and delivered a report that fixed responsibility. It was the first time in the one-party state that a parliamentary inquiry had judged the military: a demonstration of the principle that law stands above power.
He stood with Sakharov and Yeltsin in the Inter-Regional Deputies' Group, and in 1990 gave up his party card. For the orator from the lecture hall, the next stage was his own city.
The mayor who won back the city's name, and Palace Square in August
In 1990 Sobchak became chairman of the Leningrad soviet, and on 12 June 1991, the day Yeltsin won the Russian presidency, the first elected mayor of Leningrad. In a referendum held the same day, the citizens voted to restore the name St Petersburg. That the cradle of the revolution chose its pre-revolutionary name was one of the symbolic events of the age.
Two months later, in the August coup, came his finest hour. Rushing back from Moscow, he confronted and persuaded the military district commander to keep troops out of the city, and the next day hundreds of thousands filled Palace Square against the coup. The tanks never entered Leningrad.
As mayor, Sobchak was better at being the city's face than at its administration. The practical work beside him was handled by an old student he had brought in from the KGB reserve: Vladimir Putin, chairman of the external relations committee. That the emblem of the democrats was patron and teacher to the two presidents who would later rule Russia, Putin and Medvedev, remains one of the great ironies of the Russian 1990s.
The fall, Paris, and the last campaign
In 1996 Sobchak lost re-election by a whisker to his deputy Yakovlev, and a corruption investigation over the city's apartment allocations soon turned toward him. He was never charged, but summonses and pressure followed, and in November 1997, citing heart trouble, he left for Paris on a chartered plane. Several accounts say the departure was arranged by his old subordinate Putin; the loyalty shown in spiriting away a fallen mentor became a fixture of every account of Putin's character.
In the summer of 1999, as Putin rose to the premiership, the case was closed and Sobchak came home. He went out campaigning for his former student, and in February 2000, on a campaign trip in Kaliningrad province, died of a heart attack at sixty-two. Putin's tears at the funeral were broadcast across the country.
The orator who preached the rule of law, the clumsy administrator, the teacher of the new power: Sobchak's legacy is still argued among these three faces. That his daughter Ksenia Sobchak later ran for president against Putin added a final fold to the strange bond between this family and power.